Is it OK for a three-way designed speaker to out put the same tone through two drivers?

[Kvalsvoll]

Thank you for a detailed and considerate reply!

I appreciate your kind words, especially since my comment did not give much information about how the filters are implemented, or how they work.

And one can argue about the benefits of extremely steep cut-off, but even a quite modest filter can work very well, if implemented properly, with care for the resulting acoustic slopes.

 

[dasdoing]

this is a intresting paper about crossovers http://www.acourate.com/XOWhitePaper.pdf

 

[gnarly]

this is a intresting paper about crossovers http://www.acourate.com/XOWhitePaper.pdf

Yes, very interesting and it's easy to follow the differences between minimum phase and linear phase crossovers ,
and how linear phase crossovers are more ideal.

Part of its conclusion has been my standard tuning goal for active multi-ways:
"The idea: if the desired crossover plus the driver plus the driver linearization behave like our ideal
crossovers shown in this whitepaper then the synthesis of a good sounding speaker is no longer a
fiction, it becomes reality."

 

[IPunchCholla]

Just as a note for the OP. I’m a newbie at all this stuff too. You can get free software (ie SpeakerSim), and download Frequency Response and Impedance measurements (Some driver manufacturer provide these, but you can get Dayton Audio driver’s data at Parts-Express for the purpose of playing around).

For the sake of learning, I built an impedance meter using the diagram suggested by REW and measured my drivers’ FR and Impedence. I used the 2 mass method to derive the Thiele-Small parameters (I would have used the manufacturers T/S, but they are 30+ year old Pioneer drivers and I couldn’t find them. I plugged that data into SpeakerSim and played around to my hearts content designing a crossover network for my drivers.

It quickly became apparent to me how driver dependent the crossover is and how sensitive to slope and exact frequency the overall FR is. Small changes can cause huge shifts! I designed all sorts of x-overs and the absolute best responses was from steeper sloped x-overs with additional notch filters but I could get pretty good (40-14k +-5 with 40-1k and 2k-14 +-2) with first order and second order Butterworths (this is a three way system).

I have ordered and will build the crossovers, not because I expect any real improvement in sound (even though the current x-overs in the speakers are clearly the cheapest possible solution), but since I am just doing this to understand how these things work and I tend to learn better hands on.

I’m happy to share my files, if you are interested.