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Crossover Mystery Monsoon Tweets
Well I decided to go ahead and do some speaker upgrading prior to getting an Amp just to see what effect it would have. Here's what I found:
1) Friday night I upgraded the door woofers with the woofers from a set of MB Quart Discus series 6.5 Comps...it got dark so rather than starting on the tweeters, I gave it a listen. There was at least a 100% improvement in the quality of sound, and I noticed no strain or added distortion by the amplifier despite these being 4 ohm woofers (the factory ones do have 2 Ohm printed on them)...I don't like ear-bleeding volume anyway. I would highly recommend this upgrade to anyone who just wants to improve the muddy sounding front speakers on a Monsoon system. and richen the mid-bass quality.
2) Saturday morning comes, and I tear into the tweeters, low and behold I discover a high-pass passive crossover on the monsoon tweeters (4.7 uF 50V cap wired inline, and mounted on the tweeter bracket...this only proves that prior posts on crossovers being located in the Amp are at least incomplete, and possibly wrong. So I went ahead and installed the MB Quart Tweeters with no crossover. The sound now became inbalanced (due to the monsoon amp and its strange way of synching the Sub with the rear speakers, and the various balances between mid/high and bass, nothing was quite right...but still sounded better than the factory tweet/woofer combo, and there was sill plenty of power.
Initial Conclusion:
There is no Ohm rating printed on the monsoon tweeters, so if they are 2 ohms as previously posted, then this Cap passes only frequencies above 16.9 kHz...I highly doubt that as I can hear them and I don't have hearing above that frequency. If the tweeters are of higher impedance, then the capacitor would cause a crossover at a lower frequency with a 90 degree phase shift. My guess is that one of two things is happening...either the tweets are more like 4 ohm and the cap is crossing over at somewhere around 8.5 kHz, or there is a 3rd order crossover in the monsoon amp and the tweeter cap is effectively only added to cause phase shift back to zero rather than attenuate any audible frequencies (upper threshold of human hearing is generally considered to be 16.1 kHz iirc).
Anybody know for sure what is going on here?
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