Car Audio Central - Ultimate Car Audio Forum and Community

sorry if this is the wrong section or whatever but you are the forum professor.

About 3 months ago i started thinking about doing a home audio set up, let me say im a 17 year old making 150 a week and tight on money, i have spend a LOT of money with my car audio hobby and i
1)i cannot start another hobby that will require a lot of money
2) home audio is WAYYY more expensive than car audio.

with that being said i was looking at the adire do it youre self "kits" and i was like "HELL YEAH" i can build some enclosure and screw the speakers, then i saw some horrible scientifical unreadeble "drawings". I looked around totally confused and found out they were "crossover schematics".

Kiki who does this type of work?(reading schematics, building crossover?) a electrician?scientist?physicist?solderer?

And kiki what type of knowledge would i have to require to build these crossovers?do you have any experience with this? do you think this is hard?

ive seen diy home speakers and they werent too complex, usually if u look inside of a 3way floor speaker theres only like 2 components (forget what they are, maby resistors) between the woofer, mid, and tweeter. it would help if u posted a pic of the schematic im sure some1 would beable to help u I have taken a few classes at Tech. college in auto electrical sytems and i hear that auto schematics are the most compex to read.

as far as a crossover, u could prob pick one up from circuit city or somthin like that
but that would be if u want a nicer speaker w/ more options

passive crossover networks could be built from the schematics by any electrical engineer, or EE student for that matter.
reading the schematics is learned within the first year of college for an EE. Knowing the best crossover components to use is easy to find by talking to any audio engineer or electrical parts supply house that deals in audio component supplies. things like air core coils, and mylar fim capacitors will give the best results for audio quality.

If you want a home theater system for cheap though, get a HT in a Box solution from a company like Onkyo or Denon.
For well under a grand you can get everything. speakers, sub, receiver/amp CD/DVD player.. you just supply the television and you're ready to go.
I've seen them as cheap as $400, and really nice ones for about $700.
the DIY kits will cost you that much in materials alone for the speakers..
then you'd still need the AV receiver and DVD player, wiring, interconnects, etc.

I build crossovers. Done it numerous times. The most annoying part of building them is ordering all the parts. After that it's jut acid etching the printed circuit board with the traces you want, and soldering the coils and caps, terminals etc to the board and testing it out.
Apparently Adire already did all the math for ya on the XO for cap and choke values.

help is appreciated , so i got to be an electrical engineer to do this huh........

you just talked to one that can do it, im sure if kiki has the time he might hook you up.

not trying to sound like a know it all or anything (kiki deff knows his sh!t) but, I am going after my EE(jsut finished my generals this sem.) (and maybe this is the reason however) and found a 3 way 2th order(-12db) Linkewitz-reily with zobel to be not as bad as it could be. biggest problems I thought were dealing with phase, on/off axis response, stuff you should have software to map out for you. with all of the information out on the web about designing and calculating the values for parts needed were pretty much all done for you. you jsut have to know how many and of what value.

you can compensate for phase shift since the components used in the crossover are all fixed value shifts.. that makes it easy to know how much effect you'll see as an end result, but the more you add to the circuit to correct, the more complex it gets, and the more drop you'll get across the whole circuit. anyway, this stuff was why I said ya may be better off just getting a HTiaB solution. DIY projects are great fun, but they're rarely a cheaper alternative. Most people get into this sort of stuff then realize it takes them months or finish and a lot of money they didn't realize at first.
Take a look at the CAF forum, in the home audio area.
see all the Line Array threads, and the comments on cost for the final product.. lol

oh well ill just buy adire kit 261 towers, dual ported extremis , can play down to 25hz!!!!!!!!