Hi I'm pretty new to car audio and one thing always confused me. If my HU has a crossover, and my amp has a crossover..and my components have a crossover.. how exactly do I set it all up? Im trying to set up my component set and it sounds good but I want to make sure it sounds as good as possible. Do I set my amp crossover as FULL and let my HU do the crossover work? ..lol sorry for all the questions this just always confused me. Hope you guys can help out.

 

Well the simplest way would to be to not use the HU Crossover. For the amp crossover you will still probably want to set a 100hz hpf so as not to include the stuff your sub will play and probably wreck your mid-drivers. Then just hook up your component crossover (which are referred to as passive crossovers) and away you go. This should be a good start for your setup, and you can always play with the amp and HU crossovers to see if it sounds better to you or not.

 

Thanks for the reply. I have an Alpine 9815, how do I disable the crossover on it?

 

Use the crossovers on the 9815 and set the amp to FULL.

For the components, try setting the Highpass at either 80 or 100Hz, 24dB/octave.

 

if your speakers can handle as low as 50Hz minimum and your amp is a good one, you can go that low to get some more midbass going. Set it up on your HU. It's easier that way and you will hear the difference immediately instead of running back and forth to the trunk. Watch your gains as well and decrease if you hear any kind of distortion.