Do I need a crossover with these?

IME when implemented properly a good coax driver can easily perform as well as or better than good 'components'. Yes, you sacrifice a bit of cone area, but all your sounds (at least above sub frequencies) are coming from one source - not an insignificant feature. The big disadvantage with coax is the quality of the offerings. However some good coax drivers exist & should not be discounted due to the myth that coax sounds bad. Maybe you just haven't experienced good coax. Again, most of it is junk, but something like the SEAS L12RE/XFC might change your mind.

 

I listen to rap hip hop reggae r and b

 

Small yeah the crossover ehh

 

Co and Triaxial may perform well but I dislike having my music aimed at my ankles. Pain in the but to get your ears down there and drive. Bring the sound stage up so it sounds good sitting up. Basically choose your poison as each has its draw back it just depends on what you are willing to sacrifice and how much of it.

 

Getting the sound stage up on the dash isn't only achieved by placing tweeters up high. FWIW, your woofers, which provide most of the acoustic energy in music in a 2-way, are typically down low. They certainly are in our trucks. Your tweeters only cover a small fraction of that and do so with much less energy than the woofers.



As you can see in the graphic, there typically just isn't that much information above 10k. There is little fundamental information above 1 kHz. Most here are using tweeters that don't play much below 4 kHz if they even dip that low. Beyond that, when you separate the drivers you encounter issues in the time domain. You need DSP to account for those differences so that signals from each driver arrive at the listener's ears at the same time. You also need to consider the environment. In our vehicles, tweeters in stock locations are off-axis and play directly into glass - which is one of our biggest enemies in car audio (the environment). A tweeter with wide dispersion can help a lot, but as long as we're playing them off-axis, elevation isn't so critical. You might even be able to get a better angle with them down low.

So imaging isn't just a function of where your tweeters live. Phase, EQ, timing and reflections also play into it. Some winning sound-off vehicles place all the drivers down low and still achieve a fantastic sound stage. Pretty much any vehicle with full-size horns uses low driver placement. Our work vans, with coax in the doors, image on the windscreen very well. But if you don't believe me, try it. Use painter's tape or whatever to stick your tweeters down by the woofers if you have an extra set lying around. You may be surprised. As long as frequency response can be adequately adjusted, you're good to go.

IMHO deadening plays a bigger role than tweeter placement in our situation. If you aren't working with dead (and maybe even 'sealed') doors, you're sweating the coax vs separates thing too much.

 

Semantics? Lol! It doesn't matter if it's on a board or not, it's a 6 db crossover. Period. I apologize that I offended you.

 

Rap and hip hop have very little mid bass and midrange and it's a common theme for listeners of that music to simply not care about mid bass and midrange. Reggae has a little more mid bass and mid range than rap/hip hop. R & B has a ton of everything. Your musical tastes are pretty typical, nothing wrong with ithat obviously. Hard dome tweeters typically sound tinny and will not work well with R & B so I'd go with a soft dome tweeter. I'd also keep the tweeters in the doors. The high frequencies that tweeters play is very directional so aim the left tweeter at the passenger and aim the right tweeter at the driver. Keep them as high and as far forward as possible but keep them around 1' from the mid speaker, if they're too far away you'll easily notice that it sounds like they're far away. The idea is to duplicate attending a concert in the center of the audience in your vehicle. Where are the cymbals (high frequencies) on a stage? Up high. Mounting tweeters down low and pointing them at the occupants does nothing for a stage setting.

 

Yes, semantics. You didn't offend me. You just corrected something that didn't require correcting. The word crossover is typically reserved for a device that divides signals - not merely filtering of upper or lower frequencies. And yes, in series, you'd consider a 6 dB slope. However the slope changes in different applications - such as passive crossover networks.

ex

 

