QuestionI have a 2000 ford ranger ext cab. right now im running a 10' alpine sub off of a kenwood 2 channel amp(bridged) also i have upgraded all four speakers to full range 6x8's and added a set of tweeters. here is my question, the tweeters get too many low frequencies and the sub is getting too many highs. i am also planning on powering all of these speakers with a new 4 channel amp for the front and rear speakers and a 2 channel for the tweeters, i need to know how to run a crossover for all the amps. and also do you have a better idea than this??
Answerwell the kenwood amp you already have runing the 10 should have a crossover in it. maybe you dont have it turned on or set right? It should be set to lowpass, probably around 100hz or so depending on your taste and the slope of crossover it has (12, 18, or 24 db per octave)
yeah, tweeters will need to be crossed over to work properly, actually you can damage them very easily by not having a crossover on them. you can make your own passive crossover very easily by puting a small capacitor in series with the tweeters. typically a 10 microfarad cap will do very nicely as a starting point. you have to get special, non polarized capacitors and I can help you if you want to try this, just let me know. its definatly the simplest option but also the most limited. you either get it right, or close, or wrong and it can be a little hit or miss.
If you really want to use separate amps for the mids and tweets this is definatly a far superior way to go, since you have ultimate control over the volume and crossovers bewteen sub, mid, and tweet. all those setting though do come at a price which is complexity (and cost). you'll find that you can build a system that everything has a setting for, so logically, you'll be able to perfect it, but end up with so many settings that it seems like you'll never get it right. if you have 3 amps (one for sub, one for mids and one for tweeters) you'll have 3 - 4 different gain knobs and 3-4 different crossover points. this can get very complicated but never the less does give you ultimate control to shape you sound to the best of the speakers abilities.
I have a few 4 way active setups where there is 4 amps. one for sub, one for woofer, one for mid, and one for tweeter. its EXTREAMLY teadous to setup, my main one took months for me to get perfected and now that its finaly done, sounds better than anything I've ever heard, but was a long tough road getting there.
also the crossovers that are built into the amps usually dont go hight enough for tweeter to mid crossovers so you'll have to get an external crossover for this as well.
A good, inexpensive setup would be this amp:
http://www.cardomain.com/item/POWOV4800
(I'm using 2 of these in a jetta, one for 4 mids and one for 4 tweets and it sounds amazing!)
for your tweets, since you only have 2, I'd recomend this amp for you:
http://www.cardomain.com/item/POWOV2400
then you'll need a crossover that can be crossed at about 4 khz. my long time favorate for crossovers is Audio control. the 2xs or 24xs would be perfect for this if just cossing the tweets. if you want to crossover all 4 speakers so that the tweets you added are the only tweets working, then you'll need the 4xs. all these can be found on ebay.
I guess my next question for you would be wether you want the 6x8s to make trebbel or not. in other words, do you want the tweeters you added, to be the only tweeters making sound in your system, or did you add them to just bring the trebbel up off the floor where your mids are, so you want all the tweeters working together, there are pros and cons to both and I'll explain all this if you want.
let me know, looking forward to hearing back from you. I think we can do alot here!
