ncc74656

I feel that having more features such as a cross over, EQ, and time alignment will aid in adjusting the system. even if i dont use said features i want to have them just in case they are needed or i want to see what they do or how they work.

yea, audio-control is what we sell at work. we are a dealer for them and it was said that they make some of the best processors out there. now having said this the source of said information has been doing car audio longer than i have been alive (nearly double actually) so i suppose its not surprising that information may be a bit dated. even with that however i am finding it EXTREMELY difficult to find true digital processors that do not use POT dials on them. it seems for every digital/computer controlled processor there are 20 POT style processors on the market. hell amazon does not even carry any of these types of processors (such as the rockford 360) or if they do i do not know how to find them. my impression is that you either find a head unit with everything built in or you buy a MASSIVELY over kill processor such as the 360. there is very little middle ground or perhaps i should say there is little middle ground that is still in production. why is it that so many of the "recommended" products are all out of production? was car audio just a lot higher quality years ago and now its all watered down or did something else change?

i want to have certain driver types on hand to compare things with. i tried to get some drivers with as similar specs as possible then pick up various types of cone materials, neo vs ferreite, ect. i just cant follow all this with out the physical speakers here for me to play and listen to. the drivers i grabbed were cheap so im not worried about the cost. as for the DQDX that is the best processor that audio control has, from what i was told its one of the best on teh market so thats why i went with it.

i bought a bunch of drivers off amazon (dayton, peerless, fountek, ect) of various sizes 1.5-8" with various specs. also picked up a mini dsp and a audio control DQDX and ordered a DEH80. picked up 2 650.4 kickers (they are super cheap on amazon) to replace my so/so amp with. im going to play around with stuff out of hte truck, build various enclosures and see how things change with box design, speaker size, processing, ect. figure that will be a good way to help understand the concepts that are being explained in the loud speaker cook book and such. if i ever finish playing around ill sell what i dont use.

the ground is pounded here:

Happy Bday, thanks for taking so much of your life and throwing it on the forums

that's exactly what I did. I was unable to find any specs from crachendo on there speakers so was unable to build an enclosure to spec but I did play around with some sealed boxes. I want to downsize my door speakers and get some that are more sensitive and efficient so as to not take so much power with such a huge magnet. also the general consensus on the forum was that these speakers were shit.

the following parts are what i have been looking at using in my system, does anyone have any thoughts (good or bad) on the choices here. I have a few amps lying around that all have pass through (eclipse, audiobahn, alpine) so one of them will be used in this configuration for the remaining speakers. 2 JL ZR800-CW 8" midbass driver to be built in a glass enclosure in my lower doors. 2 Hertz ML700 2.75" midranges to be glassed in my extreme upper door and angled at the drivers position. possibly 2 focal or hertz tweets, i have 2 alpine R tweets now that i think work very well so ill start with them and if they work well in this setup then great but if not ill swap to a different product. a polk PAD4000.4 4 channel amp (with out pass through) for 2 of the speakers (mid bass and mid range i think). at circuit city we always talked about how great polk audio was (back in 06) but i did hear some things about them being made my PPI who is owned by directed and there quality having gone down the shitter in recent years. is there any truth to that? ill be using the active crossovers on the amp itself and im grabbing a 1/3 octave EQ that (if needed) ill use to balance things out. the subs will be Fi (i think either SP4 or teams but maybe BL). i have yet to work out the enclosure but what do you guys think of the parts above?

they are 10" mid range. perhaps they would work for midbass but as a mid range speaker they are very lack luster, also there mounting depth is so large I must space my windows out to make them fit with a 3/4" sheet of MDF on the door spacing them forward.

im about 1/4 into the loud speaker cook book and 1/3 into the bae1 website. I defiantly need new speakers, the crachendos sound like crap so I want to install a processor first so I can have a comparison while changing things and installing new speakers.

oh man I had forgotten about this post. yes I do have a spectrum analyzer but I think that is a moot point. I have spent all day today in the shop with my truck, playing tones, listening to distortions, comparing speakers with various specs, ect. The speakers I have now are shit... no two ways about it. they have a useable frequency response of ~ 180-850hz. past that you must cross over at 650hz to not have distortion up to 1500hz. they have more peaks in their response curve than a fat woman has folds. I have already decided against the expensive drivers, the processor will be in a head unit if I can find one that looks good enough to me. that is TBD as I want a processor with high/low xover and at least a 9 channel eq for each output. 3 outputs for a 2.1 would be fine right now.

i see that site lists the thicker sound deadener, we sell the dynomat stuff at work but ive been told to only sell the rubber backed aluminum as its all that really does anything. the thicker padding is rather useless in vehicles, the classic rubber and aluminum is more bang for your buck. according to the website thats not true? i ask as it seems that website is educating on a product they sell which makes me not inclined to assume there is a fair amount of misinformation on the site in favor of selling there product.

what sources are out there to explain "proper installs"? are we talking about custom fabrication of fiber glass enclosures and processors to balance the install or are you talking about making baffles or installing sound deadening? the door panel is removed, the factory speaker is removed, the wires are cut to length, soldered to teh back of the new speaker terminals, the speaker is screwed back into its place (a wooden mounting bracket is fabricated if required), and the door panel is placed back on. this is a speaker install to me. come to think of it i have not even installed a component set at work yet. even those people who's cars have one factory end up buying coaxes due to cost. to save on cost i have seen it recommended to replace the mid range of a component set with a coax speaker and leave the tweeter hooked up on a factory system. this to me makes little sense but i dunno. i was always under the impression that in a passive setup you had to match tweets with mids and in a coax speaker you get distortion from the tweet due to it being in the middle of the cone of a bass driver?

looking through that list of decks that lithium posted on the previous page... 1200.00 single dins? ive never seen such expensive decks before. a 1500.00 double din sure ive seen that, but wow. even some of the more reserved decks on the list are 300.00 for a 2 way with sub. im trying to think about what is the best choice here and the mini dsp is cheaper but provides less voltage out (2V). however everything i have been told on here makes me believe this does not matter. they sell a noise filter (looks to just be some caps and diods) wich assuming it does as they claim that should filter noise. im not sure what the right route to go is (if there is such a thing) but the dsp sure looks like a much better choice than replacing a head unit that presently functions perfectly well as a media player. the head units that have the built in DSP's appear to be 2-3 times the cost and many of them are only available second hand. i do not what to replace any speakers until i get some sort of processor installed. i want to have a solid base to modify from and i know what my stereo sounds like now and i know what its weaknesses are. it makes sense to me that i should process before i replace so as to keep a frame of reference. presently writing down information i read and am told is about all i can do. i have not experimented with enough real world equipment to be able to understand everything. reading is not understanding, doing is.

what are you on about copying and pasting? i have done no such thing. You have accused me twice now of copying and pasting what i type here and i assure you that what i have written here is from my own keyboard and not copied from other sources. frankly given the immeasurable inaccuracy of my assertions i am amazed that such an accusation would be made to begin with. as for local shops being useless, most people do not know or care about what is or is not a good install. they simply wish to take there welfare check (or tax return this time of year) and get some "sick beats" in there car for a few hundred bucks and call it a day. Those who do wish to have quality audio seldom have the money for labor charges of a shop. not just ours but any shop for custom work, same could be said for lift kits or body kits for hot rods. It is a VERY narrow market of people whom are willing to invest the time or money required for anything but a basic install walking through the doors of my shop. I have not been in the shop long enough to comment on audio season but the same "class" of people who i see in the shop are also my tenants and believe me when i tell you they do not in any way fill the consumer base required for a shop to be properly educated on advanced audio. My understanding is that the only shop around that possesses such a clientele and employee expertise base is automotive concepts. That i am aware of there is no course or schooling dedicated to the field of car audio, it is a field in which you are able to learn 12V principles and the rest comes from experience or brand training's in which much of the information is misleading anyway to sell their particular product. I searched for eclipse products and found some older head units. I have NEVER seen a single din deck with such features before. 8V pre amps, 11 band EQ's, 6 pre amp outs.... i have never seen a pioneer, kenwood, or sony deck with such features. having said this i have yet to find an eclipse deck with USB and BT, do they exist or did the company shut down before such features were common place? I have been told that installation is important but i have yet to see any type of install other than speakers screwed to a door and a sub box placed in the back seat. the goal for most installs is to replace the blown out speakers and head unit with some boss 12" lcd head unit and sony explodes. selling a couple hundred in product and a couple hundred in labor for installs. i have yet to be involved in any design beyond a door panel removal.

perhaps the mini dsp only allows one instance but thats not an issue. you can just run a VM box with unity and set the second USB address to client instead of host. two side by side windows regardless of the systems limitations. im going to buy a mini dsp one way or another. maybe ill use it in my home stereo to see how settings effect things or maybe ill throw it at the stereo in the truck and play around. dosnt need to be the greatest or work out of hte box, hell i may not even keep it but 120 bucks for a product i can play around with is not an issue, its cheap. i am going to get a ZX650.4 kicker, i looked around what we had to work today but the best 4 channel amp we have is a 50X4 so that settled that. on a related note - summer is coming and i will be no doubt installing lots of speakers. (50.00 pioneers and such) in car doors. for a very cheap install done right; what would you say should be done in regards to the physical install? i ask as it was mentioned that more should be done than screwing a speaker to its factory location.

