I was in a audio video store a few years ago, and spoke with a person who asked a deceptively simple question… as you go up the frequency range from a subwoofer to woofer, or from a woofer to tweeter, does one transducer simply stop and the next one take over on a specific note? He was thinking of how individual piano keys produce each note – this key does C, the next C#, etc. In reality, the transitions from transducer to transducer are more gradual, extending over a broad range. The crossover performs this transition; as speaker reproduces higher and higher frequencies, for instance, progressively more and more of the sound is directed away from the woofer and to the tweeter. The center of the transition range, where the next transducer mostly takes over, is called the crossover frequency. And, the crossover is where we sculpt the overall tonal quality of the speaker. The crossover is closest thing to “secret sauce” that we have in the audio business – this is where we make the speaker sound like a Boston.
- Stephen Shenefield
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