Passive Crossover Designer

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The Passive Crossover Designer is a crossover simulation and speaker design tool built into an Excel spreadsheet. What began as only a passive crossover design tool has now been expanded to include a box model, an impedance modeler, and a full active crossover design section for each driver than can be used along with the passive crossover features if desired. This spreadsheet will produce the frequency, phase and impedance response of 2 way, 2.5 Way standard and cascaded versions, and 3 way parallel systems, as well as 2 way series, 2.5 combined series/parallel designs, and can even be used to design 3 way series networks. It is designed to work with actual driver frequency and impedance data in the form of .frd and .zma/zda files which can be imported into the program. It makes use of full x,y,z geometric location of the individual drive units and gives you a movable listening axis to view off-axis lobing. It has individual sections for woofer, tweeter, and midrange circuits, each with SPL and Impedance charts, as well as System charts that show summed SPL response, approximated power response, phase response, system impedance, and crossover transfer functions. New to this version is a section for system input impedance equalization also.

Other features include - options for two woofers, or two midranges, and either wired in series or parallel, automatic calculation of L-Pads, Zobels and series RLC compensation circuits at the click of a button, user selectable built-in or imported Target responses that are overlaid with the driver’s response in each section. And all crossover values can be continuously changed via “spinners” and the response will change in real-time on the charts, allowing for quick curve-fitting of the response or impedance curves. (continued at bottom)

Current Version 5.1 Date: July 2006
Copyright - Jeff Bagby 2004 - 2006

To Download Passive Crossover Designer

(A Self Extracting Archive for Windows containing
an Excel Spreadsheet)

2893 k - Download Size 547 K

To Download Manual and Example Files

(A Self Extracting Archive for Windows containing Sample files,
and an Excel based Tutorial and Illustrated Operations Manual)

Items File Size 3951 k - Download Size 411 K

As mentioned above, version 5 includes an accurate box design tool with the ability to model the response of both vented and sealed systems. This add-in includes a unique and proprietary impedance modeler that will accurately model the impedance of the woofer in the box used and allow you to use this impedance curve in the crossover design section if desired. In addition, a new active crossover section is included that contains high and low pass slopes up to eighth order, five band parametric equalizer (for each section), Linkwitz Transform, and level and delay adjustments. This section can be used with the box model to design subwoofers using active EQ and filters.

The program includes the ability to save out all individual driver, crossover (active or passive), and system SPL and Impedance responses to frd and zma files that can be used in other software. It has the ability to print or save charts, and a special system summary print-out page for your project. Included are Pop-up parts layout schematics for each crossover section. And finally, it also contains the ability to save all session data to very small files that can be imported again later thereby resetting all settings in the file to match the previous session or project. This gives you the ability to create a library of crossover designs while taking up very little space on your drive.