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Captain Howdy Captain Howdy is offline
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Posts: 103
Default Oh man I'm borred.......

You know what I'm talking about. I know that you don't want to get "into it"
with me.

In article , "MOSFET"
wrote:
Really don't know what your talking about.

Yes, I've had many different tweeters, that is true. And yes, the Alpine's
were EXCEPTIONAL and I may try using them again in the future. The same is
true of my old JL VR series tweets, EXCELLENT. But I am very happy with my
Kappa series CMMD Infinity tweets at the moment; I enjoy trying different
tweets as I have yet to find sonic perfection, perhaps I never will. Alpine
has clearly improved it's speakers DRAMATICALLY in the last 10 years (and I
mean ALL types of speakers they produce). They single-handedly HAVE changed
my opinion of Japaneese speakers.

I'm not going to get "into it" with you, but may I remind you that you spent
COUNTLESS posts extolly the virtues of 6x9's and that they were the
end-all-be-all of car audio sound quality. So I would take caution in your
insults as your car audio knowledge from that ONE flame-war alone
demonstrates a woefully lacking knowledge of car audio, or at least
knowledge of what "good" sound reproduction is.

I am now blocking all your posts so don't bother responding. Take care,
sweetie.

MOSFET

"Captain Howdy" wrote in message
...
Misfit you havent had a DECENT system in all the time that you've been
coming
here,stop the bull****. Just love the post about your new Alpine speakers
a
while back, arent you the one that was making fun of Japanese speakers?

I love stories too and I would love to share one about a ****brick that
has
been coming here for many years talking dumb **** as if he knew his face
from
his asshole just to keep changing his so called facts as time goes by. But
I
think you already know that story.


In article , "MOSFET"
wrote:
OK, I'm so desperate to talk about car audio that I swear I'm going to
start
answering questions no one asked in the DESPERATE hope I might start a
thread.

The problem is right now my car sounds absolutely better than ANY car
system
I have ever owned, or heard.....EVER. Again, today I spent several hours
in
my car, absolutely dazzled by the incredible sound quality. The Infinity
Kappas driven by my Phoenix Gold amp and my 6.5" Alpine Class R's driven
by
my Fosgate Punch 225.2 just sound absolutely PERFECT together. I have the
crossovers dialed in absolutely perfectly. I swear, even my wife's music
I
typically hate (soft rock) sounded wonderful and engaging. I really am
NOT
trying to brag or anything like that, it's just I happen to be VERY
pleased
at the moment with my system so naturally I want to talk about car audio.
I
am just VERY INTO CAR AUDIO at the moment. But the problem is that
judging
from the number of new posts, I feel like I'm the only one (of course I
know
many of you are heavily into car audio, too).

So, answering questions nobody is asking....

What about the old question of "where is the best place to put your
subwoofers?'.

Let me tell you a little story about how I learned this leason the HARD
and
EXPENSIVE way. I first got heavily into car audio around 1988. Between
1988 and 1995 I owned 4 different cars and with each car I kept upgrading
my
system. I mean, my very first car with what I would consider my first
DECENT system back in 1988 had as it's front speakers a set of 4" Alpine
coaxials driven by the head unit. I call it my first decent system
because
it was the first system I had ever owned with a SUBWOOFER driven by an
outboard amp, a Rockford Fosgate Punch 75. And the sub was a Fosgate 12"
punch in a ported enclosure. Although the front stage stunk, I thought I
was in heaven as I finally had BASS IN MY CAR!!!!! Oh, and my back
speakers
were a set of Fosgate 767's 6.5" coaxials, again driven by the HU. I
upgraded by first buying another amp to drive the front speakers, an
Alpine
3522 (I think that was the model number, I know it ended in 22). The next
upgrade was an amp to drive the rear Fosgate speakers, a Denon (when Denon
used to make car amps) something, I honestly don't remember the model
number
but it was RATED at 30X2 but I could immediately tell they were overrated
as
the much smaller Alpine 3522 could blow this larger Denon away. No wonder
Denon went out of business.

Now I continued to make improvements, next using a much better quality
6.5"
coaxial in front and finally seperates. My first set of seperates were
Boston Accoustics Pro series 6.5".

Anyway, in 1993 and 1994 I dabbled in competing in several IASCA events in
my area. My cars were pretty nice, clean, but my systema were really
nothing to write home about. HOWEVER, in 1995 I bought a brand new Nissan
Maxima. Now in case you don't remember, this is the year they changed the
body style to the more rounded style, they put a much more powerful engine
in and was Motor Trends car of the year. It was an SE with beige leather,
sunroof, and was this beautiful black/green metalic color.

