- Crossover Design -
This speaker uses dual drivers for the woofer portion, but I
decided to stick with a standard three-way design instead of
a 3.5-way design. This was mostly due to the low crossover
point, but also to keep the impedance at 8 ohms throughout the
entire woofer region. In general, it becomes exponentially more
difficult to design a crossover as more drivers are added. This
is primarily due to the interactions between the high-pass and
low-pass filters on the midrange drivers. One of the best ways
to reduce the difficulties in this regard is to allow the midrange
to cover a fairly wide frequency range. In this particular design,
the midrange is playing from about 400 Hz to 3 kHz, which is
almost three octaves and keeps the interactions to a minimum.
Because each driver is being used well within its natural range,
the acoustic crossover point and slopes stays fairly consistent
with the predicted electrical models.
The woofers use a second order low-pass filter, which creates a
12 dB/octave slope centered around 400 Hz. The midrange uses
a second order high-pass filter, which electrically starts higher in
frequency, but which eliminates a bit of a hump in the 600 Hz to
1.2 kHz region. The midrange low-pass is a second order filter
at about 3 kHz, which again because of the naturally extended
top end response yields roughly second order acoustic rolloff.
The tweeter comes in at around 3 kHz with a standard second
order filter. Reversing the polarity of the midrange created deep
and well-defined nulls at the crossover points, indicating good
phase coherency between drivers in the crossover regions. The
padding resistor on the midrange driver is more to help shape
the response than reducing the actual output of the driver. In
reality the sensitivities of all three drivers is a near perfect match.
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