What's interesting here is that I started this project with a simple 2nd order woofer network and a 3rd order tweeter network. Then it required an RC network to compensate for the woofers' rising impedance and nail the target crossover frequency. Finally, I added the conjugate network to tame the wooly bass.

The tweeter was still a bit bright so I added the RCL Zoebel network which Bottlehead corp recommends for this tweeter in the Straight 8. Finally a one ohm resistor ahead of the tweeter crossover tamed the last trace of brightness.

What started as a simple network now has 15 parts (17 including bypass caps), but each time I remove one section the sound is degraded. Whoever said simpler is better wasn't designing with cheap drivers?

• FredArray Crossover

Sometimes a conjugate filter is needed to compensate for the built-in filter of the speaker, itself. In this case, what appears to be complex is actually counteracting something else equally complex, balancing the equation to form something pure.

I remember Jim Vandersteen was talking about his company's subwoofers, and he said the first model had a Q of 0.7, but some customers were complaining they "couldn't hear the bass". So he modified the subs by incorporating a continuously variable Q control, giving the customer a choice of tight bass, fart box bass, or anything in between.