electrical info herein often wrong

First let me say this is a very, very helpful site in almost every respect and is why I almost cannot live without Internet access anymore. 

My comments are from an EE with many years of experience in almost all areas of electrical engineering, and I've worked in areas from far-infrared FLIR systems for the HARM missile and on the synthetic aperture radar system on the (F22?  This was back in 1992 so the fact that the jet is still not in full production is rather amazing to me) to antenna design, home audio design including crossovers and power amps, home-wiring problems (the very low chip voltages and high heat of the new SMT boards is killing everything due to inadequate circuit layouts and shared neutrals).

Anyway, not a condemnation, but when I saw you mention 3rd order crossovers I knew something was wrong.  There is a huge compendium of IEEE papers from the '20s to near present day and 3rd order crossovers have pretty much been laid to rest and nails put in the coffin.

Also, wattage does not determine minimum wire size, nor does current actually;  one has to look as well at the heat factors of the insulation as well as what type of load is being draw (e.g. cranking your car is not the same as running a 10000 watt kill-your-ears stereo system.  Also, a zoebel is used mainly for two reasons:  one is to change the (seen) imput impedance and dampen an otherwise unstable system (I run into this when very good and highly inductive or capacative wiring is used with amps that have ratings like 100 watts [into a dummy 8 ohm non-reactive load) while the rating at 6 ohm loads, usually not mentioned, is like 120 watts).  In other words, they are probably more like 20 watt nominal into a reactive load and are designked to just play loud with a very low slew rate.

The other use, a home-cookbook fix, is to allay the inherent Z rise of a midrange speaker or (sometimes) a tweeter or to try to knock down from infinity the resonant point when it's within the working parameters of the system.

Be careful what  you say if you have to over-simplify it:  EMF is *NOT* in any instance a simple application of Ohms law.  It's a phenomenom, like heat or gravity, and is part of the energy-matter spectrum.

As Thomas Hobbes once said:  When you marry an ideal, reality moves in as the harshest of relatives.  I'm constantly surprised myself by how, say, a simple corner-loaded waveguide resonator can make a usb wifi "n" dongle outperform a 10 element yagi.

sparkinark / ShawnHarveyt

KarTuneMan wrote: Sometimes when I read things..... I don't feel so smart..... THIS is one of those times!

if you can feel that way mr KTM, imagine how i must have felt,lol,

Considering cross over design of any magnitude is extremly limited on this site I would say your title is wrong.

Most of the electrical info on this site IS ACCURATE.  There may be some misleading information here and there, but for the most part, the12volt is an extremely reliable source for 12vdc electrical info.