Ellam XT, built by Omar, Mexico
Copyright 2012 © Troels Gravesen

Go to Ellam XT construction page.
04-04-2012
Hello Mr Troels Gravesen.
I hope you are doing well. At last, I finished my speakers based on your Ellam XT25 design, cabs are .38 ft3 from parts express, they are temporary, in a not very far future this excellent speaker design will get proper cabs. I messed up exact diameter of the drivers flush mounting, but drivers are flush mounted. I forgot to get the router circle jig! Anyway, I followed all your advices concerning cabinet dampening, woofer hole chamfering, best crossover parts, placement of inductors, etc. Well... couldn't get the crossovers inside, due to the massive size of the Z-capacitors, obviously Jantzen didn't hear that good things come in small packages : ( The result is a speaker that is a delight to listen to, very smooth and detailed, they were playing when my friend came in and he was like: is that bass coming from your speakers? :-0 My other friends were amazed at how big they sound. I don't know about speakers break in, but these "little ones" played so sweet right the moment I hooked them up. Should I be easy on them at first, or is any listening level acceptable?
Thanks so much for sharing your speaker design with people like me, who can't afford high end commercial speakers. Best regards Omar, Mexico

24-03-2012
Recently I started one of your speaker projects, the Ellam XT25 to be precise. Due to the $$ cost of the Jantzen Superior-Z Caps I chose to only get Sup-Z Caps for the tweeters (minus the 10uf), BUT, after a test listening between CrossCaps and Sup-Z caps, I realized there is a small, yet fundamental sonic difference between them: listening some violin music with the CrossCaps, the tweeter played something resembling a violin, and, listening the tweeter through a Sup-Z, you can actually say it was a violin! (I was smiling when listening to the Sup-Z). I was surprised at the fact that many people claim there is no sonic difference, unless you have very high end gear. I got a Rega Apolo cd player and a NAD 326BEE preamp, not exactly high end stuff! All of this resumes into this question: Is the quality of the capacitors in parallel as important as caps in series ? Thanks in advance for your response to my e-mail. Best wishes Omar.