Crossover
The frequency-splitting network in a multi-way speaker: it routes low frequencies to the woofer and highs to the tweeter (and mids to a midrange) so each driver only reproduces the band it handles well. Named in the spoke’s fundamentals from the start (loudspeaker-primer-hackaday); this page collects the concept as its own node.
Passive vs. active
- Passive crossover — a network of capacitors, inductors, and resistors placed after a single power amp, between amp and drivers. Simple and self-contained, but it dissipates power, interacts with the driver’s (varying) impedance, and fixes the slopes/levels in hardware.
- Active / DSP crossover — the split happens before amplification, at line level or in software, and each driver gets its own amplifier channel (multi-amping). Done digitally (CamillaDSP, miniDSP), the crossover becomes configuration — slopes, filter type, per-driver delay (time alignment), and EQ are all editable, not soldered.
Slopes and filter types
Crossovers are described by their slope (roll-off steepness) — e.g. Linkwitz-Riley 24 dB/octave, a common target because its acoustic outputs sum flat through the crossover region. Steeper slopes reduce driver overlap (less lobing, less stress on the tweeter near its resonance) at the cost of more components or heavier filtering.
Where it sits in the spoke
Crossovers are the design layer after the driver-and-box predictive loop (thiele-small-parameters → loudspeaker-enclosure): once each driver has a box/band, the crossover integrates them into one coherent response. The active/DSP route (camilladsp) is the spoke’s DSP-bridge made concrete — it moves crossover and correction (EQ, time alignment) out of passive components and into software, an alternative philosophy to the all-passive design tradition. The first (unconventional) split the spoke saw was the low/high divide across drives in hdd-speakers.
Related
camilladsp · loudspeaker-driver · loudspeaker-enclosure · thiele-small-parameters · loudspeaker-primer-hackaday · hdd-speakers