How do you determine crossover settings for home audio?
Assuming your Pioneer receiver is semi-modern (say, 5 years old or newer) and has a dedicated subwoofer-out jack, it will handle all your crossover needs. If your subwoofer has a crossover disable switch, activate that. Otherwise, turn its crossover all the way up so that it doesn’t get in the way of the Pioneer’s crossover. So what is a crossover? Basically, it’s a circuit that determines how to split audio frequencies. For an individual speaker, such as your CR67, the internal crossover determines the range of frequencies that the tweeter plays and the range of frequencies that the woofer plays. In your Pioneer receiver, the crossover setting determines the point around which the receiver starts diverting audio signals from your speakers to your subwoofer. (I say around which because the crossover is not a hard cut-off, but a gradual slope.) Typically, this crossover point is somewhere in the 60Hz to 150Hz range. I always try to keep the crossover point below 100Hz unless the main sp
So, what I need to know is do you want small ranges of crossover, large ranges, or is it all a matter of preference? The ‘range’ of the crossover is determined by its slope, measured in dB/octave. A steeper slope will result in what you would call a narrower range. So say you have a 6dB/octave crossover and the crossover point is at 100Hz. If you were to hook the crossover up to a magical, perfectly flat, DC-to-light bandwidth speaker and play a 100Hz sine tone through it at a given reference level, then swept the pitch down an octave to 50Hz, it would be 6dB quieter. Your understanding that a crossover controls the range of frequencies that is shared by more than one speakers is generally correct, but the terms, etc., make more sense when you realize all a simple crossover can do is make a tone get quieter when the pitch goes down (high-pass) or make a tone get quieter when the pitch goes up (low-pass). Everything else is a combination of those principles. So, back to slope. Our theor
This is why speakers are normally sold with integrated passive crossovers. The crossover, and its integration with the drivers and box (which also functions like a crossover), is an integral part of how the speaker will sound. Of course this is just as true for the crossover in the sub as it is for the crossovers in the speakers. So in principal relying on the receiver to do the filtering (crossovers are filters) isn’t really the correct advice. In reality you have to put a lot of effort in to optimize your system at that level, and even then the room and the placement of subwoofer/speaker within the room probably matter at least as much as the shape of the subwoofer’s built in crossover. So, if you really want to learn about this stuff lets all have a long talk, otherwise the advice to use the receiver’s crossover is fine. I find jeb’s use of the word range to describe the roll off of a filter a little strange, but except for the semantics his answer seems pretty good, so…
