- Sat Apr 03, 2010 4:22 pm
#185360
Sorry for the jargon.
A 3 way is a mid bass, a medium sized tweeter, and a small tweeter built into one speaker. Mid bass are not 3 ways they're actually 1 ways LOL. Less is better. You sacrifice power and sound quality when you ask one speaker to do all three jobs. 3 ways are like having the surgeon also be the receptionist and the janitor. It sounds like a good thing... this surgeon is a 3 way surgeon. But he will do all three jobs poorly compared to 3 people doing their specialized job.
Sorry I always go overboard with the ridiculous analogies.
A mid bass is just a medium sized speaker usually 5 1/4 or 6 1/2 inch that is only meant to play mid range. Compare this to a tweeter which is very small and only plays highs, or a 10 or 12 inch sub that only plays lows. Small speakers are easy to vibrate quickly, producing highs. Subs are big and push lots of air, but move slowly.
Components are a tweeter and mid bass set instead of having the tweeter mounted on top of the mid bass like a typical speaker. Typical speakers have a small non-polarized capacitor mounted directly to them to filter the low and mid frequencies from the tweeter. Because of the space constraints, you sacrifice a lot when compared to having a separate passive crossover.
Crossovers are a set of electronic components that work together to filter frequencies so you can send high to tweeters, mids to mids, and lows to subs. This is the hospital manager making the work schedule for the surgeon, receptionist, and janitor LOL. Components come with passive crossovers that you connect your speaker wires to. It's a little box that is mounted separately from the speaker so it can dissipate the heat.
Passive just means that they aren't powered. They eat up some power from the signal. Amplifiers have active crossovers. These have their own power and so they don't eat up any from your speakers. In fact, the amp gives your speakers more power.
More power isn't just for playing your system loud. It's not just for hip-hop. When your system has more power, it sounds much better at all volume levels. You hear a lot more detail in the music and you feel like you're in the studio (also has a lot to do with the installation quality and location of the speakers). You can turn it up louder w/out blowing your speakers.
For metal (I like punk, hardcore, emo myself. Some metal like Pantera and Ride the Lightning), you don't want a huge speaker that moves slower. You want it be able to move quickly to reproduce the double bass pedal. So a 10 is better than a 12. A 12 is okay but any bigger and it sounds sloppy. The mid bass setup I described in my earlier post would work better for metal than for hip-hop with the extremely exaggerated and slow bass hits.
Sorry for the damn essay. This is what happens when you can type almost as fast as you can talk.