I recently received an inquiry with a seemingly simple answer: How much power will a Pioneer TS-C720PRS component system safely handle when electronically crossed over between 50Hz and 60Hz?
I thought about this for a second, and then scurried off to my office to find the manual from our test set. I wrote the inquirer back with the RMS and maximum power handling numbers listed in the manual’s specifications section, 50 watts and 200 watts, respectively. But then I started to think about the question and how someone could conclude that a highpass crossover applied to the component system (versus letting it play full-range) would allow for increased power handling by eliminating the troublesome low frequencies. While that sounds good in theory, it’s not often the case.
Here's the deal. In a typical 2-way component set you have a pair of both woofers and tweeters. Dividing the signal between the two sets of speakers is a passive crossover network which serves two primary purposes: 1) It splices the signal between the two sets of speakers so they each play within a designate bandwidth, thereby performing together over a greater spectrum in a more efficient manner; 2) It increases the power handling of the drivers by excluding frequencies that could be damaging to the speaker(s).
It was this second attribute had me thinking how someone might assume that the power handling of a component system could change if a highpass crossover was implemented on the entire system. Actually, this would probably hold some truth to it if you take the tweeters out of the equation, but that is not the case here. Instead, this brings to mind the old saying that a group is only as strong as its weakest link. In the case of this (and most) component systems, the weakest link is the tweeter. And, since the tweeter in the TS-C720PRS is already filtered with a highpass at 2,000Hz (@12dB), setting an electronic highpass crossover at 50-60Hz (which may increase the performance of the woofers) will have absolutely no affect over the total power handling of the system. This means the power specifications provided by the manufacturer still hold true.