i have an amp that has a built in crossover and theres no way to turn it off. i like external cross overs better. can i use one with this amp? will it hurt either? thanks

 

Just set your built-in X-over to "neutral" gain, and turn the LPF all the way up (HPF all the way down if it has that option), plug in your separate X-over, and adjust to your liking.

 

You can set both of them to the same frequency and compound the slope.

 

ok, so turn the lpf up as far as it will go and the hpf off. turn the level down as far as it will go???(what do you mean by gain..level?) what do you mean by neutral gain? i am not really really into car audio so i dont think i could do what micah said correctlly, but i kind of understand what justmax is getting at. so this wont hurt the amp then??? thanks for the help.

 

Just make sure that the crossover on the amp allows the amount of frequency by, i.e. try not to cut anything. You can do what Micah suggests and try to match the crossover on the amp with the crossover on the seperate crossover, I assume that it will do something that I am not familiar with. Micah can you please explain what matching the crossover's does?

 

Yeah, I'm not clear on compounding the slope either.

rambo, basically, turn the hpf & lpf off if possible, or lpf up and hpf down so as to disable them. "neutral" gain would be in the middle... you don't want to decrease or increase the input volume until you plug in the crossover. The crossover *should* work independently of the gain on your amp, I'm just saying to start in the middle, get everything adjusted on your crossover then adjust the gain.

hope that helped

Justin

 

and no, it won't hurt the amp at all, it's just receiving more or less of particular frequencies on the audio cables. It's the same as adjusting your bass & treble on the deck, just more precise.

Justin

 

so basically turn on the hpf filter on the amp and use your external crossover to feed it a smaller range of frequency (all low) instead of the whole frequency range to sort out and adjust my level (gain) accordingly. is this correct? i think this is what everyones getting at. also wouldnt this make the filtering system more effective? seems like it would. but also some good signal or freq. will probably be lost having to go through this much resistance. anyones thoughts?

 

Those xovers are probably 12db/octave each. If you set them to the same frequency, you will have 24db/octave roll-off, which yields about twice as much control over the speakers. External xovers generally aren't better than built-in xovers on high-end amps; it's the same electronics.

 

what I'm getting at is one of 2 things...

1. turn the filters OFF if possible (some amps don't have the option to turn off filters)

or

2. turn LPF to it's HIGHEST freq, letting as much freq as possible go thru, and vice versa, turn HPF to it's LOWEST freq (same effect).

This will let all crossing over be handled by the cross over, not the amp. After all, that's what the crossover was made to do. If Micah is right, and the crossover and amp have the same electronics, then it won't matter too much. What's most important is that you get the cables hooked up properly and adjust it the way YOU think it sounds best, not worrying about hurting the amp (you won't).

Justin

 

That won't work, because it will bandpass the signal at the amp, so he won't have the lower and upper octaves. The xovers in most amps goes up to about 200-400Hz for lowpass and down to about 50-80Hz for highpass, so he'd end up hearing only 50-400Hz (bad). He should just use the xover in the amp. Keep it simple.

 

That would be true if the LPF and HPF were acting on the same channel. I'm speaking under the assumption that the HPF will be for 1 channel (front), and the LPF would be for a separate channel (like rear).

Note: I agree with Micah on the just using the built-in crossover, and my car stereo is proof...
I have a 4-channel amp with HPF set to 100Hz & up to run my front & rear 6.5's, and a separate 2-channel amp bridged mono with the LPF set to 125Hz & down for my sub.

Justin

 

OK. Maybe I wasn't paying attention to how he was wiring things. Nevermind.

 

if anyones interested you guys were right. i tried to hook to xovers up to my 4 channel amp and it did nothing. i screamed, cussed and jumped up and down and now am going tp rip out the two xovers and just use the built in one. much easier, less wires, and i dont care if it doesnt sound as good. i was using the channels for subs. 2 10s and a 12....thanks for everyones help. you live and you learn.

 

Actually Rambo never did say how anything was wired so we may not yet know the correct answer.