Impious

Are your FR measurements gated at all or just an open measurement?

This thread is just conjecture. Can't be anything more. The only thing you can do is hook it up and see how your electrical system handles it. There are far too many variables involved. Upgrading the big 3 would be a logical and cost effective upgrade, but beyond that you have to wait to get it installed and see how your electrical is performing to determine what your needs may or may not be.

Just got an IPad mini from work for free. Never had a tablet or smartphone before, believe it or not. Give me some Ideas for apps to get. First person to suggest that Skar app gets banned.

Pretty awesome entertainment stand

You just want to make sure you aren't overdriving the preamp input section of the amplifier or the output section of the amplifier, leading to clipping. Otherwise it's a simply matter of setting it to whatever is necessary for your installation. Without knowing your preamp voltage level or what level JL considers "high" and "low" I can't say for certain. There is nothing wrong with a gain setting halfway up (or higher) as long as you are getting full power from the amplifier without clipping. With the setting in "high" you will need more preamp voltage to drive the amplifier to full power output, so having a higher set gain makes sense. There is nothing wrong with this. Personally I would probably keep it in high and set the gain where necessary to avoid potentially overdriving the preamp section of the amplifier. If having set to low isn't overdriving the amplifier preamp stage, then you can keep it in low as well. I would however not boost the EQ adjustment on the HU to make up the difference in output. Increasing the boost on an EQ asks the amplifier to output more power at and around those frequencies, and can lead to clipping. A +3db adjustment on the EQ asks the amplifier to double it's power output. A +6db asks the amplifier to quadruple it's power output. You can see how this can quickly lead to problems. As for the sub level adjustment, it depends on how it works. If +10 on the adjustments allows the HU to output full rated voltage than anything up to +10 is fine. If it outputs full rated preamp voltage at a setting of 0, then increasing the adjustment means your maximum volume setting on the HU must decrease otherwise you will clip the preamp output.

With lowpassing around 4khz on the mid I wouldn't expect it to be beaming terribly bad in that range, meaning on- or off-axis response should be pretty similar (radiating from the driver, excluding reflections). I would more expect your smearing problem to be other FR issues or phase related. IMO your speaker location isn't going to help your stage width. You're probably getting some early reflections from the windshield due to the mounting of the midrange in the a-pillars that is pulling your stage in. Reflections could be causing the issues with the smearing as well. But answering M5's questions would help a lot as well. That said I'm not a huge fan of pillar mounted speakers due to the problems with reflections, so I'm probably going to be biased Tossing the system back on the RTA would probably be helpful here.

What are your crossover points/slopes?

Thanks I'll look some of those up.

If you really feel that uncomfortable with it, look up the Team IAK section. A lot of guys there from the Indy area.

I would definitely not worry about a difference of 2hz and less than 1db

Easy way to compare. Download Unibox (also free) and compare results. Not sure if Hornresp includes port velocity or not, but it would be another good one to compare against. As for an acceptable value, it depends on who you talk to, the design of the port, the frequency of the peak velocity &/or velocity vs frequency. 55ft/sec is a good goal, but pretty conservative. Under about 100ft/sec is usually acceptable for a decent sized port with good flares and a peak velocity that occurs at a lower frequency. Generally speaker though the lower # the better, as long as it's not ridiculously low.

You don't need any of those for the program to work correctly. Leaving them blank won't affect the modeled results in any way. Pe is basically power handling, just input the rated power handling of the driver or leave it blank, won't affect anything. Le is inductance, doesn't affect low frequency response or response in relation to a given enclosure. And I honestly don't believe WinISD even includes the necessary calculations to use Le like it would need to be used. Le only affects the high frequency roll-off, which WinISD doesn't model unless you add a lowpass filter. Z is nominal impedance, i.e. the normal 2ohm/4ohm/etc rating given to speakers. Again doesn't affect the model at all and WinISD should auto-populate this field after Re is input Dia is probably an abbreviation for diameter, though I don't have that field on the parameter input screen on the version I have downloaded so I don't know where you are looking to input it or what diameter it's referring to. But regardless, isn't going to affect anything in the modeled results.