You should try listening to your music with 1 khz and above cut completely off, I mean since there's "little fundamental information" in it then it shouldn't be a problem right? In this particular discussion it is completely irrelevant how much energy it takes to produce bass vs higher frequencies, in relation to what has been discussed so far. The "time domain" you're writing about is fractions of a millisecond which the human ear and mind can't even distinguish the difference. You're obviously educated on the subject of sound offs but sound offs aren't the real world as evidenced by the equipment they use to judge the contests. It can be easily proven by your own statements. You wrote that the sound from each speaker needs to be timed to the listener, guess what you just did? You just built a sound system that sounds perfect for 1 occupant on 1 side of the vehicle, that's not the real world. Glass is definitely not 1 of our biggest obstacles as glass reflects sound. The biggest problem in the real world of car audio is the mid bass that our vehicles produce while driving down the road which sound offs have no test for - more evidence that they simply don't care about the real world. Power supplies (battery & alternator) can make a huge difference in sound so what do they do at sound offs? They hook up electrical chargers to the power supply, does that occur in the real world driving down the freeway? A tweeter with a wide dispersion sounds more like a marketing gimmick than the real world because high frequencies are extremely directional regardless of the speaker that's playing it. Sound deadening has nothing to do with mid range or high frequencies in it's proper application.

Please let me know how your music sounds once you've cut off all frequencies above 1 khz since there's "little information" up there. Thank you. A video recording of it would be hilarious to watch/listen to.

 

You are correct the tweeters may not make a lot of sound but what they do is highly directional making them easy to locate with your ears.Speaker location can make a average speaker sound great just as a great set can sound bad because of location. Its cheap and easy to experiment with tweeters and see for yourself what works and what dont for you personally . You can put double sided tape on the back of most tweeters and just stick them in places you might consider mounting them and see if you like them there . Maybe not be a lot of sound from a tweeter but what comes out of them you would be surprised at how much effect it has and the quality of the tweeter makes a difference. I or any one else can tell you how great tis or that is but what appeals to any one else may not sound good to you

 

It required correcting because it was an completely incorrect statement. A crossover is a crossover, period. It is irrelevant if it's 6 db, 12 db, 18 db, or any other type of crossover. It is completely irrelevant how many parts are in the crossover and irrelevant if it's mounted on a board. A crossover is a crossover. The slope never changes unless the parts within the crossover have been changed, I have no clue where you picked that idea up. A coil is a passive crossover. A non polarized capacitor is a passive crossover. If anyone is playing semantics it's you and you're education on this topic is failing you and now shining brightly. How long have you been professionally installing and how many related schools have you attended? A lot of your information you're posting is simply incorrect, but some of your information is bouncing around or near correct. So anyway I'm done debating you, have a great day.

 

Absolutely correct.

 

My point was that most of the acoustic energy coming from your transducers, subs excepted, is hitting you in the ankles and is covering well over 1 kHz. And FWIW the time domain, in DSP, is set in milliseconds. That you don't think that makes a difference tells me all I need to know about the rest of your posts. Have a nice day yourself!

 

That's true that you can locate higher frequencies better than lower ones. But placing speaker components apart from one another comes with its own set of problems. With DSP properly applied, you should not be able to locate any of the speaker drivers with your eyes closed.

I'm not trying to downplay the importance of good speaker drivers or placement. I've used cheap drivers & it hurts. All I'm saying is that the myth that a tweeter needs to be hitting you in the face for good imaging and sound quality is just a myth.

Personally, if I had nothing but basic controls, I'd want coax drivers. It'll also possibly provide a better experience for everyone in the vehicle. I want DSP if I'm going with different driver locations.

 

I don't mean the tweeter has to be hitting you in the face my point is they don't to be in the center of a coaxial by your ankles. You can do most anything if you want to spend enough . My point is raise the sound stage up cheaply don't lower it

 

