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#1
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
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 |
#2
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
When I said Fosgate 767's, I meant Boston Accoustics 767's. I think I made
that error several times in that last post. MOSFET |
#3
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
Also, when I said "no wonder Denon went out of business", of course I meant
no wonder Denon stopped making cat audio amplifiers, because the one I had STUNK, and I think the model number was something like DCA-400 (or at least 400 was the model number I'm quite sure, and like I said although it was RATED at 30 x 2 it MAYBE put out 20 watts X 2 RMS. Very underpowered for a rather large amp, a little larger than my MUCH more powerful Fosgate Punch 75 and INCREDIBLY larger than the more powerful Alpine 3522. MOSFET "MOSFET" wrote in message ... When I said Fosgate 767's, I meant Boston Accoustics 767's. I think I made that error several times in that last post. MOSFET |
#4
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
On Jun 11, 7:16*pm, "MOSFET" wrote:
Also, when I said "no wonder Denon went out of business", of course I meant no wonder Denon stopped making cat audio amplifiers I never heard any cat audio I wanted amplified, (except maybe those little tiny kitten mews, those are barely audible, but so cute!) Our cat moans in the middle of the night and wakes everyone up. If they had stuck to the plan and made cat audio attenuators like I told em to, they woulda definately stayed in business. |
#5
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
Well I prefer Tabby amplifiers as the sound tends to be cleaner and bit more
laid back than your standard Calico amplifier. Of course, when using a cat amplifer, you must make sure voltage does not drop too much as you will begin drawing more amperes to compensate (ohm's law: watts=volts X amperes) and the increased heat from higher amperage draw CAN fry a cat of you are not careful. The smell is a dead (no pun intended) givaway if this is occuring so I always recommend the use of circuit breakers or fuses near the cat so this does not occur. Of course, the other drawback from cat amplifiers is there is often a lot of hiss (OK, well, hissing), screetching, moaning, and caterwauling. All of this can effect SQ. Tongue planted squarely in cheek, MOSFET "suprstar" wrote in message ... On Jun 11, 7:16 pm, "MOSFET" wrote: Also, when I said "no wonder Denon went out of business", of course I meant no wonder Denon stopped making cat audio amplifiers I never heard any cat audio I wanted amplified, (except maybe those little tiny kitten mews, those are barely audible, but so cute!) Our cat moans in the middle of the night and wakes everyone up. If they had stuck to the plan and made cat audio attenuators like I told em to, they woulda definately stayed in business. |
#6
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
Haha, seriously tho, I wish there were cat audio attenuators..
So I see traffic is approaching zero around here lately? Last time I was here, I think you blew up some JL tweeters, captain howdy was posting your personal info, and bob wald was preaching about pyramid's superiority... That'd be about the time I got my last new car, and had my entire system transplanted from the old car. You upgrade your system? BAH! I've had the SAME system in my last 3 cars - alpine hu, 2 kicker ix704 amps that must be 12 years old - one to run the 4 corners (70x4), the other bridged for the subs (280x2), and a pair of jl 12w6's in the trunk. Rock solid, still pounds as good as ever. I'd upgrade any of it, if it ever died! I wonder if bob wald's rockwood/pyramid/pyle system is still running |
#7
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
Yes, you certainly DO remember what was going on way back when. But I
don't recognize your handle. Were you using a different one back then (I say that only because anyone who would know that much about RAC comings and goings probably posted a thing or two, yet I don't remember any "suprstar")? I am glad your system is still going strong. Yes, those JL 12W6 were, and are, great subwoofers that I can easily imagine DECADES of use out of them. Of course, any decent amplifier will work FOREVER as long as you don't fry it in some way. Most of my amps are 10+ years old. It would be ALL of my amps but given the fact that NOBODY makes an aftermarket HO alternator for a Subaru Forrester (and trust me, I've spent DAYS searching this one out), with great reluctance I sold my trusty old Soundstream Refference 700 (150 watts X 2 RMS at 4 ohms, 700 watts RMS bridged to one channel at one ohm) and bought an Alpine Class D 1000 watt amplifier, the MRV-850. As promised, the Class D hype is no BS, my bass increased significantly as my Soundstream NEVER got anywhere near putting out 700 watts (although it did see one