Aligning Subs!At a Single Crossover Frequency??🤔

Aligning Subs to Mains!This is the most talked about and most asked for question. Through my recent Smaart Training Sessions, while answering these questions and after having conversation with people, I realised that there are few common perspectives about this among a majority of the attendee’s! Here, I’m trying to address one such thing.

It’s a very common perspective that we are aligning our Subs to Mains at only a particular Crossover Frequency.

Is this a Fact or a Myth? Is this right or wrong? I’ll let you guys decide on that once you read this post.

For now, let us consider the concept of aligning at a Single Crossover Frequency.

By common knowledge, we all know that the crossover frequency is the point at which the workload of producing the frequency spectrum is passed from one component to the next. In our case this is from our Subs to the Mains.

And this crossover frequency is basically the frequency where both the components are of equal magnitude.

Here’s an illustration of the Magnitude of Subs and Tops.

In the above graph this point is 120 Hz and then let’s consider that one has taken all the efforts to have a perfect alignment at this particular frequency.

After everything is set and done, for n number of reasons we might need to increase or very rarely decrease the level on the subs. While there are quite a few ways to achieve our goal, the most common approach is to either increase the Amp’s Level or the Sub’s Fader.

By doing so , we are increasing the magnitude of the entire bandwidth produced by the subs. Observe what happens to our crossover frequency, the moment we do this.

You did see that right?

Yes! Our crossover point has now moved!It isn’t the same as before. And now all that time we spent aligning at that particular Crossover frequency has gone to waste!

I’m sure that you all would agree with me that this isn’t desirable. Now the question arises of how does one deal with this?

I’ll follow the answers in my upcoming blog!

For now, without getting into the deeper aspect of this, a simple thing that I want you all to take away is that :

Everytime we makes changes in relative levels, we are also affecting the crossover frequency, and thus, in turn all our other decisions that were based on the it.

P.S : This is an over simplified presentation for basic understanding, setting the stage for detailed understanding.