altoncustomtech

It looks fantastic!! As previously asked, what do you think of the sound??!!

That’s completely understandable and what most people are thinking. When you’re talking about subwoofers it can matter but when you’re dealing with mids or highs it’s not nearly as relevant. The frequencies that they play don’t require any real power to reproduce in the first place.

I love this car!!!

This should be a great build. Definitely watching. Also on the Evil mids, if the four ohm wasn’t available you should have just went with the 8 ohm version. You wouldn’t have noticed any difference in output.

I’m not convinced that you don’t have a wiring/connection issue. The amp you have is rated for 75x4@4 ohms (class a/b) + 325x1@4, 500x1@2 or 750x1@1 ohm (class d). I have a difficult time believing that that amp is drawing more than your upgraded electrical can handle. Granted the lighting in some vehicles can really exaggerate the voltage drop and you definitely need to verify just how bad the drop is but I’m thinking you have a connection issue somewhere. For instance my wife’s Traverse is running a Zapco ST-4D bridged and an Arc Audio XDi2000.1 @ 1 ohm on all stock electrical (180A alt and stock group 48 600cca wet cell battery) with only minor dimming on the hardest bass lines. It didn’t really even start dimming until recently as the battery has gotten weak and is in need of being replaced. An AGM replacement battery is still a great idea and highly recommended by us all though.

Wow, you must live somewhere the weather is really great if you’re jonesin’ for a ride right now, lol. I am looking forward to riding weather again but it’s not even remotely on my radar when I look out the window right now. I’m sure you will hear from them soon, especially after posting this topic, that usually gets extra attention.

Not much I can do to help with your order directly but I might be able to offer some piece of mind. First of all, I know that the crew who runs everything is out representing the company at the CES show in Las Vegas, which is no small task. I’m sure they’re trying to continue to take care of folks as they always do but I can guarantee it’s got them further behind than is ever normal. Second, what did you order? Some items are drop shipped from their respective manufacturers/suppliers and the delay can occasionally happen on that end. Right now every manufacturer has people wrapped up at CES so it’s very likely everyone will be short staffed or out of the office and behind schedule. Also keep in mind that SSA is a small business with only a few great people running everything from behind the scenes. It doesn’t mean they’re not paying attention or don’t care, quite the opposite in fact on the latter point, but there’s only so many eyes to watch, and time in the day to work. I’m sure they’ll get you answered and squared away as soon as they catch up to your correspondence in the order it was received. SSA has a great reputation for its customer service for a good reason.

My first suggestion would be to forget the rear speakers and put that money and effort into the front speakers. Rear fill is simply useless and a waste of money. I had a ‘98 Chevy Venture and people in the back seat never complained about not hearing the highs. As for the front speakers, if you run the front doors with a pair of 6.5’s you’re already going to have a 2 ohm load unless you’re planning on using 8 ohm speakers in that location. Secondly the smaller 3.5-4” speakers are never going to handle that much power full range. You’re better off using the freed up (after not going with rear fill speakers) rear channels of that five channel amp to power those separately. Then you can use your HU’s, the amplifiers, or a separate signal processors high pass filters to cross them high enough that the bass and midbass won’t be an issue for them.

Yes it’s the same, no matter what the shape or configuration of the port is, the more port area you have the longer the length has to be in order to maintain the same given tuning frequency.

Welcome to the forum!! You should definitely be much happier with your new setup.

There’s many more colors available here... http://www.knukonceptz.com/mobile-audio/power-wire/kolossus-kandy-kable/