ill look around at head units, id like more things to play with than many of the HU's have built in. i like the GUI on the minidsp and the simple notion of requiring a laptop vs the head unit does not weigh negatively on my decision. perhaps if the deck has a more fluid or responsive interface then that would be a consideration. the minidsp has 48khz sampling while the 2X8 has 96. i use 96 on my computer but i believe most all compressed music is 48 so it may be a moot point. 2 2X4's are cheaper than a 2X8 and i could control them simultaneously from a single computer. only added step would be having 2 configuration windows open as opposed to one. wich ever route i settle on i think i will be ordering parts this next week. i may buy a new amp at work if we have a decent price point with decent wattage. so much of what we have are lower wattage 120.00 amps. i forget the brand now but while reading specs on some of hte products we have i found a "250X4" amp with a 72db signal to noise ratio. never seen specs quite like that on an amp before.

i thought about getting the 4X8 but my thought is that i will run the sub off the head unit as... well its a sub so it does not take much to cross it over. downt the road i can buy another 2X4 OR a 4X8 and make a case. sell the 2X4 to a co worker. i like the notion of controlling it through a computer, i like that a hell of a lot more than the idea of a deck control. the POT is only needed to change hte master volume with out the computer hooked up right? was the minidc the 12V adapter?

this all changes quite a bit of things... more to think about. I think what i am going to do is buy a 2X4 mini dsp and a new 4 channel amp (650.4 kicker i think). this will replace my current amp that is having issues and give me a fully featured processor. leaving everything else the same i can play with this processor and see what changes in the setup that i know well. from there i will figure out what i want to change and then make a new game plan.

i do not know, i do know that my gains were over pushed but i ran a BL that way for some time with no issue. that said they redesigned the leads to help prevent this.

i understand that each speaker needs a channel, but if not pro audio speakers then wich? are the daytons and the like not pro audio speakers? what is a "normal" speaker?

let us say i go with a 2 way setup of a tweeter and a mid range driver. is the objective to build a proper enclosure in a door and use a pro audio speaker for this purpose? i ask this as i am not aware of any "car audio" companies that offer a mid range driver that is designed for anything other tham IB and it is my understanding that putting a IB driver into any type of enclosure is a poor idea. To that end an active cross over setup would be a bi/amped setup correct? that is to say that either a 4 channel amp with dedicated front/rear to be used for tweet/mid or 2 amps for this purpose. I am assuming that a dayton or some other parts express speaker vs what ever car audio brand.

m5 - question about the placement, frequencies become more directional as they increase right? i can hear that just stepping off to the side of my home speakers vs directly in front of them. to that end would it not be better to have tweeters at ear level and mid range at least some what pointing ot the driver? instead of having the mid range pointing into the floor or across into a door that is? it just made sense when it was explained to me this way at work.

see its only with in the last week or so that ive looked at anything other than a car audio driver in a car. at work it was made very clear to me that only a car audio driver sould be used in an auto install. now having said that i do not blieve that there is any reason why "non car audio drivers" should not be used in auto applications. the more i read about the specs on some of these brands i had never heard of, the more i think that the JL, Focals, hertz, rockford, ect. are more of a name sake and over priced for what they deliever. At the shop i have seen build logs of custom baffels, after market prefab door pods, sound deadening placed at various locations to aid in the install but i have never had the chance to do any of this myself. In my own truck i have wood baffels and sound deadening but ive never had a customer that was willing to spend the money on such things. people just come in and want speakers screwed into what ever and they want to pay as little as possible. 2 years ago when i installed my sound deadening what i did was covered the ENTIRE cab, floor, back, roof, doors, ect. i realize now that 100% coverage is not needed or even recommended but back then "more is better". It does have the added advantage of water proffing my floor i suppose... in either case ive got a crap load of that in the truck. the truck is a 99 2500 cummins diesel quad cab long bed. this summer i hope to see some real installs at either my shop or over in hopkins where they do the majority of custom fab work. lith: as for adding a 7" in a 3 way, what i was thinking about was buying a 2 way with a 7" and good tweet in addition to the 3 way so i can see and hear both. the types of tweeter you listed however - i dont think i have ever heard but a couple of them, makes me want to buy some of hte ribbons and such to see how they preform.

the vast majority of 6.5's are designed IB no? so you screw them into the door panel, add some deadening if required and call it a day. on custom installs i am told that you build a pod around ear level for a mid range, put a mid bass down low and then place a tweeter in line with ones ears. that you limit standing waves and avoid symmetry to avoid wave collisions on certain frequencies. maybe what i should do is pick up a 2X8 for future expansion and buy a good mid range 7 to use with my current tweeters, pick up a horn, silk, and bullet tweet with good specs and swap them out to see how there sound changes. then throw in the 3 way to see just how far off from that base line i fall. id like to try speakers in my factory location, in the optimal sound location, and then in custom enclosures of various types to see just how it all changes as you move things around.