Depends on what bandwidth you are referring to. Peak output around tuning would be about the same, but above tuning the Icon would have up to 2db more output. That doesn't include power compression however. The Icon has twice the rated power handling of the SA-12 and a 3" coil instead of a 2.5", so it's highly likely the Icon would experience less power compression at that power level, which would increase the output differential between them. I didn't model the DR, didn't feel like looking up the T/S

Yes, the speakers are powered by an Alpine PDX-5, a Kenwood KDC 896, and the speakers are Alpine Type R components (i faded all music to front speakers) I'm not sure if you need more information than that. if you need to know something more, just ask. the amp is under the passenger seat If the gain is set high it could be noise from the amp. It could be a poor ground on the HU or amp. Could simply be the noise floor of the equipment. Could have the RCA's routed by something noisy inside the vehicle. TBH if it's only a slight, low noise when the stereo is muted I wouldn't worry about it, but I don't know what the noise actually sounds like. I guess the severity of the problem is for you to decide. Lol "jus one mor beer brah" I have dang near the best amp and head unit that the companies that sell them make, I'm sure i can do better,Maybe you meant to say Install, Install, install? I said it first! ( ) hahaThe ground runs near the rca's for like a foot By the way, does a 3" coil have more motor strength than a 2.5" coil on the same power? As Sean said, the entire chassis of the vehicle is the ground. As to the 2nd question, assuming everything else was equal between the coils (density, wire gauge, etc) the 3" coil would probably have a higher motor force since there is more "L" in the "B" field. But if everything was equal, it would probably have a higher Re as well again since there was more wire. But it's going to depend on the specific design, "all things equal" doesn't really work with subwoofers because most of the time things aren't equal.

If you switched HU's then your comparison is invalid. One of the HU's may have been more sensitive to the poor OEM ground location than the other, for example. As to the 2nd question.....this has been a long thread & I don't remember, are the speakers driven by an amplifier?

I've always had them ran directly next to each other and never had any issues as a result. More than likely when people are having issues with induced noise that moving the RCA's helped, they were running the wires next to something else "noisy" in the vehicle and the power wire wasn't the actual problem. Richard Clark used to offer money to anyone that could prove they induced noise into their RCA with a power wire.

Heh.....overkill is my middle name, so to me it's just "a little"

You are not going to come to this site to advertise, especially to advertise a site which will be a direct or indirect competitor to SSA. If you which to discuss the options of being a vendor here, contact the administrators.

The port area (width and height) needs to remain constant. So if you have a 2" wide port, the port end needs to be atleast 2" from the nearest wall. Now, to be technical, if you ended the port 2" from the side wall (I'm assuming a side wall is what you are talking about) then the effective port length would actually "curve" around with that side wall a bit, plus you would need to add the port end correction factor to your effective port length calculation (I think WinISD might do the correction factor, I don't mess with ported enclosures in there much to know off hand). However, you are talking about changing the port tuning by a couple hertz at worst (if the port is a decent length) which really isn't going to matter much in a daily driving situation. People sweat the small stuff too much IMO. If you can't hear it, it doesn't matter. Using WinISD model the same enclosure with a port 3" longer and see what the difference in response is. I don't know the details of your enclosure but I wouldn't be surprised if the change was small enough to not audibly affect the response. The downsides to having 2 subs share a common chamber is that 1) you lose a center enclosure brace in the enclosure created by the separating divider wall, and 2) with a common chamber if one driver fails you increase the possibility of damaging the 2nd driver as well because it now effectively "sees" twice the enclosure volume which will affect it's mechanical power handling capabilities.

