Hi, if you make crossover for electric signal, sum it back electrically. there is no difference with LR filters at least, as long as frequency response does not change dramatically. Hence, crossover as concept does not alter sound. One could implement linear phase crossover as well.
With speakers, the crossover splits signal in electric domain and is summed back by your ears, in acoustic domain. So if you hear difference it's due to something else, anything in acoustic domain before your ears, like edges of the box making diffraction, or interference issues through reflections, directivity, or anything in the electric/acoustic conversion. All these are due to the system and not from the crossover (split) itself. I understand this might be what you ment but it's not clear what you ment.
For example the transducer itself has a coil, usually with iron core, and the whole assembly moves, so worst possible variety of coil, and adding an air core inductor in series actually makes things better, not worse as you fear. If you dig deeper into how stuff works you can make things worse or better with the passive crossover. And one does not have to use passive parts to make crossover, but one could utilize DSP for example, or both passive and active xo for best performance.
There is nothing to be afraid of crossovers, they just need to be implemented well and that is not too hard nowadays. If you hear a bad sounding system it obviously has some issues either in implementation or it just isn't suitable for the particular application you are listening, or is not set up ideally for it. It could be fullrange driver system, or some multiway system, both could sound better or worse depending on application and implementation.
Sorry, point is not to start a fight or anything, just show a different perspective on the stuff and that there rarely is just one thing that affects performance but multitude of things. Fullrange driver can make a fabulous system, but is eventually limited in output capability and bandwidth so a crossover is inevitable if one needs more of those and there is no reason to be afraid of it.
With speakers, the crossover splits signal in electric domain and is summed back by your ears, in acoustic domain. So if you hear difference it's due to something else, anything in acoustic domain before your ears, like edges of the box making diffraction, or interference issues through reflections, directivity, or anything in the electric/acoustic conversion. All these are due to the system and not from the crossover (split) itself. I understand this might be what you ment but it's not clear what you ment.
For example the transducer itself has a coil, usually with iron core, and the whole assembly moves, so worst possible variety of coil, and adding an air core inductor in series actually makes things better, not worse as you fear. If you dig deeper into how stuff works you can make things worse or better with the passive crossover. And one does not have to use passive parts to make crossover, but one could utilize DSP for example, or both passive and active xo for best performance.
There is nothing to be afraid of crossovers, they just need to be implemented well and that is not too hard nowadays. If you hear a bad sounding system it obviously has some issues either in implementation or it just isn't suitable for the particular application you are listening, or is not set up ideally for it. It could be fullrange driver system, or some multiway system, both could sound better or worse depending on application and implementation.
Sorry, point is not to start a fight or anything, just show a different perspective on the stuff and that there rarely is just one thing that affects performance but multitude of things. Fullrange driver can make a fabulous system, but is eventually limited in output capability and bandwidth so a crossover is inevitable if one needs more of those and there is no reason to be afraid of it.
Last edited:
