A voicecoil is nothing more than an inductor.
Capacitors and inductors introduce phase shifts with AC signals.
When I speak of roll-off I'm talking about the response graphs of the individual drivers. Woofer top, tweeter bottom graph.
I know you really want to understand all of this, but to be honest with you, this doesn't need to be complicated. There is no such thing as a "perfect" crossover. Butterworth, Linkwitz riley, bessel, epiliptical....all have their uses.
or in the digital realm Infinite Impluse Response, Finite Impluse Response.
Each one has their tradeoffs and people select different ones based on design goals.
The whole phase smearing (I would not call it distortion) at the crossover point is hard to detect, especially in a car.
BTW, EQ is nothing more than tight filter bands. Everytime you use a typical band of EQ you are introducing more phase shift at each band as you adjust. So now ask yourself, are you going to concern yourself with sticking only to L/R filters or 24dB/oct? FIR filters are linear phase but can introduce "ringing" if overdone. Not to mention it's very CPU intensive especially in lower frequencies. Everything is a tradeoff.
The environment of a car is going to wreck more havok on everything than the processing algorithms, unless you really don't know what you are doing during tuning. Use whatever you need to get the job done.
If you really want indepth stuff start with the first link then move on to the second one. Then read the last one and see it the whole "phase distortion" (I prefer phase smearing) is a moot point.
http://www.bcae1.com/xoorder.htm
http://sound.westhost.com/ptd.htm
http://www.audioholics.com/education...ibility-part-2