ElectroVoice professional speakers are wonderful! Their relatively common 'classic' smaller consumer speakers are not. The potted-in-tar crossovers suck, too.
Aristocrat, Marquis, Low Resonance Compact System, are examples of speakers that would lose to Bozaks. Speakers that are pristene on the inside mean nothing to how they'll sound on the outside
The EV Interfaces are quite nice, I've heard.
The EV Sentry 100A, 500, and V are AMAZING speakers, and ones I use to monitor recordings and transfer work. I plan on quad-amping my EV Sentry III's over 30" woofers jus to see what happens. Also the Sentry IVB will smoke an Altec VOTT in every way....once you biamp it with a 4th order crossover
For pure musical and cinema enjoyment, I listen to Concert Grands. Rarely a day goes by that I don't listen to them, even if it's just for background music while doing chores around the house.
Recapping crossovers is apolitical. There are gargantuan improvements, which are easily audible. It's the cheapest and most effective upgrade you can make to a vintage system. Capacitors have a finite lifespan, which is about 20 years (especially for the older ones), and will have higher ESR (resistance), drift value, and sometimes even completely fail shorted, which means a blown speaker driver is in your future. Don't even get me started on amplification.
For instance, I recently got a pair of mismatched Altec Duplexes (604C, 605A), and with the stock crossovers, they sounded like crap. I bypassed them, went active with an Ashly XR-1001, and the difference was astonishing. The wonderful little details that were previously hidden were now in plain view. I went from wanting to just sell the speakers to deciding that I would keep them, and try to make pairs out of both. I had non-audiophile houseguests at the time, and they walked in the front door on day 2 (which is well out of the path of the speakers), and immediately noticed a difference for the better.
Bozak crossover capacitors are known junk. I almost left my Concert Grands in Mississippi because they sounded so freakishly terrible (and this was driven by a Krell KSA-100 and the TOTL Sansui preamp), but because I knew about the crossover caps, I took the plunge. I loaded $2250 speakers into my $1500 Astro van and drive back home from Mississippi to St. Louis. Replacing the capacitors was a revelation.
Crossover slopes work like this:
The steeper the slope, the faster the rolloff, and the less energy given to the driver after the crossover point. This is particularly critical for compression drivers. With steeper slopes, getting drivers to integrate well can be a bit of a challenge, but it's doable. With first order slopes, driver integration is much easier, if the drivers are well suited to handling a very wide range of input.
View attachment 916657
A 6db/oct (1st order) slope has 90º of phase shift, and sums together nicely. This requires one element (a capacitor or an inductor).
A 12db/oct (2nd order) slope has 180º of phase shift, thus necessitating reversing the polarity of the high pass section. This requires two elements
A 18db/oct (3rd order) slope has 270º of phase shift. This requires three elements.
A 24db/oct (4th order) slope has 360º of phase shift, and sums together nicely This requires four elements.
It's always advisable to have less elements in the crossover path, which is why I love active crossovers so much. 4th order slopes are possible with the amplifier connected directly to the driver.
Slopes are illustrated above for a 100hz crossover point.
Personally, I prefer 1st and 4th order crossovers. Anything else typically sounds weird to me, but most of the EV stuff uses 2nd order, and I just live with it. There's only so many active crossovers one can own, and a governor of the AES recommended that I buy Sentry 100A's, so I did, and I adore them stock. I'll be recapping them soon.
Bozaks, in order to sound anywhere near pleasing (and Sam will disagree with me on the tweeter thing) have to have B-800, B-800A, B-209B, B-209Bc or B-209C midranges, B-200Y, Yc, or Zc tweeters, and have the midranges operating in the correct phase with the woofers and tweeters. Typically, these were made after 1961. Anything before this will need to be updated. The B-209, B-209A midranges and B-200X tweeters are junk. Plain and simple.
Bozaks were designed to be flat sounding, and upon first comparison with a shouty Altec or JBL product, will sound dull and rolled off. After Rudy Bozak declared bankruptcy for the first or second time, someone decided to reverse the polarity of the midrange in order to make it 'pop' more. Listening to the Bozaks this way, it will sell well in a store, but will sound imprecise and incoherent (compared to proper polarity) when trying to dial in the best imaging and soundstaging.