I never wrote that it's easier to locate higher frequencies as that depends on the specific vehicle in question and the specific speakers in question. A very simple analogy is a vehicle with vent windows in the doors vs one without.
I specifically noted the ONLY problem with the mounting location of the mids and tweets being too far apart.
I can guarantee you with or without DSP that if the mids and tweets are too far apart I can point to the approximate location of the mids and tweets blindfolded in a vehicle. DSP adjusts the deliverance of the sound to a specific location, as in the location of a microphone in a sound off. A very simple question for you: since you're stating basically that a DSP can take care of the sound waves hitting you at different times due to speaker location are you going to adjust the DSP for the driver or the passenger because it is impossible to adjust the sound to arrive to each individual occupant at the same time because the occupants are located in the vehicle in different places. If you adjust the DSP for the driver what's the passenger going to hear in the right rear seat?
A cheap speaker most definitely can sound great. It totally depends on the demands you ask of it, ie: what frequencies it will play, how much power it's given, and the individual speakers own best operating range.
I never wrote a tweeters sound needs to hit you in the face because for one thing that's impossible and for another that's completely false in a vehicle. If the tweeters are pointing at the drivers face that aren't going to point near any other passengers faces so that is a ridiculous point. In fact I wrote the driver tweeter should point to the passenger and the passenger tweeter should point at the driver.
Without DSP you'd want to use coax drivers? I'm positive almost every home speaker made in the last several decades uses separate mids and tweets (or a horn) instead of a coax speaker for very obvious reasons to anyone that's informed.
It's extremely obvious to me you've studied books about sound offs but have extremely limited real world experience outside of sound offs. Your continual DSP this and DSP that proves it. If you adjust the sound to hit the driver at the same time every other passenger in the vehicle will be short changed in the sound quality they receive.
I know I wrote I was done replying to you but it's just too much fun for me to prove you incorrect with very simple logic and my over 30 years of experience.

 

Exactly correct again. How many years have you been into car audio? Have you ever professionally installed? You obviously know what you're writing about. Your answers to the two above questions don't matter because you've been correct every single time, it's more of a curiosity to me. Nice job brother.

 

I think I'll not feed the nOOb troll any further, but I have to say, he should liven up the place. Welcome to TW hot rod boat guy - helluvan entrance.

 

The point here is that you aren't devoting energy that the speaker is incapable of reproducing, reducing heat and consequently distortion. You want to focus the spectrum to the frequencies that speaker is good at to improve efficiency of the driver.

I feel like you're focused on this idea of imaging because your speaker location choices are exacerbating the direct vs. indirect energy condition in your listening environment. In the mix, if an engineer desires to have something sound more present, he will adjust higher frequencies in the mix for that sound, and delay, along with the psycho-acoustic properties of interplay between left and right, as well as phase, can place an instrument where desired.

If the majority of your high pass frequencies are aimed directly at you, while low pass is not, you're defeating the natural blending effect that bouncing them off of all of the glass in your vehicle will have, making it more difficult to achieve balance throughout the spectrum, and in effect, make it more difficult for the engineer's choices to translate to your sound stage.

You sound like a John F. Allen guy, who prefers to tune directly to the speaker, rather than the listening environment. A method I don't agree with. It's the same reason I don't like Atmos, it's overly direct energy dependent, and severely narrows the area in which the system performs well (IMO).

This.

Now, regarding time alignment. I'm not a fan of time alignment in the way it's commonly used in car audio. To try to achieve optimal convergence of channels to one seat seems absurd. If this is your goal, wear headphones. Where time alignment is important to me, is the function it has with regard to cancellation of frequencies at the crossover point if things are out of phase (which they are, because you used a crossover). Use time alignment as a corrective measure to minimize the dip you get at the crossover point, instead of EQ (or before EQ) to flatten the response of that channel. Obviously, you need an RTA to see the effect, but it has more to do with how crossovers change phase, than distance between drivers, especially in a vehicle.

Obviously sound is a subjective topic, like politics or religion. It's weird to see a discussion like this spawn out of a component speaker question. It was interesting to read, and there were a lot of comments I had more input on, but ultimately I decided to weigh in on what I considered to be the larger issues. All you can do is learn what you can and do what you think is best for you. I've been doing professional audio for 25 years and I'm still learning things to this day. Point being, don't get set in your ways. The technology is constantly changing, and so is the measurement instrumentation. The meat and enjoyment of the hobby lies in figuring these things out, and learning as you go.

 

Guilty as charged - I'm definitely an absurd 1-seat tune type. 95% of the time I'm driving it's just me getting back and forth to jobs so no issue there. That's what keeps me in the game - lots of driving. I do commercial work as well and it indeed feels like I know less the further I go (and it's probably true due to the constant training & dynamic nature of the work). But indeed DSP can help the 2-seat tune as well. Simply leveling out FR works wonders. And yeah, it's nice to have easy control over phase as, like you point out, passive crossover components can alter phase. Not only that, but flipping phase in active systems can help resolve issues (ex midbass in my truck)