Crossover Hook up to 2 amps.

[Shayne Millar]

Hi, I've been working on a project that is basically making a standing loudspeaker out of car amps, power supply and speakers. It is a three way speaker with a tweeter, mid and a sub. I've made a homemade passive 3 way crossover from scratch and am trying to hook up the crossover to my amps. I have a monoblock amp for the low pass frequencies from the crossover and a duel channel amp for the mid and high pass frequencies from the crossover. I am wondering how can I connect the mid and high pass outputs of the crossover to the duel channel amp which only has one input or should I buy a third amp so each crossover output has its own amp input?

 

[slipperybidness]

Hi, I've been working on a project that is basically making a standing loudspeaker out of car amps, power supply and speakers. It is a three way speaker with a tweeter, mid and a sub. I've made a homemade passive 3 way crossover from scratch and am trying to hook up the crossover to my amps. I have a monoblock amp for the low pass frequencies from the crossover and a duel channel amp for the mid and high pass frequencies from the crossover. I am wondering how can I connect the mid and high pass outputs of the crossover to the duel channel amp which only has one input or should I buy a third amp so each crossover output has its own amp input?

Hmmmm.....typically you are going to run signal-->pre-amp-->amp-->crossover-->speakers

So, you see you would typically be running your PASSIVE crossovers from amp OUTPUT to crossover INPUT to individual driver input.

If you have your crossovers BEFORE the amp in the signal chain, that would typically be an ACTIVE crossover setup.

You may need to re-think your setup here. Do you know what your insertion loss is for the crossovers? I suspect that this is typically done as I described above b/c the insertion loss is too great as compared to the signal level. I'm sure there are other reasons too, and I'm sure someone with more knowledge on this topic can come along and inform us.

 

[WaynePflughaupt]

You may need to re-think your setup here.

What slippery said. The standard way to use a passive crossover (which all free-standing pre-manufactured speakers use) is, the amplifier’s speaker wire goes to the crossover input, and the crossover has outputs for the drivers - tweeter, midrange and woofer.

If you’re intent on using separate amplifiers for each driver, you should be using an active (aka electronic) crossover. Passive crossovers are a really poor way to utilize a bi- or tri-amped system.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[Shayne Millar]

I'm going to look into making a new crossover that can be attached after the amps. I'm not sure when the insertion loss is, but what i was trying to do was make a cheaper crossover so I didn't have to buy "beefy" capacitors, inductors and resistors. It looks like that may be the way I want to go.

 

[slipperybidness]

I'm going to look into making a new crossover that can be attached after the amps. I'm not sure when the insertion loss is, but what i was trying to do was make a cheaper crossover so I didn't have to buy "beefy" capacitors, inductors and resistors. It looks like that may be the way I want to go.

At this point, you may want to look into an active crossover from someone like Behringer. I would also suggest reading the Speaker Design Cookbook.

The crossover is very important, just as important as the drivers. Crossover is not the place to try to save a buck.