Spent a couple of hours yesterday listening to the new classics through these … I love my Illuminators even more now 
Focal Diablo Utopia
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The new boxes I’ve just acquired have meant that my AV amp that was in the middle of my rack had to be taken out to make room 
I miss it far too much so I had to negotiate with my wife to move it elsewhere … that was expensive! 
Back to the garage for some more woodwork
Enjoyed trying new joints, didn’t want to use screws anywhere and it needs to be strong.
All glued together.
Shelves, top and side panels made.
First coat of wood stain, in hindsight should’ve had the mitre joints on the front!
End result, pleased with the way it turned out. My wife likes it too, which is a relief
Next job is a shaker style door in the new year, but can now enjoy Christmas movies on the big screen again
Perhaps I should rename this topic … at least it’s kind of audio related
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I have a bunch of resistors on their way so I can tweak the treble response, feels a little too much on some recordings with my new boxes so it’ll be interesting to try stepping it down a bit.
Should be arriving in time for the weekend, fun little project
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Well they were supposed to be delivered yesterday but haven’t turned up yet … so after work yesterday I modified the crossovers to use the higher value alternative resistor I had already mounted on the board. The difference is much more noticeable than when I experimented doing this with my previous system. The treble is still there of course but it feels like some of the life has been taken out, some of the impact with drums even, and this is just with a one ohm increase. Glad I ordered a full range of small increments, judging by this test it’ll likely be somewhere between this and the default value.
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Not long after posting the above they’ve arrived
The terminal blocks on the right are the ones Troels recommends that I bought (just in case) when building the speakers … time to put them to use!
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Had quite a lot on this weekend but made a bit of progress…
The plan is to mount the resistors on the rear of the stands for easy access.
I didn’t have any suitable thin ply or MDF so had the bright idea of cutting channels out of a piece of 18mm MDF…
It worked but would’ve been easier to go out and get a sheet of something thinner 
Slapped on some paint, doesn’t have to be pretty, and screwed on the terminals
Resistors glued to the boards ready for soldering, default treble level on the right, decreasing to the left (to the level I currently have wired up).
May do some of the soldering later but a bit knackered… grandkids are exhausting
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Mark. Are you going to mount this on the back and run the wire from crossover out the cabinet and back in?
I have thought about doing this in the past also.
Hi Mark, yes, going to mount it on the speaker stand (as it’s going to be temporary) then run wires from the crossover. I’d rather not drill a new hole in the cabinet for them so the plan is to take one of the screws out of the port mounting and drill through there. Once I’ve settled on the level I can plug that hole, put the screw back and add the resistor to the crossovers.
Will definitely build this into the next speakers I build.
Anyone thought about taking the crossover out of the cabinets completely? Particularly if you’re building the stands, could easily put them in an accessible enclosure on the rear of them. I’m not sure if running the cables to the drivers for longer than they would be with an internally mounted crossover would be at all deleterious (early in the week for long words!) to SQ?
I think Royd had a good approach to external crossovers on their Apex floorstanders, where they were mounted entirely within the small steel base of the speaker, making them very accessible.
They provided sockets into the crossover for single wire or biwire/biamp use, or you could just plug cables directly into the speaker cabinet for active use.
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That’s what I did. As I didn’t want stands, I extended the cabinets creating a compartment in the bottom for the crossover.
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Troels does do that on some of his larger designs, usually mounted on the back or in the base … I don’t think longer wires to the drivers would affect sound quality … look at his photo of the ScanSpeak demo room on his Ellipticor-1 page, they’re on the floor
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That’s neat … certainly benefits to having easy access. The PMC Fact and larger Focal (I believe?) speakers have external treble/bass adjustments … very handy for room/system matching.
A build picture finally! 
They look fantastic, would love to see more … hint, hint
Was looking at these again quite recently and hadn’t spotted before that they’re 96db sensitivity … they must have incredible dynamics! Really wish I could build a pair!
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Have you thought about how you’re going to test? I was thinking that you could AB them by only changing one speaker at a time? Especially if you have some nice mono recordings.
Just planning on listening for a few days really, since the current value is a bit low for me I’ll start in the middle and then go either side of that depending on how that works out … a binary search
Done:
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Fantastic! Something fun to read after a shi**y day at work
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