Hi,
I'm thinking about building a pair of LXmini speakers (a quite unusual DIY design from loudspeaker wizard Siegfried Linkwitz, using hi-end SEAS drivers and cheapo PVC water pipes).
It is a 2-way speaker which need an active crossover (usually a miniDSP) and four amps
do you think I can use a beocreate board for this ?
thanks !
Should be no problem with the Beocreate.
I am trying to do it too.
Have you succeeded?
Yes ! Here are some views of the "Thing".
Sounds really amazing. Visitors are often puzzled, trying to figure where this damn sound comes from and WTF are those rusty pipes. Even my wife eventually loves them.
I bought the official construction plans from LinkwitzLabs (here) but I had some difficulties finding the proper type of plumbing stuff here in Europa so I took some freedom with the original drawings.
The PVC tubes are painted with an iron powder then oxidised. They just look like old rusty toilet pipes. Drivers are SEAS driver in "black special edition'.
Power supply, RaspberryPi and Beocreate are hosted in a vintage bakelite enclosure recycled from a broken 1955 "Ducretet - Thomson" vacuum tubes radio.
The Beocreate card works well but is a bit weak for the job, even with the biggest power supply from Hifiberry. It often runs at 80-90% of its maximum. I had to work quite a lot on the dsp settings and the crossover curves to make it sound good and eliminate some saturation issues.
I recommend you to buy the official plans, this will grant you access to the members-only section of the oplug forum (https://oplug-support.org) with tons of invaluable infos and the very friendly support of the LX community.
Have fun with this project,
K.
Thanks for sharing.
We also bought the originals and went over similar problems with the plumbing.
Still working on the conection the the beocreate.
I used Speakon 4 poles connectors (Neutrik-NTR-NL4FX).
A bit bulky but easy to solder on big wires, very reliable, easy to find and rather cheap on amz.
Thanks
Even though this thread is now over 3 years old, I would like to catch up on this. I have an LXmini setup with a miniDSP 2x4hd and two stereo amps, one of which suffers from a recent defect. Now I am looking for an alternative. One of the more attractive options is definitely a raspi + beocreate, however I have no experience at all with sigmastudio and filter programming and the like. However I feel that applying some existing filter definition file(s) should definitely be possible, I did such things before, among others also with the miniDSP.
Hence my kind request kev spots: would it be possible that you share your beocreate filter configuration? Of course I have purchased the LXmini license, hence there should be no copyright issue.
Many thanks in advance, and thanks also for the nice pictures of your amazing build
Matthias
Hi Mattias,
You won't need to fiddle with sigmastudio at all. The distro from hifiberry has a prebuild DSP setup for the Beocreate and on top of that, a very simple but rather complete system for setting up the speaker filters (see image below).
My parameters come from the Linkwitz Lab Design Owners forum : https://oplug-support.org.
You should find everything you need in this thread thanks to the user Davey.
Starting from those parameters you will be able to easily tweak the filters from your phone or a tablet, while listening to your music.
Keep in mind that the beocreate is not that powerfull (2x30 + 2x60W) and the LXminis are obviously not sensitive speakers but this setup is overall pretty impressive for the price. Also very easy to use with lots of inputs : TOSLINK, Spotify, Airplay, Squeezelite, net radio, bluetooth, network share...
In four years I had two total failures, both due to dead sd-cards on the raspberry pi. so when everything is set up don't forget to make a backup of your parameters (maybe one day I will upgrade the system with a pi 5 and a M2 solid state disc).
K.
Hi Kev,
thank you so much for your quick reply and the many helpful hints. Up to now I was really confused about how to configure the beocreate dsp correctly. From your post I conclude it is possible to just enter the original filter parameters by SL and his community into the hifiberry software, correct? That would of course be no problem.
I am aware of the power limits of the beocreate. Up to now I ran my LXmini's with two 2x30 W stereo amps (Creek CAS4040 btw) without ever using that amount of available power to any significant degree - we have small rooms and no demand of drama. Of course class-D amps are different, but i do not see a problem here right now.
On the oplug forum, I completely missed that thread you mentioned up to now, that is extremely helpful! So I will have the original filter setup and Davey's 4th order version to try out. It looks like now I have all the necessary info in place to start this project, just need a bit of time. I really would like to hear these great speakers again.
Congratulations again to your beautiful builds (both speakers and "radio") & thanks a lot!
Matthias
Yes that's correct.
you can create as many filter as you need for your speakers : crossover, high shelf, low shelf, peak / dip or custom, delay and gain on the four channels then save those settings as 'speaker configs'
independantly there is also a 'sound design' interface that lets you add filters and tweak your sound for left / right channels and save them as 'listening modes'
And if you connect an USB mic on the raspi, you will have acces to a 'Room Compensation' setting.
The beocreate with the raspi on top have a rather small footprint so you can easily squeeze them in any fancy enclosure. Have fun!
F.