Active/Electronic Crossover

[Woollie]

Howdy,

Just wondering if anybody is using one of these crossovers or something similar and of course if they are worth getting?

Kicker 03KX3 3-Way Electronic Active Crossover - $155.00

At the moment I have 1 amp running the front splits and a mono running my sub. Will one of these give better sound or just better control over the sound? I've heard they take a lot of the load off the amps.

What do you all think?

Cheers,
Clint

[sweefu]

What are you trying to change by adding this to your system?

[Woollie]

I'm not trying to change anything. I was told they could make a difference to some adjustments of the music. I was wondering if there was somebody else that may have been using these types of crossovers also and whether they were worth the money or not.

[sweefu]

If you are happy with the stereo, I don't see a need to change the system unless you are seeking to change something. If you had the cross over, what would you adjust and why?

[Woollie]

I was under the impression that they give you a broader (more fine tuning) adjustment factor.

The other reason I liked the idea was because I can plug my front and rear channels into the crossover then run all of my speakers and the sub from the crossover. At the moment I only have my front speakers running off my 4 channel amp. It means I could also run the rear speaker without worrying about a loc for the sub amp.

[Crisis63]

I installed a similar device in a mates car. Audible gains may be marginal but effectively they do take some load off the amps which may reduce distortion. Passive crossover work by subtracting signal that has already been amplified this wasting power. With an active crossover such as this, your amp running your splits will not be fed low frequency signals which are power hungry to reproduce and wasted by the use of passive crossovers. To realise the full potential you need to have a separate amp for each frequency band. I.e. one for your subs, one for the LF drive component of your splits and one for your HF drivers. If the amp that is driving the splits is a 4 channel then you can do this.
As I said though the audible gains may not be excessive but its all good fun!
Only thing to be wary of is that you set the frequencies carefully and according to the specs of your splits. HF drivers are extremely sensitive to low frequencies and you run the risk of popping them if you have the low pass set too low.

Go nuts!! :-D

[MAG00]

I was under the impression that they give you a broader (more fine tuning) adjustment factor.

The other reason I liked the idea was because I can plug my front and rear channels into the crossover then run all of my speakers and the sub from the crossover. At the moment I only have my front speakers running off my 4 channel amp. It means I could also run the rear speaker without worrying about a loc for the sub amp.

Just to clarify, it is a pre-amp crossover. You adjust the frequencies fed to the amplifier, which then outputs the frequencies to the speakers. I can't quite understand what you are actually trying to do.

Run the front and rears on the 4ch, sub on the sub amp.

Unless you actually want to run active and go through hours upon hours of fine tuning to get the crossovers sounding good, then it's not worth it.

[Crisis63]

I was under the impression that they give you a broader (more fine tuning) adjustment factor.

The other reason I liked the idea was because I can plug my front and rear channels into the crossover then run all of my speakers and the sub from the crossover. At the moment I only have my front speakers running off my 4 channel amp. It means I could also run the rear speaker without worrying about a loc for the sub amp.

No. As described above it sits in front of your power amp. You need a four channel to use this properly with your front splits.
See my previous post.

[StoneX]

I installed a similar device in a mates car. Audible gains may be marginal but effectively they do take some load off the amps which may reduce distortion. Passive crossover work by subtracting signal that has already been amplified this wasting power. With an active crossover such as this, your amp running your splits will not be fed low frequency signals which are power hungry to reproduce and wasted by the use of passive crossovers...

Why not use the high pass filter in the amplifier then? That is in the low level section of the amp before being amplified.


Anyway, this would be useful if going fully active but there's no need for the front/rear/sub option as you can't really adjust this on-the-fly, so you might as well just split (or feed through amps with that feature) your RCA's and set the gains for front/rear/sub separately on the amps anyway.

[Woollie]

Thanks for your input guys. Seems like it may be a waste of money then. Not only that but all the fiddling around again to install it.

Was just more interested in what they did that's all

[Woollie]

I installed a similar device in a mates car. Audible gains may be marginal but effectively they do take some load off the amps which may reduce distortion. Passive crossover work by subtracting signal that has already been amplified this wasting power. With an active crossover such as this, your amp running your splits will not be fed low frequency signals which are power hungry to reproduce and wasted by the use of passive crossovers. To realise the full potential you need to have a separate amp for each frequency band. I.e. one for your subs, one for the LF drive component of your splits and one for your HF drivers. If the amp that is driving the splits is a 4 channel then you can do this.
As I said though the audible gains may not be excessive but its all good fun!
Only thing to be wary of is that you set the frequencies carefully and according to the specs of your splits. HF drivers are extremely sensitive to low frequencies and you run the risk of popping them if you have the low pass set too low.

Go nuts!! :-D

So what you are saying is I could run my front speakers (woofers) from 1 channel of the amp and the tweeters from the other channel of the amp???