Speaker wiring help?

Question

i built my own PA cabinets for Dj use they have a 700watt 15" sub woofer a 175 watt compresion driver 5, 150watt bullet horns and 2, 75 watt micro horns how do i wire these to one input? any help would be great thanks!

Answer 1

You need a "crossover" board for each cabinet. This device separates the music into the bits each speaker is designed to put out. You can very easily kill your midranges and tweeters without one, and may even blow your amps up.

You can build or buy a crossover, but the best place to start might be wherever you bought the speakers from- they may even have one designed for what you already have in your cabinets. If not, you may have a real headache on your hands. Frequently, a custom speaker set is built around the crossover, because custom building a crossover takes a little math and knowledge of three basic electronic circuits: Low-pass, Band-pass, and High-pass filters. The Low-pass keeps higher frequencies off the woofer. The Band-pass limits the frequencies going into the midrange at both the low and high sides to what it is made to play. The High-pass keeps all the low and midrange frequencies off the tweeter, which is very fragile and easily fried by too much power.  There are companies out there with active adjustable crossovers, but that can be a very expensive approach. and usually means three stereo amps for two speakers like yours.

I recommend passive crossovers, but you need to know the specs on your speakers ("frequency response") before you buy.

Here's a couple links that may be useful:

http://www.usspeaker.com/crossovernetwor...

http://home.new.rr.com/trumpetb/audio/xo...

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/pshowdetl...

It's a start. Best of luck with this- you could get some excellent results.