| # Speaker Project - Monitors # Crossover Design

> > > Crossover design is the most artistic part of speaker design. Any set of drivers with an enclosure will work with many different crossovers. For this system I tested 4 completely different crossovers, all of which had good looking frequency response charts and all of which had specific pluses and minuses. The general methodology is...

> > > 1. Ensure that you have actual impedance and on-axis frequency response datasets for all of the drivers in the system. The on-axis response should be stored in the "frequency response" part of the driver properties. If you merged a port and nearfield and on-axis response that works also.
> > > 2. Create a network (crossover piece) for each driver. I name mine Woof and Tweet, usually. Start with the woofer and tweeter in each network.
> > > 3. If desired, add impedance compensation to the woofer (the tweeter rarely needs it).
> > > 4. Calculate frequency response and impedance for the resultant circuits.
> > > 5. Create goals for the woofer and tweeter circuits based on your desired crossover point and slope. I usually use an absolute value for the goal value based on eyeballing the woofer and tweeter response.
> > > 6. Insert stock crossovers for the woofer and tweeter using the same frequency points and slopes.
> > > 7. Use network optimize to get optimum networks for the drivers.
> > > 8. Create a new network using all of the speaker drivers and copy/paste the networks from each indivudal into that. Calculate that frequency response, using the correct offset for the drivers.
> > > 9. Tweak the final crossover.

> > > Here's one crossover I did using 4th order Linkwitz-Reilly.

> > > It sounded good and measured well. I also tried creating a third order butterworth. That turned into this

> > > Finally, I built a third order butterworth without impedance compensation, based on seeing that the impedance rise is mainly after the crossover point. That turned into this

> > > This crossover actually tested very close to the 4th order Linkwitz-Reilly, is much simpler, sounds good, and uses way fewer components so this is my final crossover. The measured frequency response is pretty much +-2dB from 50Hz to 20KHz.

> > > back main next

> > > last updated November 17, 2001