What it takes to build a pair of Genesis Dragons. Slowly but steadily, a total of 6 months!! Today, I was matching capacitors in preparation for building the crossovers for the Genesis Dragons. – Gary Koh…
The problem with capacitors is that you can’t buy them closer than 5% in the large film-and-foil caps that we use. So, to get the tolerance down to less than 1% we end up having to measure them individually, sort them out just to get close. Then, we use multiple caps in parallel to get exactly the value we want.
Here are three values that took me most of the day to find. FWIW, I found that mixing caps in left and right channel to get to the capacitance value I wanted made the speaker sound not as good. For example, to get to 3uF, you can’t have 1.5uF + 1.5uF in the left channel, and 1uF + 2uF in the right channel. To get to exactly 3uF, I might use a 2.7uF and then add a 0.1uF that is a little high and a 0.2uF that is a little low.
An added benefit of bypassing caps like this is that the paralleled caps also give me lower equivalent series resistance and inductance – resulting in a more “ideal” capacitor.
Also, the gold-plated screws that we use for the tweeters came in…… here’s what $3,000 worth of screws look like!
