I favor a crossover that transitions at 800Hz. That is a good balance between making the woofer work too hard and making the midrange work too hard.
No, it's physics. It takes a certain amount of power to reproduce 50-500Hz, it takes more power to reproduce 50-800Hz and the woofer converts that increased power to heat. Likewise, if your midrange is reproducing 500-8000Hz and if your change that to 800-8000Hz, your midrange will sound better and last longer due to less cone/diaphragm excursion and less heat.
Exactly! And that's why active electronic crossovers like the Minidsp and others are so popular. One can tailor the spectrum and slopes given to each driver or group of drivers.
My opinion of crossing at 800Hz assumed a two-way 8-Ohm conventional speaker system powered by one amplifier using a passive 6 or 12db/octave network. Of course, when you add bi-amping, tri-amping, active crossover networks, 4-Ohm drivers, and three-way or four-way speaker systems; crossover frequencies become more aligned to the individual components. I was discussing pure power, or energy, as it relates to the frequency spectrum. Just make sure your components can handle the 'power' at the crossover frequencies you are using and not an average of the bandwidth, say 200-2000Hz. What sounds good can be influenced by our ears inability to hear lower frequencies, and the heat in the voice coils is not related to what we can or cannot hear.
