Active Vs. Passive 3-way Front Stage....

[kingsuv]

Going to an active setup isn't for everyone. It's just one small componet in a big chain of parts. I have the Alpine H701. Unless your a real nutjob in the quest of sound greatness, the unit can be more fustraiting then helpful. If you have a nice processer and half-ass the rest of the install then your wasting your money.

[civicduty]

i love a active 3 way setup.... i'm currently using diamond D7s on a set of MB Quart 6 1/2 mid bass 4 1/2 mid range and a set of diamond D9 tweets..... the amount of control you have is hard to beat

[Boon]

3-way active + 3-way time alignment is where it's at

Lets you be way more flexible with crossover points and speaker positioning but it can be a total bastard to tune right And if you get it wrong it's can sound pretty cruddy

3-way passive is difficult unless you have time alignment on the crossovers (don't the super highend rainbows have it?) because you would have to spend some serious time on path-lengths etc to get it right.

[Kicker Guy]

imo if you build the passive setup yourself, meaning buying the speakers you want not a set, and build the crossover yourself to the points you want they can be about the same. Either way you go it will take time and money.

[kingsuv]

imo if you build the passive setup yourself, meaning buying the speakers you want not a set, and build the crossover yourself to the points you want they can be about the same. Either way you go it will take time and money.

I went that way in the Excursion before I went Active. It was good, really good but after doing active in the 250, I pulled them from the X and will do active in that as well. It made it easier to go from one truck to the other being the dash and speaker setups were the same. It was nice to try both ways.

[ptcary]

I went that way in the Excursion before I went Active. It was good, really good but after doing active in the 250, I pulled them from the X and will do active in that as well. It made it easier to go from one truck to the other being the dash and speaker setups were the same. It was nice to try both ways.

See this is what I was really wanting to know, I selected individual drivers for my front stage, selected specific passive crossovers, and kingsuv reports that he still noticed a significant difference in going active, over an already good passive setup.

I ended up ordering an Eclipse head unit with a 3-way crossover built in, time alignement, DSP, auto-eq..... so all I would need to go active will be another 4-channel amp, I guess I'll make that my next goal after I get everything up and running again.

[kingsuv]

Even though I choose my drivers and X-over points on my x-overs. After they were in the doors, everything changed.

Not knowing how the speakers were going to do on and off axis is another issue I have. I hope to resolve that in my next pod build.

[jhmeg2]

But on an all active setup, how do you protect the tweets?

[Neel]

What do you mean protect the tweets? You protect them like you protect all the other drivers in your setup...proper crossover points / slopes / cut off frequencies / level . There is not a whole lot of good car audio processors out there anymore... the 701 is discontinued.. bitone was a disappointment ,the 3sixty.2 is basic and has a bit of a noise floor and the pioneer P9 combos are ultra rare. I found no other option but to mod a pro audio processor to run on 12v to do what i wanted to do with my setup. Passive crossovers are extremely difficult to dial into cars simply because you never know what slopes / crossover points will sound good in your car, plus you lose some power and the components change values as they heat up and cool down making them not as precise. Active is really the best way to go.

[Nightshade]

I use my Sundown sax50.4 to run actively. It has a built in high pass and low pass crossover that is completely awesome. The low pass can be set from 50-500hz on the front two channels and 50-5000hz on the two rear channels. The high pass is also set as 50-5000hz on the front two channels, and set as 50-500 on the rear channles. I happen to run my tweets off the front two channels crossed over at approx. 3500hz and the mids off the two rear channels crossed at approx. 3000hz. It sounds much much better than the crappy passiver xovers that came with the comps. Also one of the xovers that came with the set had something break off the board so this was an easy way to eliminate that in the future.

Edit: Forgot to mention that the amp also has a subsonic filter for both front and rear channels so freq cutoff can be set to conserve power below crossover freq's.