Series Cross-Over For Better Blending Between Drivers

One thing that I loved about a good full-range drivers is I don't have to calculate and experiment the cross-over values. But in most cases, the one pair full range speaker cannot give fuller frequency band. Especially for the car audio system, in this listening space, it is require multi driver to reach the full band audio frequency. As you may have the same experience like I did, designing the cross-over in multi way speaker system may takes so much time and money. This is including trial and error from different value of components and hear the effect to the sound.

I used to experimented the parallel cross-over configuration for long time. This parallel cross-over means each driver has the same input from the amplifier, configures in parallel. It is more difficult to design, especially if it set into higher order frequency slope. The most problem with this parallel cross-over is the frequency response between the drivers is hard to blend each other into one smooth frequency response.

So if this parallel cross-over is facing so much trouble, why don't I try the series cross-over instead.

In this series cross-over project, I design the simple first order, or 6 dB slope cross-over. This series cross-over require the same components just like in the parallel cross-over.

I will using the components that I already had. The cheap non-polar electrolytic capacitor and the 0.15 mH inductor. The car here is Honda Jazz 2015, reviewed here, and the amplifier is Gainclone amplifier for car here and here.

Here is the schematic.

I will put this series cross-over for a pair of mid-bass on the door panel and a pair of full-range (as mid to high frequency) on top of the dash.

In this first order slope series cross-over, both capacitor and inductor are contribute to each drivers in series, so they act just like the second order slope.

This series cross-over is easy to build and I can say the result for the sound as my expectation, is better than using the parallel cross-over. Since building this series cross-over is easy and without any additional components just like when using in the parallel cross-over, so I think everyone should try this out.

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