crossover or not

[slmjm7]

i have jus recently started building my own speakers and i built my first set with some old aiwa speakers from a old stereo of mine. each tower consist of 2 6in midbass drivers and 2 3in highs. the old stereo put out 100watts but i took the speakers from 2 different stereos since me and my sis had the same stereo lying round. my reciever is a pioneer 7.1 surround its supposed to put out 100 watts per channel. should b bout right. but there not very loud like they should b. or like they were with the old sereo. but i also dnt have crossovers in them. would a crossover make them louder.

[Feanor]

i have jus recently started building my own speakers ... but i also dnt have crossovers in them. would a crossover make them louder.

Welcome to these forums, slmjm7.

A crossover are usually a good idea, but something it won't do is make the speaker louder.

The things a crossover does do is the following:

Restricts each driver to the limited range of frequencies for which it is best suited.
Balances the output of each of the drivers so that they produce the same volume of sound (within their respective frequency ranges).
By virtue of the limitation to a certain frequency range, protects each driver; e.g. a tweeter would be damaged if it attempted to play loud bass.
By virtue of the limitation to certain frequences, eliminates the distortion the driver would produces if it attempts to produce sound outside its range.
Depending on the design, compensate for various anomalies of a driver, e.g. resonances or excess output at certain frequencies.For an comprehensive introduction to loudspeaker design, see Vance Dickason's Loudspeaker Design Cookbook (http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=500-035).

[StevenSurprenant]

i have jus recently started building my own speakers and i built my first set with some old aiwa speakers from a old stereo of mine. each tower consist of 2 6in midbass drivers and 2 3in highs. the old stereo put out 100watts but i took the speakers from 2 different stereos since me and my sis had the same stereo lying round. my reciever is a pioneer 7.1 surround its supposed to put out 100 watts per channel. should b bout right. but there not very loud like they should b. or like they were with the old sereo. but i also dnt have crossovers in them. would a crossover make them louder.

I don't know how you're not blowing out your tweeters without a crossover?

The other thing is that if the boxes are the wrong size for the woofers you could be loosing a lot of bass which means it won't play bass very loud without sounding thin. Also, you probably need to port them which will also account for a loss of bass and hence lower output.

I really can't say since you didn't give many details.

Another thing is that without crossovers the woofer and tweeter frequencies overlap too much and it probably sounds real bad.

Time to read the book...

There's plenty of free software for box design.

[slmjm7]

well i jus did it to see how well i could build a cabinet for them. where would i get a software for building cabinets. and im wanting to get into building my surround sound with preamps and power amps. with all separates. but i cant find a book or anything to guide me along.

[audio amateur]

Building your own stuff is nice but given your knowledge on the subject I'd highly recommend not going that route.

[slmjm7]

everyone has to start somewhere to get that knowledge though. so inorder to learn u have to try