ohm) as my voltage would drop to around 11 volts when really cranking it. With the Class D amp, different story, the voltage DOES NOT drop off the map anymore despite the fact I am using four amps: a 50 watt per channel vintage Phoenix Gold amp drives my Infinity Kappa Series 10 front tweets, a vintage Fosgate Punch 225.2 drives my front midbass 6.5" Alpine Class R midbass drivers (those drivers are absolutely INCREDIBLE, I CAN NOT say enough about these speakers, and I have used the BEST 6.5" drivers MB Quart, JL and Boston Accoustics makes, these Alpine drivers leave all others in the DUST, they need LOTS of power, I mean AT LEAST 150 watts X 2 RMS, which is basically what my Fosgate is giving them, but I suspect they can take much more! They are the only midbass speaks I have ever owned where I can turn off my sub system, turn the X-over down on the Alpines, I typically have them set at 80 Hz, and play bass heavy music at moderate levels and YOU WOULD NOT KNOW THE SUB WASN'T WORKING!!!! That's how much bass those babies can produce, and produce it clearly and with sharp dynamics and punch). The last amp is a reliable Jensen (don't laugh) amplifier that puts out 40 watts X 2 (or maybe 50 watts, I'm not sure but it is rather large and, well, "fancy" looking) that is only 6 years old that drives my rear fill and has never given me a moment's trouble. And then of course my Alpine MRV-850 Class D subwoofer amp. My system sounds AMAZING right now. I am very happy with my Kappa tweets though I am always on a quest for the "perfect in car tweeter" which I have yet to hear though these Kappa's come close as do the old JL VR series. I want tweeters that sound so realistic that you can close your eyes and pretend you are at a live venue. I know this is not all the function of the speakers as it depends on the recording process and the dynamic range of the source component AND the dynamic range of the recording as it is the VERY HIGH harmoics of some instruments and many other very high frequency sounds that tip is off that we are listening to a live performance. Often it is difficult to put your finger on exactly what separates a live performance from a WELL recorded and WELL played back one. Most all people seem to know immediately whether they are listening to a live performace or a canned one, no matter how good the playback equipment, I happen to know (although a human may be unaware this is it) that it is the VERY high frequencies that tip us off that it is live. I want a tweeter that posses these qualities. But, again, it is more than just speakers involved. Point is, I enjoy trying different tweeters although I must say I am VERY pleased at how well my Class R 6.5" Alpine's mesh with the Infinities. I have the crossovers dialed in EXACTLY where I want it (using a Coustic XM-3, one of the few X-overs capable of an adjustable high pass up to 8kHz with the emplyment of a times 20, x 20, switch on one of the channels). I have the Infinity's high passed at 4kHz, 12 dB every octive. Anyway, I have had some recent problems with theft and needed to replace my subwoofers. I bought a pair of 15" Accoustic Research subs that work magnificicently. I have never used 15" subs in the past as the common notion is that they are not as "punchy" and fast as 10"'s or even 12" subs. I certainly don't find this to be the case. However I went with 15's b/c of a silly reason, I just happened to have on hand a very large dual 15" 3/4" MDF sealed box (each of the two chambers are sealed and have about 1.75 square feet of airspace) so I decided, what the heck, try 15"'s, I already have the box ready to go. And I'm damn glad I did as these larger subs are naturally more efficient and can play lower. Combined with my Class D amp, I now posses on top of a beautifully sounding car (deep, wide, soundstage with well centered and anchored center image), I now offically posses what could best be described as a "Ground Pounder" capable of being heard MANY blocks away IF I HAD ANY DESIRE TO DO SO. Anyway, my $.02, MOSFET "suprstar" wrote in message ... Haha, seriously tho, I wish there were cat audio attenuators.. So I see traffic is approaching zero around here lately? Last time I was here, I think you blew up some JL tweeters, captain howdy was posting your personal info, and bob wald was preaching about pyramid's superiority... That'd be about the time I got my last new car, and had my entire system transplanted from the old car. You upgrade your system? BAH! I've had the SAME system in my last 3 cars - alpine hu, 2 kicker ix704 amps that must be 12 years old - one to run the 4 corners (70x4), the other bridged for the subs (280x2), and a pair of jl 12w6's in the trunk. Rock solid, still pounds as good as ever. I'd upgrade any of it, if it ever died! I wonder if bob wald's rockwood/pyramid/pyle system is still running |
#8
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
I was going by 'mfreak' back then, but I wasn't a huge poster.. I
