The development of this page shall take place over an extended period of time.  Throughout which, the newly covered topics should be thouroughly understood by all.  The coherent comprehension of each topic will require either a) an exisiting functional working knowledge of the topic; or b) a quick trip to the library; which these days is cyberspace itself.

An apropriate concept to start with is to be the crossover.  After a good working understanding of phase response, magnitude overlap, and the general necessity for crossovers, then other applicable sciences shall be explored.  The areas of study will be resonance, wave propagation,  time alignment, limiter techniques, transducer elements, wave guides & horns, amoung others.


The Crossover

Why start with the crossover anyway?  Well, it is the crossover, otherwise knows as a "dividing network", that allows for such powerful loudspeaker systems.  It is the crossover that protects and fully utilizes their components.  Also, the crossover inherently introduces the second largest amount of distortion into the sound reinforcement process.

Distortion:   1. The act of distorting.  2. The condition of being distorted; deformity.  3. That which is distorted, as a misleading statement.  4. A change in the waveform of a signal caused by non-uniform transmission at different frequencies.     -Funk & Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary, volume 1         (publishers since 1876) Other common synonyms of 'distortion' or 'distort' include, but are not limited to: contortion; deformity; malformation; mutilation; twisting; losing shape; warp; crush; twist; pervert; misinterpret; deviate from standard. An audio engineer's working definition should be: "Any detrimental alteration of the original signal or waveform."

The point has been made that distortion is not simply the sound of a clipping amplifier or an over driven speaker.  Distortion elements are presented by every single piece of gear used in sound reinforcement; digital or analog.  Phase distortion is most definitely one of the largest problems in reproducing sound with fidelity.  Phase distortion is added to the signal by almost everything in the signal chain. Loudspeakers and crossovers, however, tend to apply the most amount of phase distortion. Because crossovers exhibit so much distortion and are a key element to our sound systems they are an important starting place.  They are both necessary and detrimental at the same time.

The graphs below depict the distrotion crossovers cause known as: phase shift; phase distortion; phase angle; phase offset; time offset; or cossover error.  It should be noted that crossovers are not the only things in the signal path of a sound system that cause such distortion.  Crossovers, however, do change the phase response of the signal a great deal as shown in the graphs below.