I would contact ID and ask them what frequency they cross the tweeters over at in the passive network. That way you’ll know exactly what your target frequency for it would be to get in the middle of the ballpark for running active, no guessing involved. The Fi N.7 has fantastic specifications and should sound great. I can’t wait to play with a set in person. The SSA Evil 6.5” mid sounds very good and is a great bargain at the price they ask for them. My set made me very happy while my brother in law was demoing them in his car. I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to finally get them installed in mine. The mids will be the toughest decision simply because you can’t just listen to them all somewhere. To make the decision even harder (lol) I suggest taking a look through the lists of drivers available at Parts Express and Madisound. The raw drivers at those stores are a great place to start if you were interested in going that route. I know exactly what you are referring to on the sound of your old mids. As much as I love my Fi and SSA equipment I have to say that one of the best drivers I’ve heard that fits that description to a “T” is the Peerless HDS 830875. I gave a set I bought used to my brother in law for his build and after we got everything installed and tuned I wish I had kept them!! Super smooth, warm response that brought out the finest details with ease. They should definitely be on your list of equipment to consider. Your assumption on the difference between regular woofers/mids and the PA drivers is pretty well spot on. While PA speakers “CAN” sound good very very few will right out of the box and even with a great EQ at your disposal the vast majority of them will excel at getting loud and still never sound that good. Most need an enclosure, a ported one even better, to get remotely usable midbass and without that a warmer response will be difficult to obtain J is right though, you can always save up and buy the different parts of your equipment as you can and piece it together. I’m in the middle of doing so for my Grand Prix right now. I had the Evil mids, got the Evil tweeters a few months ago, a pair of SSA F8L 8” subs a little over a month ago, just picked up a pair of SSA IC150.4 amps a couple of weeks ago and got my JL TWK88 DSP last week. I’m working my way towards getting the IC2200.1 and while right now I have a pair of SSA DCON subs as well to help complete an all SSA system I have been piecing this together for awhile now. The crossovers and such you’re looking at are okay but I’m very honestly saying that they’re a waste in comparison to any decent DSP. The plethora of settings available in just one controller is mind blowing and kinda addictive, lol. Multiple bands, up to 31 bands of graphic and/or parametric EQ per each channel. Crossovers that can be set to any frequency(ies) you want, high pass, low pass and bandpass, from -6dB to -48dB slopes per channel, and oftentimes selectable between linkwitz-Riley, Butterworth, etc curves. Time alignment, individual channel gain controls, phase switching, and more all can be found available in the decent DSP’s available today. They’re an investment that you can use for years to come in any build you end up doing. The miniDSP is very budget friendly and very powerful for the price. The only thing people see as a drawback is the limited 2V RCA outputs, which if those folks were in the know doesn’t mean anything. No one minds you making long posts. Trust me it’s a welcome sight to the sore eyes around here and the typical, “I just wanna bang as loud as I can so which one is better, sub X or sub Y?” lol That’s not the norm for around here but we don’t seldom see posts with questions with quite this much information. It’s refreshing in my honest opinion so keep it up!

I don’t think wanting to use the XS-28 tweeter from the Image Dynamics components and the Fi N.7 mid as he originally suggested aside/outside from/of the PRV mids were necessarily illogical choices. Maybe not ideal or what either of us might do but not illogical. I definitely agree with Sean to steer clear of the PRV equipment, it’s just not going to perform in a fashion that coincides with rest of your build. What do you have for processing power? A DSP of some sort such as the miniDSP or the JL Audio TWK88 are great choices and on the more budget friendly end of the spectrum.

I have the same era of Q series subs I got back in 2009, been running strong ever since. The idea you have is called running “active”, and the preferred way a lot of us run our equipment. The passive crossovers don’t do the original drivers from your component set much justice but they sure as hell don’t do other random drivers any justice at all. All your thoughts are pretty much right on the line of thinking we typically recommend to folks with the same kinds of questions. The Fi N.7 mids are sold as a pair for that price. The SSA Evil mids are a great option as well and you can always look into raw drivers from Seas, Scan Speak, Peerless, Dayton and so forth.

That’s an awesome list of equipment! I have no doubt that you’re going to thoroughly enjoy it. I have a 10” XCON myself and I couldn’t imagine replacing it with any other subwoofer. I have the mids, tweeters and four channel amps as well but I’m still looking for the opportunity to get them installed. Soon I hope, very soon!! Welcome to the forum!

So how are the tweeters comparing to each other??

Definitely!

Thought I’d share a few pics of the DCON’s I was originally running. The original subs we used in the Traverse after I got the rest of the system installed. They were originally ran on a Zapco Z-1KD but after a fateful incident with an open sunroof during a rain storm it had to be replaced. I had an Arc Audio XDi 2000 sitting in the closet and the only amp I had that remotely fit in the amp rack. The DCON’s were dual 4 ohm and wired to 1 ohm on the Zapco for a very reasonable 1,000 watts to the pair of 400wrms rated subs. I wasn’t too terribly keen on running them on the Arc 2k at that ohm load at first but since one was making a noise fresh out of the box I figured screw it and with one recone in hand and the knowledge of the fact I could order another if needed I threw caution to the wind and decided to see just how much abuse they could possibly take. So after that background story I present to you the first few pics of the results of that abuse. The coils are still in great looking shape. Which is mind blowing considering the power we didn’t hesitate to throw at them. At 2.5 times the rated power I expected to see them at least slightly darkened or something. The sealed enclosure seams failed worse on one side than the other so I included pics of the surround. The one that didn’t unload as severely has a very small area with the stretched to near breaking point you see in the pic. However the one that’s pictured has the damage all the way around and in a small area actually tore all the way through. I’m pretty sure that damage wouldn’t be present if the enclosure hadn’t have failed. I couldn’t find any damage at all to the spiders on either sub. I’ll add more pics to this when I go to recone them with the spiders, coils and all super exposed.

