Educate me on what the three components of a crossover do

[stgdz]

Caps
Resistors
Inductors

Is there a basic design that each of these components can do to a speaker? When reading about the ZDT's zaph said that increasing the resistor on the tweet made it not sound as bright.

So does resitors dampen speakers?


I understand this is an open ended question and the combination of each of these components can affect many different things, but I was more or less curious if there was a general rule when building speakers.

[Bear]

Each in isolation do certain things. The collective circuit, though, is what's important. Start reading here may help (it's actually fairly detailed, but it is easy to remember as search terms, and the links at the bottom are the real key):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCR_circuit

Notionally, an inductor acts as a low-pass filter, a capacitor acts as a high-pass filter, and the resistor reduces the power that makes it to the speaker. However, since this is AC, rather than DC, you have a LOT of interaction between components (e.g., reactance). Start with a good book or two. That's about where I'm at!