Crossover values for Drivers with different Impedance??


All,

I'm just starting my journey into using horn speakers. I've got a pair of Altec 288-16K CD's and Altec 416-8B woofers that I'm building a speaker pair from.

Thanks to Wayne, I've been learning a lot about crossovers lately (Crossover 101 thread) and investigating his Pi passive crossovers. I haven't got all the math figured out just yet and wondered if anyone can help me understand how to tweak component values if one driver is at a higher impedance than another (e.g. my 16 ohm CD and 8 ohm woofer).

Do I just parallel a 16 ohm resistor across the compression driver input for an 8 ohm load to match the woofer? Coversely, I guess I could run an 8 ohm resistor in series with the input of the woofer to bring it up to the same level impedance as the CD (depending on what impedance I need for the crossover circuit to work). Would either of these work? Is there a better way to do this? Am I asking for trouble in using drivers with dissimilar impedance?

Finally, what impedance value do the Pi crossovers assume for their respective drivers?

Thanks for any help,

Erik


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