If tweeters are better suited to highs, small speakers to mids and large woofers to bass, why don’t we have an array of ten say ten or twenty gradually increasing speakers from tiny tweets to ENORMOUS woofers, each with a unique crossover at a specific frequency they perform best at?
We really seem to have settled on three sizes. Tweets, miss, and subs. Why is that the case?
Surely more speakers handling less varied frequencies means a better response, right?
That’s exactly what my speakers aren’t!
Xovers are not invisible. Less is more.
What are the downsides to using a crossover? My understanding was is simply clipped the signal off above or below the relevant frequencies.
The signal goes through a lot of components.
Contrary to popular belief, capacitors impact the sound. And twenty capacitors impacts the sound more than two.
Umm, no. Every crossover point is actually a range of frequencies over which both drivers are operating. They must operate in phase and in a time alligned manner. The crossover components themselves introduce phase changes that are frequency dependent, so this is anything but simple.
And even if you get all that perfect, the drivers interact with each other as their wavefronts propogate. Those wavefronts have different dispersion patterns, and so their reflected energy is not balanced in the same way as their direct energy.They interact inside the cabinet as well.
The perfect speaker would be a single driver. This is part of the allure of panel speakers, although the PERFECT speaker would be a single, point-source, infinitely small driver.