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Co-axial vs Components

What's the difference?

Co-axials are a type of speaker that has the tweeter permanently mounted in the center of the midwoofer. Co-axials usually do not have external passive crossovers, just a capacitor in-line with the tweeter to highpass the tweeter. This type of speaker setup normally runs much lower in price than a good set of components, with a good reason for that, but they will also run nominally off the power put out by most headunits. That isn't to say they won't work well with amplifiers, but most are designed with headunits in mind.

Component sets have separate mids, tweeters, and an external passive crossover as well. Mounting the mids and tweeters in different locations is a good idea for a few reasons... for instance, to allow optimal speaker placement. The passive crossovers are usually quite complex (far more advanced than what's used in co-axials) and are designed to optimize the performance of the speakers (by way of crossover points, crossover slopes, tweeter attenuation, tweeter protection, impedance compensation, etc etc). The speakers used in component sets are typically of much higher quality and better performance than those used in co-axials. Typically components are best used with external amplification only, though some brands of headunits can put out enough power to run them.

2-Way vs. 3-Way

In a perfect world, guys wouldn't have to... er, sorry, wrong thread. Speakers! That's right. In a perfect world, we'd have a single speaker that could reproduce all of the needed frequencies perfectly, 20hz right up to 20khz. Unfortunately for us, no such speaker exists. So we need to break the frequency spectrum down and play it through multiple speakers, mids, tweeters, subs, etc. This is where we get "2-ways, 3-ways, 5-ways, etc" from. Think there's another name for 5-ways though... er... moving on.

In co-axials, a 2-way speaker is a speaker that contains only a midwoofer and a tweeter…..the midwoofer playing the lower frequencies (down to around 80hz or so), the tweeter playing the higher frequencies (around 3khz or 4khz and up). 3-way co-axials typically have a mid, tweeter and "supertweeter", with the supertweeter being designated to handle the very, very high frequencies only. Co-axials can go as high as 5-way, midwoofer, midrange, smaller midrange, tweeter and supertweeter. For all intents and purposes, anything more than 2-way in co-axials is a marketing gimmick. Going with 3-way co-axials or higher usually does not increase performance much, if at all.

For component speakers, a 3-way system includes a dedicated midbass which generally plays around 60hz-350hz, a dedicated midrange that generally plays around 350hz-6500hz or so, and a tweeter that generally plays 6500hz and up. Whereas a 2-way system is only a mid playing around 60hz-4000hz or so, and a tweeter that's singing at 4000hz and up. Ideally, for a 3-way system, you'd want to put the midbass in your door, and have kicks built for the midrange & tweeter. For a 2-way component set, kickpanels or door mounting will suffice with generally good results.

General advantages of a 3-way component set:

1) There isn't a crossover point in the middle of the midrange frequencies (which are generally the most important to imaging and tonality), and they aren't being split up between drivers like they sometimes are in a 2-way setup. In a 3-way, they will be played by mainly one speaker, which is the dedicated midrange.

2) In a lot of cars, the mids will need to be flipped out of phase to help correct some midrange frequency phasing problems. In a 2-way system where one speaker plays midrange & midbass, running one of them out of phase will decrease the midbass impact. By running a 3-way, the midrange can be flipped out of phase and it has no effect on the midbass since it is being played by a separate driver.

3) The midrange and midbass frequencies in a 3-way may sound "cleaner" since each speaker has more of a limited bandwidth to play.

Disadvantages of a 3-way component set:

1) Tuning and aiming the speakers can be a much bigger pain the ass with 3-ways. Installation, tuning, phasing and aiming speakers will be much easier/quicker to perfect with 2-ways.

2) Room. It can be much more difficult find the room to fit all of the speakers. In some cars, kickpanels are simply out of the question.

3) Money. 3-ways are normally considerably more expensive than 2-ways.

As you can see, 3-ways aren't necessarily better than 2-ways. It's more of a personal preference. Some people would rather have a 3-way (for the advantages above), some people would rather have a 2-way (easier to tune, less room is occupied, etc. etc.).