I also hear no breakpoints. It's a slow transition to where I can say "yes, that's bass, not midrange." And I usually hear a difference going up or down. I think we are influenced by what we heard before.
Art, I don't think that can be done through analog means; there always is phase shift connected to filtering, and this can be measured. However, the human ear does not seem to pick up on these phase shifts, so it remains pretty much inaudible as far as I am concerned.
As to the discussion where bass ends and mids begin, it is like with colours. There is blue and there is green where everybody agrees on, but then there is this bluish green, or greenish blue, where one sees it like this, and another as that.
For me, bass is what the big driver does, mid the middle sized one, and the small one does the highs. The crossover points are pretty much determined by technical considerations, and there is a transition region where drivers do both bass and mid, or mid and high. So even there it is not black and white, and the frequency points are based on the transducer technology applied.
For me, bass is what the big driver does, mid the middle sized one, and the small one does the highs. The crossover points are pretty much determined by technical considerations, and there is a transition region where drivers do both bass and mid, or mid and high. So even there it is not black and white, and the frequency points are based on the transducer technology applied.
Even if you do it (analog 1st order has flat phase response, or FIR), it will only work at a single point in space (or a small region, if a small error is acceptable) unless you use coincident drivers which introduce issues of their own.
I agree that audibility is a totally different discussion, however keep in mind that, unless you listen anechoically, you will almost certainly hear the crossover in terms of polar response rather than per se and therefore you might be able to detect crossover this way.
Well, I have always understood it to be that a first order xover goes through 180 degrees of phase shift, with 90 degrees at the crossover point. It is minimum phase, but not linear phase. It can be simulated with an IIR-filter. For linear phase, you need an FIR filter, which I think requires DSP.
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Many here are interested in how and where they perceive the transition. But me, I'm interested in telling that whatever pattern you will get it has nothing to do with ideal crossover frequency.
There is one characteristics/phenomena (related to bass) that is relevant with choosing a crossover point. Low frequency is said to be "non-localized", "non-directional". The frequency at which we start to perceive the non-directionality of sound is very important. This is the 300Hz up to 400Hz range. But how to implement that in a crossover? It doesn't mean that we have to cross at that frequency. But we do want to make sure that two drivers are in phase where directionality can be well perceived. If it is a 2-way, choosing low crossover point (say 1kHz) will easily give this.
So before assuming the correlation between ideal crossover point with human perception regarding when the bass is a bass, I think it is not a bad idea to discuss in parallel whether the assumption is correct or not.
Not quite accurate. The fundamental of middle C is indeed 262. The fundamental only serves to determine the pitch and harmonic structure. It's the harmonic structure that your ears are telling you that the C note sounds too high to be bass. I just had this discussion about hearing pitch vs. frequency in another thread and was laughed at. Here is a perfect example of the point. Even the lower octaves of a piano do not sound like "bass". This is because there are so many higher frequency overtones making the timbre of the instrument that you perceive a C to be at the very least a midrange band note.
I do not perceive any shift in "character" when using a sine, because there isn't one 😉 (and yes I really did it before replying). Maybe we think about tones we are hearing differently, or maybe you are just listening to flaws in your speakers, but if you want to assign these words to something more meaningful than the casual (or any given conventional) use, I think you are looking in the wrong place.
What actually changes about the sound as frequency increases (flaws / design choices in real-world speaker systems aside)? Direction perception begins, strong room modes end, amplitude/decay/etc. of reflected sound changes, music (and speech) content becomes almost entirely harmonics after leaving the range of fundamental tones, and so on. I do not, subjectively, casually, associate any of these things with the words "bass, midrange, and treble".
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