active crossover recommendation


Does anyone have an analog active crossover recommendation for a tri amp for a 3 way?

 

Thanks !

John

sozocaps

Marchand offers several models and the quality is very good. He can also design custom filters like baffle step compensation and others upon request.

Hello sozocaps!  miniDSP!  I have them in three different systems. Excellent performance, low price. You do need a PC computer to program them. It's easy, software provided.  Happy listening.

I love active crossovers. All things being equal an active crossover beats a passive one every day. But, except possibly for sub woofers, generic crossovers have a significant weakness. Drivers, even good ones, are not flat. Much of this is handled by a crossover equalizing a driver as well as being a crossover. So crossovers must be designed to take care of these anomalies, meaning good crossovers are unique for their speaker taking into account the drivers and enclosures. Electronic crossovers usually assume perfect drivers. Digital crossovers can work but you have to design the way they process for each driver and high pass and low pass individually. So you need to know how a driver in its enclosure looks before designing the crossover, not so simple.

Just some things to consider.

@sozocaps , if you are going to do this do it right. Analog crossovers always have issues and are not very flexible. You can not adjust group delays. Digital active crossovers that operate in 24/192 or above are far superior. Check out DEQX's soon to be released Pre 8. It actually has a full 4 way crossover so you can add a sub if you like and it will test each driver and correct them all in time and phase. It will also establish a flat frequency response and from there you can adjust it for taste. This is the current state of the art and it is not insanely expensive. 

The DBX 234XS is the best overall choice I know of. At $319 it supports 2 X 3-Way channels if need be with easy setup. It uses the highly desirable Linkwitz-Riley 24 dB/Oct filters, which generally aren't used in passive designs because of parts count and cost issues. Its only drawback is the use of XLR balanced connectors, so you’d need 2-RCA to XLR Male for the input, and 4-XLR Female to RCA Male for the outputs. The DEQX Pre-8 looks awesome, but it definitely won’t be cheap.