Passive crossover power usage

  That's why I ripped the crossovers out of my speakers and use a Marchand 3-way electronic crossover and four amps to run my speakers.

So you knew the answer already and I wasted my time?

There is some power dissipated in the crossover and it depends on what level you are running your amp.  I'm a flea watt guy and there i almost no heat generated. But I built my new crossovers with 10 to 30 watt resistors so they won't blow if someone hooks a zillion watt amp up to them.  Remember for 10dB increase in volume, you need 10x the power.  So if a teenager has a party you could blow the crossover...there are actually stories on the internet about this.

I don't like electronic crossovers.  I hate processing the signal any more than I have to.  Many readers have no such feelings. They use equalizers, ss preamp, ss amps, etc and the signal goes throught a million components before it gets to the speaker....so to each his own.

Jerry

High-sensitivity loudspeakers in general have relatively simple (few parts) crossovers. Low-sensitivity designs are often of low sensitivity because the crossover uses resistors to reduce the sensitivity of one driver (usually the tweeter) to match the output of a higher-sensitivity driver, thereby sacrificing overall loudspeaker sensitivity in the pursuit of flat frequency response. Such designs therefore require more power to reach a given SPL, some power dissipated as heat by the resistors in the x/o.

But there are some low-sensitivity loudspeakers---planar-magnetics in particular---which have very simple crossovers. The Eminent Technology LFT-8b, for instance, has simple 1st-order high-pass and low-pass filters (requiring only a few parts to implement), yet is a very low 84dB in sensitivity. Maggies too have relatively simple crossovers, yet require gobs of current. So it is not necessarily the crossover which is "eating" power.

Oops: should read "to match the output of a lower-sensitivity driver", not a higher-sensitivity one.