I got this wire: http://www.caraudio.com/forum/showthread.php?t=436870
This is something that I was always told when I first got into the hobby as a teenager, and I've seen it recommended in countless manuals over the years. However, I've mounted crossovers everywhere from glove boxes to trunks to door panel interiors over the years, and not once has crossover location ever given me problems.
why?
Every component in your passive crossovers was selected to achieve a specific roll-off behavior based on the driver's resistive and reactive properties. Guess what else has these same properties? Speaker cable. Even the smallest run would introduce it's own unique set of inductive, capacitive, and resistive elements that were not present when the filter was optimized and will have an influence, no matter how subtle, on the end result. It may not lead to a gross error for frequency response (in fact, applying too much power (heat) to the voice coil will introduce a much more pronounced anomaly) but it will affect the time and phase coherency between the drivers. This would, of course, assume that you've gone to great lengths to ensure that the drivers were in optimal locations to preserve this relationship as well. If that's not extremely important to you and you don't value the ambient information or spacial cues in your recordings, then it's probably not a big deal. Honestly, most people have no idea what that really is, let alone how distinguish whether or not it's been compromised, and sadly most really don't or can't have the drivers in the best place to accommodate this performance. So some of what I'm saying is moot but I'm neurotic so I will continue.
