Your guide to speaker crossovers and why they’re so important

One of the most ignored topics in a car music system is car speaker crossover. Because the concept of crossover is kind of complex. But before understanding crossover, I would welcome you to know about types of car speakers and how they work.

How Crossover Works:

Now if you know about car speakers then you probably know that there are different types of drivers used in different car speakers. For example, Tweeter is a type of speaker. This speaker can play sounds that are of high frequency. A low-frequency sound will be played in tweeters. On the other hand, a sub-woofer is a speaker that plays the lowest frequencies in comparison with other speakers. It can’t play a high-frequency tone. So they need something to identify and separate frequency ranges and then channel them to different speakers. That is what is done by a speaker crossover. It simply works like a traffic police and fixes lane for different frequency ranges of sound.

Types of Crossovers:

Now there are two types of speaker crossover. They are –

• Passive Crossover

This type of crossover sits between the speaker and the amp. It is really easy to install and cheap to buy. But this crossover doesn’t utilise the full efficiency of an amplifier. What it does is that it filters out frequencies to adjust the whole sound and as a result, users get less freedom to use the volume.

• Active Crossover

Active crossovers are hard to install and they are more expensive than a passive crossover. On top of it, this requires an extra power source to work. But the bright side is that it doesn’t filter out frequencies like a passive amplifier. So, you can change the volume of your treble, bass or mid-range individually. This keeps the experience of listening music the way it was intended for.

In order to keep the quality of your speakers well, you will need an active crossover. Or else, your sound quality will get affected. But do remember the limitation of the budget before buying an active crossover for your car music system. If you want quality setup for your car audio system or marine stereo system, GC Car Audio can provide you with solutions.