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Crossovers

Okay, I'm confused about the various types of crossovers. From first order to fourth order Linkwitz-Riley, there's a ton of various setups and schools of thought. What's the difference? What do the "orders" mean? I've tried looking around online, but most of the explanations are very technical. While I'm not a complete lunkhead about this stuff, what I'm really looking for is an explanation that can be understood without a degree in electrical engineering or decades of speaker-building experience.

If anyone would like to attempt a layman's explanation of the theory and application, I'm interested.

-Chris
cds9000

Showing 1 response by loontoon

loontoon
301 posts
 
The orders are the degree of turn over at the knee, the point where the cross over rolls your drivers off. The 1st order is 6db/octave, and the 2nd is 12, and 3rd is 18, and 4th order is 24db/octave. The higher the order the sharper the cut-off. The type of filter, Bessel, LinkR, Butterworth, etc describe the circuit apporach to the design. All are quite similiar and different type have different plus and minus's to them. The LinkwitzR, type is often used in D'Appolitto type designs for it's advantage if phase projection.

So without getting into math, that's about as clean as I can tell it.

loon
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