what does a crossover do?

Posted by admin in Wednesday, July 29th 2009

Topics: Car Audio

its all about me asked:

i was just wondering if i need one. in my car i have 2 4″x6″ and 2 3.5″ jbl speakers wired into my cars system, but i also have 2 mutant 6″x9″s and 2 mutant 5″ the mutant stuff is powerd my a mutant 300 watt amp. i also have another mutant amp, a MTPK12-A that is just sitting in my living room till my 15″ mutant *** sub turns up. would i need a crossover for my 6″x9″s and my 5″ speakers?

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3 Comments

playniu said in July 31st, 2009 at 5:58 am

for me a separte crossover clears out the speakers especially the inside speakers. for me i have a amp for bass a amp for the inside speakers. the crossover sends bass to the bass amp and highs to the inside amp. the built in crossover don’t do much you can barley tell a difference. the best ones i use are clarion 3way and kicker 3way. Good luck

KaeZoo said in July 31st, 2009 at 11:52 am

Think of a crossover as a filter that removes certain frequency ranges from the audio signal. A high-pass crossover filters out bass; a low-pass crossover filters out high frequencies. (low-pass = low frequencies pass). A crossover might be useful to remove low frequencies that your smaller speakers can’t handle; your 4×6, 3.5″ and 5″ speakers aren’t able to handle a lot of bass, so removing the bass will make them sound better and protect them from damage.

Crossover information:

sparky3489 said in August 2nd, 2009 at 5:09 pm

A crossover allows a certain range of frequencies to pass to a speaker or set of speakers. For mids and highs you’d want to block bass to reduce distortion. Likewise when you get your sub, you’ll want to have the LPF (low pass filter) on the amp turned on and set just below the highest frequency of the sub.

For instance if the sub is 20-200Hz, then the LPF would be set around 170Hz.

Check the other speakers frequency response to determine what crossover settings you’d need. From there it’s all a matter of taste of what sounds good to you.