Hmmm.
“First foray into high fidelity speakers” and “I’m going to design my own crossover circuit” is going to be difficult.
You will go further if you build them as designed and use some room EQ to tune the bass to your liking.
Otherwise you may go around in circles.
Nothing wrong with that of course, as long as you’re willing to play the long game…
To be clear, it'll be my foray into
owning a hi-fi system. I have plenty of experience with audio acoustic, electronics, and DSP engineering; I just haven't ever had the time or patience to have and set up my own, and I'd rather begin with something cheap (but still competent). Even so, I hardly think implementing just the crossover mod would be difficult for a beginner. I do agree that the room correction deserves its due diligence always, and that's a separate ongoing project
My end goal is to flatten the the on-axis response with as much bass extension as possible so that they sound as best as they can, sans-EQ. The reason I'll be re-doing the cross-over is because I plan on modding the acoustics of this speaker to achieve this goal, and that'll completely mess up the response that the crossover was intended for. I think the woofer can perform better than it is within the stock arrangement. I think it's a reasonable goal to get this woofer to extend flatly to 50 Hz reliably by tweaking the port alignment or cabinet arrangement. Of course, all of that will completely change the measurements.
If I can get the bass to extend just a tad bit lower while preserving the midrange and tweeter output and distortion, I think that's a much more solid starting point. The stock response has too much energy in the mids (kind of a "cuppy" sound to me that's most apparent in the 303's in acid house music) and clearly overemphasized highs (it's most evident to me when listening to the high frequency effects in "Sonic After-6290 Mix" or Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle") compared to hearing it on the Genelec 8341As. Amir called the HiVis "bright" in the review, but I'd go so far as to say that they're kind of "glassy" or "shouty" after hearing the un-modded version in a reference room.
What I had in mind is to flip the rear panel to have the port on the bottom with a tube extending it up to the top, and stuffing some additional damping to mask the tube from the midrange and tweeter (and perhaps absorb some of the tweeter/mid reflections and port leakage that may be causing the up-tilted stock response in the first place). I might also 3d print a different port entirely depending on how much patience I have...