helotaxi

Nice thing about Chevy small blocks is the plethora of relatively inexpensive alts available. My car on the other hand does not have an aftermarket alt available. Thank God the stock one is 165A

It's already a one stop shop for those things, take the guy's daughter as your wife and you get the camel a RPG as part of the dowry... Saudi could use some more coastline though. A little northern shore...I can se it now "the Ithsmus of Kuwait" the "Israeli Penninsula" Turn Lake Thar Thar into the Gulf of Thar Thar.

"Rear stage" Interesting term. I've heard of "backstage" where the groupie whores go, but not rear stage. If you're talking about rear speakers, they pretty much are

The end will be when the people of Iraq finally get fed up with the foreign fighters killing their own and start turning them in to the authorities. The correlary to that is the authorities must not be totally corrupt. That will be the end as far as we're concerned. A similar situation would have occured had Saddam died of natural causes as well. Iran would have outright invaded if that had happened. Talk about worst case scenario.

That sounds like too much info to me... I'll have an update this weekend, been sick and it's been blowing a gale here all week.

The first step is the "big 3." If you haven't done that, it might be all you need.

Totally agree there. Must be a phallic thing. The sub is really only a very tiny part of the sound of the system. In a pur SQ setup its not uncommon for the sub to only be reproducing the bottom 1.5 octaves. The other 8.5 octaves are the responsibility of the front stage and are where the complexity of the music lies. Those drivers are the make or break of the SQ system.

The older XXX did come in a 10, but as you mentioned, good luck finding one. Same with the older Brahma. A BM might work out great, just don't plan to tune it in the sub 30 range.

It depends on the power involved. Brand doesn't matter, size does, to a point (regardless of what she says). 12ga is usually plenty. 10ga is usually more than enough. 8ga is usually overkill. Don't buy Monster Cable. It adds nothing but money to their bank account. You can get 12ga speaker wire for a fairly reasonable price at Home Depot by the foot.

SPL comps? None, once the going gets serious. Just doesn't have the motor strength to get really loud in a ported box. As has been mentioned, SQ is totally subjective. The W7 is a SUB woofer. Doesn't get into the upper bass range very well at all but delves into the depth of inaudibility as good as most any sub on the planet. Factor in the broad flat Bl curve and you end up with a sub that can get pretty freakin loud at really low freqs in a sealed box with extremely low distortion. The lack of upper bass and the utter lack of distortion sounds wrong to a lot of people. I've never actually heard a properly set up W7. I've heard several installs with them but in no case would I call the setup proper. They were all street-beaters with the low pass filter set too high, the box tuned too high and the bass up too high. Sounded like ass. But then any sub would under those conditions. Same experience with W6v2s. The W7s have the potential to sound awesome and get really loud for the level of soud quality that they are delivering. There are louder (lots of drivers and lots louder) and there are probably better sounding (all personal preference, though) but the W7 blends the two as well if not better than any driver out there. I personally LOVE my '03 XXX, but I will very likely go back to JL when I get my new car. I'm holding out for the reprise of one of their greatest subs ever in the form of a 8W6v2 but I'm not holding my breath on that one.

I'm an SQ guy but even I think that tuning that low in the car is a bit excessive. The car is going to lower the effective tuning anyway. Don't know of many 10s that want to be tuned that low in a smallish box either.

The plexi bottom is on it (not the original, though) but I didn't have the depth available to mount it plexi out (which is a PITA to do also) and have enough space between the heatsink and mounting board to get airflow in there to cool it. It looks like there is a ton of room there but the Sundown and the processor still have to go in and have to clear the back seat.

The older Alpines had an iPod interface box that you would have to buy at added expense and the feedback I've gotten on them is the interface is awfully slow. Same with the Pioneer. I don't know about the Eclipse. The newer Alpines have the Full Speed connection which is really nice, but it comes at the cost of pretty much all other features. I would have bought something entirely different if it hadn't been for the fact that I wanted to keep my XM setup that I already had for an Alpine (9813 that met an untimely end). A 9813 or 9815 should do everything that you want as well except actuall control the iPod. If you don't mind doing song selection from the iPod itself, there are a couple compaines that make AiNet cables for iPod that get the signal delivered and charge it as well. That might be a less expensive option. The Bass Engine Pro is really nice with a multiband parametric EQ full 3-way crossover and time alingnment. Comes on the 9813 and 9815 and is the same thing that is in the 9833 and 9853/5

Its a tiny trunk and has been full of stereo gear for the last 3+ years. It's not like I'm really losing anything. I haven't had it in so long I just forget that it's even there.

Did you consider using some threaded rod to brace it?

Did you consider using some threaded rod to brace it?

I know this sounds dumb, but make sure the sub out on the deck is turned on.

If you increase the speed of the cone, either the amplitude must change or the speaker hits a limit. The limit is really bad from both a distortion and a longevity standpoint. The increased amplitude is where your extra volume comes from. F=ma as we all know and d= .5 at^2. t is a constant and is the period of the wave in question. If we increase power we increase a. An increase in a with a constant t means the driver moves farther during that time. Once you have enough power to hit the excursion limit of the driver, having more will not do anything for you. This is where the interaction of the LPF and power handling comes in. In most cases Xmax (or Xlim) is what is governing your power handling with music. Thermal power isn't that important for the simple reason that you aren't applying high RMS power so it takes a while to temp out the coil. It is actually peak power that matters for music because it will dictate the excursion of the driver. The lower the freq, the longer the period and the farther the driver can potentially move with the same power. By limiting the low end freqs, you can apply increased power without hitting Xlim. This is the reason that you will see some manufacturers rate power handling for tweeters based on the crossover freq and slope. Higher freq and/or steeper slope means more power handling.

Comparing 4 ohm and 8 ohm drivers is bringing "home audio" speakers into the equation, so this isn't really car audio specific. 4 ohm drivers aren't just for cars, 8 ohm aren't just for the home. What about 16 ohm drivers, too? The point is that it should be industry wide, not just car audio like CEA, which as you mentioned is pretty well pointless anyway.

I would check to make sure that the sub coils are wired in phase. Out of phase equals silence, been there, done that.

Sound deadener.

The one chance you have is finding a load-matching transformer that will handle the kind of power you're running and that has a high enough inductance value that having it wired in parallel won't act like a HPF right through the passband of your sub and that also won't "ring" on the output. I don't think you'll find one because I don't think that one exists. Sounds like you're going to either need a different sub, a different amp or rewire the current sub to 4 ohms and deal with the drop in amp output compared to 2 ohms. What sub and amp are we currently talking about?

As far as the pops go it sounds like the central harness is the source of you troubles. You might need to bypass it. Hiss from an amp with the RCAs disconnected, though, sounds like a problem in the amp itself.

Protection in what way? The cap is wired in parallel. That means that there is still a straight shot from the battery to the amp.

Why? Oh you mean that you realize that there is much more to an audio system than the substage and SPL? I never really fit in there from that perspective.