Can someone be so kind as to explain crossover frequency to me?

[Colin.B]

I recently bought a Yamaha RX V373 receiver and a pair of Inifity P363s. I'm using some HTiB rears and center and no sub at the moment. I noticed people talking about crossover frequency and my receiver certainly allows me to change it. Will I notice a difference in sound by doing so? I'm assuming a lower frequency gives deeper bass response? Is it only for use with subwoofers? Anyways, totally ignorant question. Doubt it will change the sound quality but thought I'd ask because the more you know...

[tim_s]

This is not my area of expertise - so pardon any mistakes I make but my understanding of cross over frequency is the division of frequency handled by separate components. I.e. when is the cut off point for the satellite speakers vs sub-woofer. Sound quality would be dependent on the speakers themselves, for example you may prefer the smaller satellites within top of the low range and cut out the sub-woofer from this all together to focus on bottom low-range only to maintain responsiveness but if you sub-woofer is quite responsive and you would like the sound to be more aggressive than perhaps the sub-woofer is the correct response to this.

It depends on the equipment which is why the option exists.

[ahinson]

This is a high level explaination.

The frequency they're referring to, is the range at which the band filter is applied.

The filter is either high, mid or low pass band (or frequency range) filter which uses a frequency threshold.

In a low pass band filter, it allows frequencies (sound) that falls within its range to pass to the speaker (i.e. 10 - 100 Hz).

This keeps the device from receiving these frequencies, since an attempt to play back frequencies that fall outside of the speaker's operating range can damage the speaker or behave erratically or produce fluttering (distortion).

The same concept applies to high and mids.

Many home audio subs and multi-speaker boxes have a filter and/or crossovers built-in.

The crossover is essentially a router, that passes frequencies to the devices attached to a channel. Lows to subs, mids to mids and highs to tweets.

Ultimately, if you have a speaker on a channel on which you can adjust the crossover frequency at the receiver and that channel goes into a sub or multi-speaker box, chances are it has a cross over in it. Changing the frequency range on the channel is unnecessary.

If you adjust a dedicated sub channel to send lower frequencies (10 - 50 Hz), the lows will be lower from that speaker, but unless you have something else playing back frequncies you've just cut out, (for example 51 - 100 Hz) you'll miss out on some of the sound.

Read this for more detail.

http://en.wikipedia....Audio_crossover

[tim_s]

Hi,

I would recommend a song such-as `Still With Me (feat. Cristina Soto) [seven Lions Remix]` - might not be your interest but it is very dynamic and will allow you to bring in the richness of your setup.