What does a crossover do?

[Tgilchrist 10+ year member]

i have a basic idea but i want to know u why would u need one or want to use any crossover?

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[Blue Fury 10+ year member]

Go to the speaker section and look at the stickied topics.

 

[RJesus 10+ year member]

coaxial speakers have crossovers in them.

a crossover sends the high frequencies to the tweeter and the low frequencies to the woofer.

without a crossover, your tweeters and woofers will be forced to produce ALL the frequencies that your music produces. Which is probably 20hz - 20khz

20 hz will break your crappy woofers, and make your tweeter instantly rip itself apart.

10k hz will make your woofer catch fire.

Think about it, tweeters are made out of paper and silk, they're made to move incredibly fast.

If you hear a low frequency, you can feel it as well. You can't feel a high frequency. Thats because low frequencies move a lot more air. In order to move more air, the low frequency speakers have to be bigger, and heavier, and move farther.

If your tweeters try to move the amount of air it takes to produce a 20hz frequency, it will fall apart.

Also, your woofers probably can't handle frequencies as low as 20hz (but your cd player can play 20hz frequencies.)

so without any type of crossover, you would completely ruin your speakers.

Now, active crossovers allow you to set your own crossover points. Lets say you buy individual tweeters and woofers (not in a pre-selected set). Your woofer might be designed to play up to 2khz, and your tweeter might be designed to play down to 1.5khz.

so you would set your crossovers accordingly. Maybe you feel like your stressing your tweeter by playing such low frequencies, so you could raise the crossover point to alleviate the stress on the tweeter.

 

[RJesus 10+ year member]

CLIFFS:

all speakers have crossovers (or are connected to crossovers in some way)

if they don't, they will instantly explode and catch fire, the fire department will laugh at you and watch your car burn.

crossovers are used to:

1) protect speakers from frequencies that could damage them

2) limit the frequencies speakers produce, in order to alleviate stress on the speaker.

if you have a subwoofer, you don't want to send it 10,000 hz vocals, do you?

if you have a tweeter, you don't want to send it 30 hz bass waves, do you?

some people add in a 'mid range' driver. which produces frequencies around 200hz-3000hz.

this bridges the gap between tweeters and woofers. sso the tweeter doesn't have to work as hard to play the lower frequencies, and the woofer doesn't have to work as hard to play the higher frequencies.

 

[TMali 10+ year member]

they help you set the eq on your subs to get 150db's everytime

 

[pearlsjam79 10+ year member]

Just out of curiosity, what does everyone have their crossovers set to???

 

[Tgilchrist 10+ year member]

Do all speakers really have crossovers in them? subs,door speakers,rear speakers. and tweeters?

 

[SSS 18734 5,000+ posts]

Crossovers aren't ALWAYS necessary. There ARE, in fact, drivers that can produce nearly the entire spectrum of sound with a surprising degree of linearity. However, they are not capable of producing that linearity at any respectable listening volume. Crossovers simply maximize performance of the speakers by limiting the frequencies that are sent to it - the frequencies that it produces most efficiently. This drastically increases power handling, and a well-implemented crossover system will not reveal any separation at the crossover point.

Most raw drivers do NOT have built-in crossovers. Most low-end and middle-range coaxial do, though. They typically consist of a very simple crossover using only capacitors.

On my 4-way active setup, the crossovers between sub, mid-bass, mid-range, and tweeter are: 80hz, 300hz, 4000hz. That's a low pass filter (sub), two bandpass filters (mid-bass and midrange), and one high pass filter (tweeter).