Osprey-12 for Music

Osprey-12 with the Albatross

The Osprey-12 shines for vocals. This is great if you are using it as a recording monitor where voice clarity is critical. But for listening to music, I find the bass bass is not loud enough. The obvious solution is to apply bass boost by way of electronic EQ. I want to avoid this because I’ve not come across an eq that I’m satisfied with. This is something that I intend to address later. Meanwhile, I shall adopt my next option, using a subwoofer to support the Osprey-12.

I have a wide selection of woofers to choose from but I eventually decided on the Albatross. She is a 75 liters bandpass subwoofer based on an affordable 10″ by Dayton, the DA270.

The layout above shows how I configured the system. Basically, it’s bi-amped. The Osprey-12 is driven by one amplifier while the subwoofer has another. I used a 24dB/oct electronic crossover to divide the frequencies between the subwoofer and the Osprey-12. I started with 150Hz and worked my way down to 80Hz. After listening to different genre of music, I finally settled on 80Hz.

You’ll need to test this out for yourself. Bass is very difficult to address because it’s room dependent. That’s one of the reasons my preferred method is to use an active subwoofer. I can select the best crossover frequency and equally important, balance the output between the the bass and the satellites. Not enough bass and the system will end up tiring to listen to. Too much bass and it’ll drown out the rest of the music. This is probably the most common mistake when active subwoofers are used. It’s like adding too much catchup in your burger.