Thiele Small parameters describe the low frequency behavior of a loudspeaker. Cms is the compliance of the suspension of the loudspeaker. Compliance is the inverse of stiffness. So Cms tells you how compliant the suspension of the speaker is....or, by extension, how stiff the suspension is (a higher compliance means lower stiffness, lower compliance means higher stiffness). When a subwoofer "breaks in", the only physical parameter that changes is the compliance of the suspension (Cms). Cms increases (the suspension becomes more compliant) because the suspensions loosens up and becomes softer and less stiff. Since Cms changes, it changes most of the other relevant T/S parameters that predict how a loudspeaker behaves in the low frequency realm. Fs is the resonant frequency of the driver. This is your basic mass on a spring stuff. The mass of the moving parts (cone, coil and former, & suspension) and the "spring" is the suspension, and at some frequency these parts will naturally resonant just the same as any other mass on a spring. That's Fs. And since the compliance of the spring changes, the resonant frequency changes. Fs will go down because there's slightly less "spring" with the same amount of mass, so it resonates at a lower frequency. Q was short hand for Qms, Qes and Qts. Q stands for Quality factor. Basically if a system is resonating, Q describes the amount of "loss" in the system or the amount of damping the system is providing....it tells you how long that system will resonate for. A higher Q means there is less loss (and less damping) so the system will be more resonant and will take longer to stop oscillating. Back to our mass on a spring, Q factor will determine how long it takes for the system to stop oscillating. Qms describes the damping provided by the suspension (surround and spider). Qes describes the damping provided by the motor. And Qts is the combined damping of the Qms and Qes, or the total damping of the driver. Generally speaking the motor provides the most control over the driver at and above resonance, so Qts is always much close to Qes than it is to Qms. There is also Vas, which is more or less a different expression of the compliance of the loudspeaker. It's expressed in terms of air volume, liters or cubic feet. A larger Vas for a given cone diameter means a more compliant (less stiff) suspension. Vas has a lot to do with enclosure volume. Generally speaking, a larger Vas means a larger enclosure volume is needed for a given alignment. Fs, Qts and Vas are the main parameters the describe what the shape of the response curve of a speaker will look like in a given enclosure. Now, Cms is really the only physical parameter that changes when a speaker breaks in. But since Cms changes, Fs and Vas will both change (Fs goes down, Vas goes up). And since Fs changes, Qes and Qms will both change (they go down since Fs goes down) which therefore changes Qts (goes down as well since both Qes and Qms go down). Looking at the math helps understand that part of it. But, more importantly, because Cms is the only physical parameter that changes that means Fs, Vas and Qts will all change in proportion to each other leaving their relative ratios pretty much the same. Which means the shape of the response in a given enclosure remains pretty much the same. There are small changes to the response, but they are are well below the threshold of audibility...less than 1db. It might, *MIGHT* matter to a guy who does SPL where .1db can be the difference between 1st and 2nd place. But audibly....no difference.

What exactly is the goal? Aesthetics? Because those gaps probably aren't really enough to make an audible difference. Only possible difference could be on a meter if that is your goal. If you wanted to get fancy you could do some fiberglass panels as Ryan said. Less time intensive would be to cut some wood filler panels to the general shape of the panels and secure them to the box. For daily driving don't worry about a 100% seal, caulk and expanding foam are completely unnecessary unless the caulk was simply being used to help secure filler panels to the vehicle. If you were doing it solely for an improvement in performance in a daily listening scenario I wouldn't waste my time.

It's slightly overkill but as long as the wire fits all of the connectors it is fine. In most cases 14ga or 16ga will work just fine and could save you a little money. But as with power wire, speaker wire gauge depends on the amount of current being passed through the wire. BCAE has a good calculator you can use to determine appropriate wire gauge: http://bcae1.com/wire.htm

Save your beers, you don't need it to set a gain. Waste of time.

McIntosh's Power Guard circuit does just that. Was used in several Clarion amps as well back when Clarion owned McIntosh. There may be others. But that's the first to come to mind.

Sorry - no measurements yet I can tell you my Alpine Type- R and Type -S sounded very different (to me) after a week or so than when they were first put in - even when i took a used Type-S out and put a new one in, I could tell. when i first put them in, it seemed like it couldn't hit the low notes, after awhile, the lows definitely became more prominent (to me)* *Right before they blew lmfao Measurements are really the only thing that would support the claim that there was a significant audible change pre- and post break in. Subjective experience does not. As Q pointed out, you might have experienced a change, but the change was in your perception and not in the driver (at least not audibly).