Well, I’ve said I was going to get pics up when I started to get around to reconing the DCON’s, and we’re finally there!!!! If anyone cares to remember I had one making a rattle new out of the box. Of course the guys at SSA were super quick to get me taken care of with a recone, no question about their top notch customer service!! In the meantime my wife managed to fry the Zapco Z-1KD that was originally powering them so I replaced it with the only amp I had that could fit the amp rack, an Arc Audio XDi-2000. I figured hell with it, if I blow the one that’s rattling it’s no biggie there’s a recone coming and if the good one was to go I’d just order a recone for it and freshen them both up. They did remarkably well in my opinion for having 2.5x their rated power on tap, and the way my wife tends to run the system I have no doubt they saw every watt of it regularly. The coils are a little darker than the new ones on the recones but they aren’t burnt. Despite the surrounds showing clear signs of being stressed I couldn’t find one sign of wear, stress or damage on the spiders. The cause of the rattling sound on the one that rattled brand new and the rattling that started in the good one after the enclosure blew out is clearly evident on the coils. They rubbed pretty darn good with the one clearly working towards failure. The last couple of pics are of one of the new recones for comparison. I also have to say that while I’ve not taken LOTS of speakers apart I have dismantled quite a few in my time in this hobby. Never have I come across a surround or spider material that was this difficult to cut. If I hadn’t just sharpened my knife a little over a week ago I would had to have found a box knife and a new blade to put in it to get them cut apart. These things are definitely built super good out of superior quality materials. Well, that’s enough rambling for now, here’s some pictures as promised for your speaker porn entertainment!! LOL

OMG I just blew pop out of my nose..... LMAO!!!!

Definitely!! That’s why I posted them all up, it is great information for the inexperienced and the experienced alike. I can’t wait to hear how that goes!

I thought I’d share this here. The writer goes through great length to explain the why’s and how’s of time alignment in a stereo system. He explains comb filtering, phase issues and alignment, crossover settings and so forth. Plus he does it in a manner that pretty much anyone with just a little bit of background or experience on the subject can understand. http://www.audiofrog.com/community/tech-tips/time-alignment-part-one/ http://www.audiofrog.com/community/tech-tips/time-alignment-part-2/ http://www.audiofrog.com/community/tech-tips/time-alignment-part-three-delays-and-crossovers-for-tweeters-and-mids/ http://www.audiofrog.com/community/tech-tips/time-alignment-part-4-getting-the-bass-right/ http://www.audiofrog.com/community/tech-tips/time-alignment-part-5-putting-it-all-together/ Please forgive me if I’m wrong to link out to another manufacturer’s website forum. If so I will go through the trouble of copy/pasting the content.

There’s so dang many to choose from out there it’s crazy. I have an SQ building friend who works at a brick and mortar audio store who says that these Ampere Audio coaxials are well worth the price. http://store.soundsolutionsaudio.com/products/ampere-audio-100w-6-5-coaxial-set.html Otherwise these Pioneers have always sounded pretty decent to me. https://www.sonicelectronix.com/item_11269_Pioneer-TS-D1602R.html There’s just too many to mention really. The absolute best thing you could do would try to get out there and listen to as many as you can. Just because the sound of one set pleases me doesn’t mean you’ll find it as nice.

I’m glad to hear that you’re still enjoying it!!!! I’m certain of it. So certain in fact that I designed an enclosure especially for proving that point. The only issue is I’m not sure I’m going to follow through with it because as of the time my order was fulfilled for the second recone I learned that my recone will be the last recone made. Which means that if they’re damaged after this they’re done, no more, and even though I can get a recone elsewhere they would never again be a true DCON.

Giving credit where credit is due. I would never just recommend someone do something like that but I felt that it was the perfect opportunity to do a little destructive testing. I honestly feel like they handled it in fair stride. It definitely impressed me they held up to it as long as they did and honestly they could possibly have been good long term if it wasn’t for the enclosure. The worst part is that the enclosure failed the worst on the side with the good sub. If it would have been the other side I probably wouldn’t have needed the second recone.