Hivi Center Channel

[mike2273]

Hi guys,

I am going to build a center channel to replace a old Yamaha center and I want to use the following.

Hivi b4n 4″ with a Dayton Audio AMT Mini-8 crossed over at 3,500hz but I am unsure about that crossover point as I have seen people make crossover that are a little higher. The Box is roughly .3 cf. and sealed I would consider ported but as for the question are the speakers a good pair at that cross point.

Thanks for any feedback Mike.

[123toid]

Posted by: Mike2273

Hi guys,

I am going to build a center channel to replace a old Yamaha center and I want to use the following.

Hivi b4n 4″ with a Dayton Audio AMT Mini-8 crossed over at 3,500hz but I am unsure about that crossover point as I have seen people make crossover that are a little higher. The Box is roughly .3 cf. and sealed I would consider ported but as for the question are the speakers a good pair at that cross point.

Thanks for any feedback Mike.

This is a great question.  I hope more people read this.  Whenever designing a crossover there are a few things to keep in mind.  For the crossover point, you should take into account beaming and the resonant frequency (FS).

So let’s first take a look at beaming.  Every driver will beam (or start to narrow the off axis frequency).  What this means is that at a certain point, the off-axis frequencies start to diverge or split apart.  And you can eventually get to a point where it sounds great on axis, but only on axis.  The size of the driver is best way to determine the beaming point.   There are calculations you can do for this, but it might be easier to start by looking at the manufacturers off-axis responses. Take a look at the RS100-4 for clarity.

You can see that the off axis really starts to diverge by 4Khz.  So with this in mind, a 3500 crossover should work well.

Now we need to talk about FS of the tweeter.  Typically you would double FS to get your lowest second order crossover point.  Or another way to look at it, is to try to get FS about 20db down.  Unfortunately, this won’t work with this AMT.  So looking over the frequency response.  It looks like the lowest I would cross it over is closer to 5Khz.  So in this particular case, these drivers probably would not bee a good choice, unless you wanted to make it a 3 way. 

[mike2273]

Thank you for the input and so the hunt begins for a feasible tweeter.

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