crossovers Can I use passive and active crossovers?

[mike12]

Hello, so my first time installing components. I have tweeters that came with passive crossovers. I was wondering how they work with the amps crossovers and filters. I was also wondering if I wire the tweeters to the mids parallel to each channel. I have a ampere 150.4, alphard audio 6.5s, and crescendo sts-1 tweeters. Both tweets and mids are 4 ohm so parallel gets me to 2 ohm at 225w rms on my amp. I will be running a 6.5 and tweeter in each door wired to a seperate channel. Thanks!

[audiofanaticz]

You can use both active and passive, however whatever crossover is set lower and or higher depending on how you set it up is going to limit the functions of the other filter. One crossover wont over ride the other so to say.

Say if you have a tweeter that is passively crossed over not to play below 3500 hz, then you wire the tweeter to the same channel as your mid that is crossed over to play 80hz through 3500hz. This would mean any frequency higher than 3500hz will not be played through your tweeter that has a passive crossover set at 3500hz. So your tweeter wouldn't be playing at all. Now if you take the passive crossover off your tweeter it will be playing the same 80hz-3500hz which would blow the tweeter in a heartbeat. So for this too work you would need to have your mids play 80hz to say 16000hz and those higher frequencies coming out of your midrange speakers would sound horrible most likely.

Not to mention if you wire the mid and tweeter in parallel for 2 ohms that means the mid would get 112.5 watts and the tweeter would get 112.5 watts. You cant put that kind of power on a tweeter it will blow almost instantly considering they are only 50watts rms each.

Ideally you want each speaker that is playing a different range of frequencies to have its own channel so you can correctly set the gain/lpf/hpf/ssf per pair of speakers unless your using an actual passive crossover that has 1 input and an output for the mids and another output for the tweeter.

[mike12]

6 hours ago, audiofanaticz said:

You can use both active and passive, however whatever crossover is set lower and or higher depending on how you set it up is going to limit the functions of the other filter. One crossover wont over ride the other so to say.

Say if you have a tweeter that is passively crossed over not to play below 3500 hz, then you wire the tweeter to the same channel as your mid that is crossed over to play 80hz through 3500hz. This would mean any frequency higher than 3500hz will not be played through your tweeter that has a passive crossover set at 3500hz. So your tweeter wouldn't be playing at all. Now if you take the passive crossover off your tweeter it will be playing the same 80hz-3500hz which would blow the tweeter in a heartbeat. So for this too work you would need to have your mids play 80hz to say 16000hz and those higher frequencies coming out of your midrange speakers would sound horrible most likely.

Not to mention if you wire the mid and tweeter in parallel for 2 ohms that means the mid would get 112.5 watts and the tweeter would get 112.5 watts. You cant put that kind of power on a tweeter it will blow almost instantly considering they are only 50watts rms each.

Ideally you want each speaker that is playing a different range of frequencies to have its own channel so you can correctly set the gain/lpf/hpf/ssf per pair of speakers unless your using an actual passive crossover that has 1 input and an output for the mids and another output for the tweeter.

Thank you so much, how could i wire what i have to my amp? wire the 4 tweeters to 2 channels and the 4 mids to 2 channels?

[audiofanaticz]

Yes that would be the better alternative, keep your tweeters on channels 1 & 2, but I would almost wire each pair in series for 8 ohms since they are only 50wrms each, and even then the gain would have to be kept somewhat minimal imo.

Then wire the 4 mids to channels 3 and 4, with each pair of mids ran in parallel for a 2ohm load per channel.

[mike12]

2 hours ago, audiofanaticz said:

Yes that would be the better alternative, keep your tweeters on channels 1 & 2, but I would almost wire each pair in series for 8 ohms since they are only 50wrms each, and even then the gain would have to be kept somewhat minimal imo.

Then wire the 4 mids to channels 3 and 4, with each pair of mids ran in parallel for a 2ohm load per channel.

Ok thank you so much i appreciate the help 

[mike12]

On 9/3/2017 at 11:30 AM, audiofanaticz said:

Yes that would be the better alternative, keep your tweeters on channels 1 & 2, but I would almost wire each pair in series for 8 ohms since they are only 50wrms each, and even then the gain would have to be kept somewhat minimal imo.

Then wire the 4 mids to channels 3 and 4, with each pair of mids ran in parallel for a 2ohm load per channel.

i had one more question. wiring like that i wouldent have to use the passive crossovers correct?