I am new at speaker building so pardon me a bit. I am building the Veritas and finished the cross-overs. I have followed the plans exactly. I connected the speakes without a baffle or box to see if the crosses work. They work but what I noticed from both sides is that the mids have a bit of distortion at the higher end of the range. I played a jazz piano CD which sounds warm and clear on my current system. Since the mids and tweeters are sealed should I be hearing any thing out of the ordinary? Like I said I have followed the plans exactly or at least think I have. Will the baffle and box make any difference. I know the sound with free standing speakers will not be good but I am a little worried about what I am hearing now.

Caveat: I'm no expert in the sense of many here, but have a lot of experience building kits, designing and building my own designs, designing and building pro sound speakers, and (along the way) messing with a lot of drivers, xovers, active xovers, etc.

That being said, it is my observation that isolating a narrow band of the overall signal (such as the mids, which you are referring to) and then listening to a driver reproducing them without the benefit of having the rest of the freq spectrum being appropriately reproduced, etc, can lead to apparently "bad" results.

The effect may be even more pronounced with hi-fi mid/high drivers that are not mounted on the front panel of a "known to be good" speaker design, as hi-fi drivers are designed to be so mounted and doubtless the dispersion/diffraction/etc sonic properties are designed to take advantage of the front panel in controlling non-near-field sound and dispersion etc.

It is also true with every mid/hi driver I've ever been exposed to, both hi-fi and pro sound, that when used to reproduce just their "part" of the sonic spectrum and without the rest of the signal being present, tend to sound pretty raspy by the time one turns them up to the point of being clearly audible and playing with any authority.

For example, I've had results similar to what you are describing driving both known "good" hi-fi mids/tweeters AND the $600 JBL horn drivers + $200 horns out of a pair of very good JBL pro sound cabs, when the drivers were driven with a "known good" 24 dB/oct Linkwitz-Reilly active xover and a very clean amp.

All that being said, since you already have the drivers and etc and have the electrical paths completed, you have little to lose by completing the roughed-in cabs, stuffing them, and starting them towards their break in (refer to the response to my request for listening experiences.)

Otherwise, if you've substituted cheaper iron-core inductors and/or cheaper inductive resistors (as opposed to more expensive non-inductive resistors) and/or cheaper capacitors (as opposed to the Thetas called-out in the spec), then you could be hearing xover-induced signal degradation as well.