Crossover questions?

[mikey15]

OK guys I know I'm going to take a beating on this but; hey I'm a NEWB so I want to learn. Will a passive crossover ease the pain of the learning curve. I mean will a passive system adjust to any system. I mean a 3 way speaker mated to a 3 way active crossover. Now here is the second question. When an active crossover is advertised as "3 way stereo/4 way mono" does that mean that one crossover will control 2 3 way speakers or do you have to buy an active crossover for each speaker
Thanks
Mike

[Anthony]

Okay, you may want to clean up your question a bit because I had to read it four times to understand what you meant.

You are asking if an ACTIVE crossover would make the learning curve easier.

Yes and no. Active crossovers are not portable. By that, I mean, you can't just take a speaker with an active crossover to anybody's house, plug it in and go. You need preamp outs and the ability to wire everything up, plus extra amps and equipment. If you are just making something for yourself and don't mind all that, great. If you plan on building a lot and giving away your speakers as gifts (or selling them), then passive crossover is really the only way to go.

That being said, active crossover take away the pain of learning to solder and finding the right values for the slope you need to tweak in the right design. However, simple electric filter slopes are only part of the equation. First, some drivers have their own acoustic rolloff which gets added to the crossover. In a passive crossover you can tweak the design to get this summation exactly where you want it. For an active crossover, you might end up with a steeper slope than you planned on.

Also, some drivers require notch filters for problem frequencies (like breakup modes), or a slope filter if the driver has a non-flat response. This is not to mention baffle step compensation. All are important and a simple active crossover will not address this. Some of the more advanced digital crossovers have filters you can set for these.

So active crossovers can make dialing in a crossover point easier and with the right drivers can be super simple. But they do not solve all problems.

And a 3 way stereo would mean one crossover would be good for two speakers with 3 drivers. Or if you want to use it for 4 way (3 way + sub), you would need two.

Hope this helps.