You raise a good point.Hi everyne. BE718, I am going to buy MOTU 8A also, and go ahead with crossovers on PC side.
Pls, advise few questions:
1) What about ocasional freezing of OS, plugin crashes, etc. How you protect speakers?
2) You use accourate, and what do you use as soft player? What is the role/function of MOTU soft mixer in all the chain of your software setup Just share more detals about "soft" rooting in laptop itself.
3) Do you use sme in built DSP functions of MOTU? Are there any useful for speaker multiamping and correction?
4) Did you try AVB? Is AVB MOTU input compatible and accepting normal ethernet output from laptop, pc?
Thanks a lot for reply!
1) In theory the PC could go mad and send full scale output all the drivers. The mitigation against that is to use series protection capacitors with the tweeters (say 47uF..?). These will attenuate any damaging lower frequencies reaching the drivers and their effect can be compensated for in the DSP measurements and driver correction. Using the amplifier's volume control rather than software volume control means that even if the DACs send full output, the volume is limited to just being somewhat louder than your normal maximum listening level, so very unlikely that anything will be damaged.
The above scenario has only happened to me once, when I made a mistake with my own software - nothing was damaged.
If I were to develop a dedicated DSP box, I would certainly include intelligent failsafes to prevent potential damage. Kind of like the Sch**t amplifier that uses a microcontroller to monitor the output - but made to work properly.