///M5

I wouldn't go too cheap. The cheapest one I'd buy would be a Coustic XM-6.

Stole your dog? Need to beat a ho for that chit.

Congratulations! Best move ever.

Unless you really have some money for gear, you are better off using a mic and just testing for peak output. Or of course following HT's " "enough or not" measurment..."

To what accuracy do you want to make that statement? The reason I ask is that with the methods described above you would still be at best with a 10% number, which in your example is nearly 400watts. To me a real number is somewhere in the better than 1% realm.

This does create a car stereo problem in my M however.

The icicles have fallen off my roof. They were all there this morning. Bye bye winter

It stays on really well in fact. Sounds to me like you are basing your decision on the "much more dirty" which I don't get. To me deadening is all about bang for the buck since you need a crapload of it. Nothing beats the Raamat for that.

Your weather is that nice already? We have 40deg today and the snow is starting to melt. Boo.

Since the OP's first post specifically mentioned "real numbers" outside of the car environment, he would need to test versus a stable load at a stable output and a consistent distortion level. However, I 100% agree with the statement above that I bolded. If the application here is to figure out which amp will do better for you in an SPL world, design and build your box first and then test the amps on the driver in the box you have chosen.

I have seen a few people with that combo in their car (on the net that is). Makes me jealous everytime, only if I did it I would forego the headunit and use a carpc so you could control it from the front as well.

Glad to have you back.

Come on, it isn't fair to compare one amp at 10% distortion to another at .1%. Without measuring the spectral content you could easily do that by accident as well. How do you think these chump companies can claim they are selling an 8000w amp, when in reality it might do 50w a channel. It is pretty easy to meet a spec if you change how you measure that spec, without taking this into consideration in your measurement it won't be accurate enough to draw the conclusions that you are trying to.

That is what I did yesterday, blew off work.

I didn't think the eq was flexible enough to load a curve at arbitrary frequencies to compensate for the increase in output on the upper end. I need to go back and read the specs again...you just cost me $300 bills Ryan.

I love the pseudo-suede idea, in my book the closer to stock the better with the caveat being as long as you make it look better. You are on the right track mang.

I disagree with your last statement. Reasons: 1) Space and configuration. Say you want to run up the back wall of an ext. cab truck, it is pretty hard to have a large diameter round port. 2) Flexibility. I don't know about you, but I can fab a slot port pretty easily while making a long round tube of a specific diameter isn't very easy. 3) Cosmetics. Good luck hiding a big arse round port, but it is real easy to make a square blend into something, especially since you are making it out of mdf. 4) Tuning. As stated above if you want multiple tunings, it is pretty easy to extend/shorten a slot port by building a bolt on bracket all out of mdf. You can have as many as you want for a few bucks worth of wood. Sure you could remove the whole port as well, but there will be plenty of instances where just adding on to it is much easier.

Top o'the Thursday to ya.

I really prefer amps that are just amplifiers; however, they surely won't make the rest of the system cheaper. One other bit, as far as I know it is hard to have any baffle compensation when running active as well.

oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god

You left out one major piece Chris. You will need some way of measuring distortion as well and along with that you need to determine what level of distortion is acceptable and test up to that level. To make things even more difficult, you could question which harmonics are actually important to you in that measurement and what actually defines distortion. A lot of speaker designers that I have worked with in the past measure up to the 50th harmonic, which at low frequencies is fairly easy but even up at 20kHz is a completely different story. You'd be surprised how many manufacturers cannot even do this measurement and have to outsource it to a testing house. To do it right it is really expensive. The load that Chris proposes isn't stable enough in my book.

lol

That is supposed to be coming this way so I thought I better beat on the sled one more time. It might snow this weekend again though after melting the 20"+ we got last week.

Sweet. When I do that with my M, the mic clips at 15' away which makes it sound like chit.

afternoon. 180miles on the sled today and my knees are killing me.