answered some newbie q's here and there, like how to wire up subs to different impedances or whatever.. I never had a huge elaborate system, (well I guess it depends who you ask :P ) No eq, the only crossovers I have are the ones on the amps, no caps, no flashy install.. Just a sub box in the trunk with a couple amps bolted to it, and flop the back seats down.. I always had aftermarket speakers in the 4 corners, the stock speakers would never take the power. I like my music, I like it loud, and I try to be respectful in neighborhoods etc, but yeah, even quiet bass travels pretty far. In the old days I was obnoxious and stupid, everyone heard me coming and going everywhere. Which means everyone knew I had a system. Which means I got broken into a lot, and got 2 complete 2x12 dual amp systems stolen. The junkyard guy knew me cuz I kept coming back to get windows for whatever I was driving at the time. I got real good at replacing glass..... I've been into car audio since I ever had a car. My first car was an 83 ford ranger with an AM radio and one speaker! I took apart the dash and re-wired some cheap HU and 6x9's in auto shop in high school, like every day! I eventually got an mtx terminator 12 and god knows what pos amp, and it's been snowballing since. I bought and sold tons of amps and subs on ebay, just to try everything out. I lost a few bucks every time, I considered it paying for the experience. ppi, rf, kicker, alpine, mtx, pg, jbl, boston acoustics, you name it. I pushed my feedback into the hundreds just doing that. Anyway, it kinda plateau'ed off 10-15 years ago, it's as loud and bassy as I care for now, no need to go any bigger. The sq is acceptable, I wouldn't mind pushing it, but I can't really justify the expense.. I'd pay a lot to get a little bit more, and I'm happy where I am now, I haven't bought a new piece of car audio gear in years. Plus I have other more expensive hobbies now. Ie recording and production, I have a fairly decked out recording studio in my basement. I'm a metal head, I play in bands, got tons of instruments, mics, acoustic treatment, anything a typical rock band would need to play or record. I spend more time and $ on that lately than anything else. I had some Alpine R's once, 5x7's in the front doors of my mazda. Someone told me the doors took 5x7's, but they took 6x8's. The 5x7's fit tho, so whatever.. I wasn't blown away by them or anything, they worked tho. I had em crossed over at 110 (per the dial on the amp) and really pushed em really hard. I blew one of them and got a new pair of pioneers that the install shop was talking up, they were bigger, took more power, and cheaper. I didn't transplant those to my next car. Actually, the only inside speakers I ever DID transplant was a pair of infinity 63.3i's. I was broke and heard everyone talking em up, I was drooling over those for months before I finally got em. At first I thought they were VERY bright and harsh sounding, I was kinda ****ed and suprised. IDK if they broke in, or I finally got the crossovers/eq set right, but I eventually liked em a lot. Oh well, g2g, I'm sposed to be working :P |
#9
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
Of course I remember "mfreak". How's it hanging?
Yes, when I first got heavily into car audio when I was 18-19 and had my first subwoofer and outboard amp put in (a Fosgate Punch 75 amp and a 12" Punch sub in ported box), I have to admitt I had my foolish moments as I finally possed one of "THOSE CARS" that could be heard and felt a block or two away. I have ALWAYS been into bass, however. In one of my threads I recount the story of how when I entered high-school the music department (which I was a part of, I played tennor sax) had a very old Ampeg bass amplifier that did not work. It was a huge and heavy affair with two 15" drivers in the speaker cabinet and then it had a seperate tube "head" that sat on top. It was about 5 feet high. Anyway, I convinced my band instructor who I had befriended to let me take it home and try to fix it. It turns out it just needed three new fuses and it worked fine again. Did I immediately give it back to the school? NO FRIKKIN' WAY!!!!! I used it as a subwoofer in my elaborate stereo in my room: I had a Technics turntable, Technics cassette deck with Dolby B, C and the new DBX, which actually worked AMAZINGLY well, you just could only play a tape recorded with DBX on a DBX enabled cassette deck, But on a metal tape, I remember recording CD's with DBX on a metal tape and then playing the original on the CDplayer; A/B' ing it and I SWEAR TO GOD you could not hear any difference. I had a Radio Shack 12 band EQ, Pioneer reciever, and then an Akki real-to-real deck which made AMAZING quality recordings of course. Of course every SINGLE component was that brushed aluminum color fashionable in the early and middle 80's, and late seventies. Anyhoo, that Ampeg amp CRANKED out the bass like you would