I'm totally new to components. I always used 2-way and 3-way mids back in the day. Anyway...
I'm looking to purchase a set of 5.25 components for up front. How exactly does the impedance work with these? I've been reading elsewhere about setting the supplied crossovers for impedance and for atenuating the tweeters. Are components set up so that the woofer and the tweeter are a combined 4 ohms? I plan to also use a pair of 4" mids in the stock dash locations and I had planned to run at 2 ohms.
By the way, I would like to use Diamond Audio for the components and the 4" mids.
In a properly constructed and well thoughtout crossover network, the impedence seen by the amp is the same as each individual speaker across the frequency band, even though it seems like you're wiring them in parallel. It works like this because each speaker is only receiving a certain range of the sound. The amplifier sees it just as though it were powering a single full range speaker. So if you have a 4 ohm woofer and a 4 ohm tweeter and a linkwitz-riley crossover is used (and not a buttersworth type design which results in a peak at the crossover frequency), the amp sees a 4 ohm load. I've seen the attenuation feature on some crossover networks which i blieve is a simple L-pad, or set of resistors that reduces the power going to the tweeter. Except for a few cases and fairly unique installs with multiple pairs of tweeters, this isn't really necessary as long as the woofer and tweeter are well matched. For example, if you wanted to combine a pair of 90 db sensitivity tweeters with 87 db sensitivity woofers, you'd want to use this attenuation feature to achieve a flat response. On a good pair of speakers that is purchased as a component set, this shouldn't be an issue as long as you aren't planning an install like the one i mentioned.