I have a set of 2-way JBL car audio speakers where the tweeter is physically separate from the bass/mid driver.

The bass/mid driver is mounted at the bottom of the front doors and the tweeters are mounted at the bottom of the A-pillars. Since the tweeters are much closer to the driver's ears than the bass/mid driver, the sound levels produced by the tweeters are too loud in comparison the sound levels produced by the bass/mid drivers. There are no adjustments on the external crossover which allows me to drop each tweeter's level by a few decibels. Could I use an inline capacitor between the crossover output and tweeter inputs to reduce the tweeter's sound level without affecting the sound level of the bass/mid ? I thought about using an equalizer but they're expensive and would necessitate mounting and re-wiring. Any help would be appreciated.

Sorry if this question does not belong in this forum. Mods, please move this thread if necessary.

Thanks.

 

Try this.
http://www.lalena.com/audio/calculator/lpad/

It should keep the crossover seeing the right impedance.

 

Thanks for the website link.

I agree that active would be better but I don't have a lot of room.

Presently, I'm using a 4-channel amp to power the front and rear speakers. The rear speakers are co-axials while the front are the component speakers.

Should I purchase a particular type or brand of resistor or will something from an electronics store do the job ?

 

I bought my L-pads from parts express BUT they are getting scarce

 

Try building your own L-pad. Easy as could be.
Output from your crossover's high-pass + (tweeter terminals) into a SERIES 1.17 ohm (call it 1 ohm, standard value), then a 9.7 ohm (again, 10 ohms is a standard value) parallel between the positive (output side of the resistor you just added) and negative. Tweeter is hooked up parallel across the 10 ohm resistor

This combination will yield -3db attenuation.

For -6db attenuation, use 2 ohms for the series resistor, 4 ohms for the parallel resistor.
The resistors should be the square, white ones, rated for at least 10 watts. There are higher quality power resistors available, but the white ones are easy to find. Buy a bunch of them, get your digital ohm meter out and match the values as close as you please. Tolerance on these are typically +/- 10%, but at least they're not expensive.
I prefer to mount the resistors to a bit of perf board (nice, computer grade stuff is plated through the hole) then solder the lead in and lead out wires directly to the board. Saves wear and tear on the tweeter terminals.
We don't solder tweeter wires with a 100 watt iron, right?

[ October 18, 2005, 10:47 AM: Message edited by: Kevin Catalano ]

 

Thanks for the tip Kevin.

I have an iron which is very low wattage which I use to replace capacitors on computer motherboards.

I'm going to get the resistors this weekend and build 4 L-pads (3db, 4db, 5db, and 6db) to see which one sounds the best.