Now this was really the height of IASCA and I desided with this beautiful
new car I was going to pull out all the stops and put an award winning,
magazine quality system in this car. I had a good friend who was an
installer for Magnolia Hi-Fi so I paid him under the table several
thousand
dollars (and four weeks with no car as it was in his garage as he worked
every single day on it after he got home from work, somtimes late into the
night) to build an absolute kick-ass system. It was beautiful. It was
driven by a single amp, a Soundstream Reference 705, 5 channel amp that
had
just come out and was hailed by everyone for it's sound quality, features,
and high-current abilities (the subwoofer channel was .5 ohm stable, all
the
other channels were 1 ohm stable). I bought the new at the time, Alpine
7939, the top of the line alpine, not the most attractive HU Alpine has
ever
built as the control knob looked like a nose and it was frankly a stupid
design because although it kind of looked like a knob, it wasn't a knob,
you
turned the nose and all it accomplished was like hitting a volume up or
volume down button, it was like it couldn't decide whether it wanted to be
a
volume knob, or volume buttons, so this was some kind of compromise.
Thankfully, Alpine realized what most people want are knobs so they can
attenuate the volume up or down as quickly as they can turn a knob, that's
the way I like it, so I can INSTANTLY turn the volume all the way down
with
a quick flick of the wrist. Of course, all models of Alpine's that end in
"9" (like the famous 7909) indicate they have no internal amplifier of
their
own and require outboard amps. My front speakers were the Boston
Accoustics
Pro Series seperates and what was cool about the SE series with the Bose
system was that it CAME with A-pillar pods for the Bose tweeters with
grills
that, of course, matched everything so I simply used those for my Boston
tweets and the midbass speaks went in the factory door spots, however with
much Dynamat added to the doors and trunk. In fact, funny story, when I
first got the car and you pushed the trunk button on the remote the trunk
quickly poppped completely opened. I had so much Dynamat applied to the
trunk that when you pushed the trunk button, it simply unlocked and
elevated
a pathetic 1/4", my wife wasn't real happy about that. I had Boston Pro
6.5" midbass drivers (no tweeters) for rear fill, run in mono (I thought
it
helped anchor my center image better in mono). I had fake burled wood
trim
on the inside put in, had the ENTIRE "premium" Bose system ripped out
(never
saw more than 2 hours of use, don't think the cassette deck of the double
DIN CD/Cassette player was EVER used). Had a burled wood push out spare
compartment to fill the DIN space left behind after the double DIN unit
was
removed. He built a beautiful amp rack with amp, a Phoenix Gold 15 band
EQ
(EQ15 something, don't remember the model number but they were very
popular
EQ's at the time and for years afterwards) and two Monster Cable .5 farad
caps tied together by two Monster gold plated buss barrs. The cool thing
was that the Phoenix Gold EQ and Monster caps all had lots of white and
blue
(and blue matched the amp of course) and all the wiring was hidden in a
pull-out compartment under the subwoofer so all the visable components
seemed to match with this blue and white theme. When the amp rack was in
it's compartment under the sub, I had two fans in a push/pull
configuration
to wash air over the entire affair but it was nearly impossible to SEE
those
fans ( however, you bet I fricken MADE the IASCA judges see those fans).
I
had an Optima Yellow top, Phoenix circuit breaker (as I still do today),
and
unlike now (I have Phoenix Gold RCA's and speaker wire now as I sold the
stereo with the Maxima as the stereo was completely "built-into" the car
so
there was more value in selling the stereo complete with the car rather
than
picking this thing and that out of it because obviously the subwoofer/amp
rack was built into the car) I had all Monster Cable high-end RCA's and
speaker wire throughout.

Anyway, the subs. I had a pair of Soundstream SPL12's, 12" subs in their
own 1.5 cuibic foot sealed enclosures. Now the enclosure was obviously in
the trunk, but the subs faced forward so when you put the rear seat
arm-rest
down you saw half of each sub, right there nearly at the opening. There
was
really no need for grills (although IASCA knocked some points off at one
event which ****ed me off) as there was no way you could accidentally
damage
one as you would have to reach through the arm rest hole to touch them and
of course nothing could accidentially fall back there or anything.

ANYWAY, it was truly a work of art. I mean it was beautiful. And I
certainly accumulated my share of trophies for the next few years. The
largest being this RIDICULOUS 5 foot high trophy I won at a Magnolia Hi-Fi
event, I won best of show, of course I think part of the reason I won that
is that every component in that car was bought from store that sponsored
the
event, it certainly couldn't have hurt. And I did well in the IASCA
circuit
competing in Tacoma, Seattle, and Portland. As I recall, I ALWAYS placed
(1st, 2nd or 3rd) competing in the amature 250-500 division I believe
(which
was actually a good division as the 150-300 watts division was MURDER as I
recall and there were always many more competitors in that catagory). I
had
enough points to go to nationals my first year but it was out of the
question as I couldn't take that much time away from work, nor did I want
to
have to rent a trailer or, of course, put several thousand miles on the
car
to drive to Daytona. Also, I knew enough about the real HEAVY HITTERS
like
Dave Rivera and Steve Brown who were already doing things with 'glass and
Rivera's ridiculous fishtanks he incorporated in all his installs to know
I
didn't stand a chance against these SPONSORED (unlike me) multi-kilobuck
systems.

Anyway, I'm actually finally getting to my original point which was how I
learned some important lessons about bass. Basically, it started when I
realized just by chance one day that when the trunk was open the bass
increased SUBSTANTIALLY. At the time, I had no idea why this was so. I
really didn't. So I believe I actually asked the question here nearly 15
years ago about why the hell my bass got so much louder when the trunk was
open. Like I said, I did not know the things I know now and I just
couldn't
wrap my head around this frankly annoying phenomena (I wanted this
substantially increased bass ALL THE TIME). And of course someone like
Manville Smith explained to me that what was happening was that as my
subwoofer cones were bassically at the center of the car and that bass is
going back (as well as forward), bouncing off the rear-trunk, then going
forward, this extra distance of travel causing these waves to become 180
degrees out of phase and when those waves catch up to the waves going
forward in the first place, they cancel out a substantial portion of my
bass. Of course, I've spent thousands, this enclosure and amp-rack drawer
are built into the car (I mean, when you opened my trunk, NOTHING would
tell
you there was a stereo there (except for the fact you might think it was a
very small trunk for a car that size), EVERYTHING was completely stealth
and
built in AS IF it had come with the car. It was a truly amazing install
job
and if I were to pay a shop to do the work, I'm sure it would have cost
several thousand dollars in installation alone (my friend did it for only
$1000 for all his hard work night after night, he guessed probably 50
hours,
and keep in mind, this is what he does for a living).

So of course, nothing could be done about the situation I found myself in,
and I just learned to accept it (because, OBVIOUSLY, turning the subwoofer
around was quite literally impossible unless I destroyed it first to get
it
out of the car).

So I learned a VERY expensive lesson in accoustics: you always want your
cones as close to the boundries of your car like corners or at least the
rear-end to avoid cancellation. You know, I kind of blamed my installer,
Glen, a bit as well. I mean, HE WAS CERTTIFIED for Pete's sake and should
have seen this coming. I also let him do the majority of designing the
system (I just picked out the components I wanted to use, but I let him
have
free reign with how the whole thing was to be designed and built. I
always
wonder if the subwoofers had simply been facing the rear with attractive
sub
grills and such, if the bass would have been much louder. OR, I now
wonder
if he had taken more time in sealing the space behind the sub with 1" MDF
if
those waves could have been prevented from going to the rear, because as
he
had it, he used just thin 1/8" plywood for facia elements covered in
automotive carpet that matched the Maxima's trunk carpet (of course he
used
3/4" MDF for the sub enclosure).

Now, to be fair, that system did pump out the bass pretty damn well. But
in
truth it doesn't come close to my two 15"s driven by my 1000 watt Class D
I
have now. I mean, my system now is TRULY a ground pounder, like none
other
I've ever owned. But, of course, beyond it's brute force, like I said,
it;s
SQ is simply AMAZING. Like I said at the begginging, THE BEST system I
have ever owned or even HEARD in my life.

Well, that was a whole lot of bull**** for no good reason. If anyone has
stories about their first systems or how they got into car audio I love
hearing those stories. I reallly do because if you're old like me (41),
in
high-school the **** was 6x9's, a cassette deck and booster EQ. THAT was
state of the art in '83 and was what I had in my first car (well, minus
the
booster EQ, but I did have a cassette deck which was considered "high-end"
anda pair of 6X9's. Of course it sounded like crap but we didn't know any
better.

Anyway, I love stories......please share......

MOSFET