not believe. My friends used to tell me they could hear my music 9 blocks away with my window open in my room when I REALLY had it going. So my love of bass started early, even before this I used to DJ the dances in middle school, now were talking late 70's, and we used a pair of Realistic Mach One speakers as our school dance speakers and a powerful amplifier and outboard turntables and a cassette deck. When prepping before the dance my friends and I would have this system in our much smaller classroom (as opposed to the gym where the dance was held) and after school we would put on bass heavy music and just crank the hell out of it. I would have to say that was my first taste of what I consider VERY low, VERY loud bass. And a love affair was born..... Anyway, so I, like you, was more reckless in my youth and, like you, I have NO DOUBT it cost me the breaking in of my car and sometimes all of my system was stolen, sometimes just a couple of pieces, this happened at least three times in a five year period. I had an alarm put in but inevitably, now and then, would forget to engage it. If you don't care about bothering your neighbors, at least take heed in my warning that theives are everywhere and a loud, booming system is like the ice cream man to a 7 year old. MOSFET "suprstar" wrote in message ... I was going by 'mfreak' back then, but I wasn't a huge poster.. I answered some newbie q's here and there, like how to wire up subs to different impedances or whatever.. I never had a huge elaborate system, (well I guess it depends who you ask :P ) No eq, the only crossovers I have are the ones on the amps, no caps, no flashy install.. Just a sub box in the trunk with a couple amps bolted to it, and flop the back seats down.. I always had aftermarket speakers in the 4 corners, the stock speakers would never take the power. I like my music, I like it loud, and I try to be respectful in neighborhoods etc, but yeah, even quiet bass travels pretty far. In the old days I was obnoxious and stupid, everyone heard me coming and going everywhere. Which means everyone knew I had a system. Which means I got broken into a lot, and got 2 complete 2x12 dual amp systems stolen. The junkyard guy knew me cuz I kept coming back to get windows for whatever I was driving at the time. I got real good at replacing glass..... I've been into car audio since I ever had a car. My first car was an 83 ford ranger with an AM radio and one speaker! I took apart the dash and re-wired some cheap HU and 6x9's in auto shop in high school, like every day! I eventually got an mtx terminator 12 and god knows what pos amp, and it's been snowballing since. I bought and sold tons of amps and subs on ebay, just to try everything out. I lost a few bucks every time, I considered it paying for the experience. ppi, rf, kicker, alpine, mtx, pg, jbl, boston acoustics, you name it. I pushed my feedback into the hundreds just doing that. Anyway, it kinda plateau'ed off 10-15 years ago, it's as loud and bassy as I care for now, no need to go any bigger. The sq is acceptable, I wouldn't mind pushing it, but I can't really justify the expense.. I'd pay a lot to get a little bit more, and I'm happy where I am now, I haven't bought a new piece of car audio gear in years. Plus I have other more expensive hobbies now. Ie recording and production, I have a fairly decked out recording studio in my basement. I'm a metal head, I play in bands, got tons of instruments, mics, acoustic treatment, anything a typical rock band would need to play or record. I spend more time and $ on that lately than anything else. I had some Alpine R's once, 5x7's in the front doors of my mazda. Someone told me the doors took 5x7's, but they took 6x8's. The 5x7's fit tho, so whatever.. I wasn't blown away by them or anything, they worked tho. I had em crossed over at 110 (per the dial on the amp) and really pushed em really hard. I blew one of them and got a new pair of pioneers that the install shop was talking up, they were bigger, took more power, and cheaper. I didn't transplant those to my next car. Actually, the only inside speakers I ever DID transplant was a pair of infinity 63.3i's. I was broke and heard everyone talking em up, I was drooling over those for months before I finally got em. At first I thought they were VERY bright and harsh sounding, I was kinda ****ed and suprised. IDK if they broke in, or I finally got the crossovers/eq set right, but I eventually liked em a lot. Oh well, g2g, I'm sposed to be working :P |
#10
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
It's going ok, I kinda faded out of here when all that spam started
up, that was out of control... Yeah I've grown up a lot since then, live and learn. I'd get a pair of 15's but they wouldn't fit in my trunk! My 2x12 box is a little on the small side, I got those jl's sealed at about 1.1 cf per side, minus the driver displacement, so I call it 1.0. (they want 1.25). If I was ever gonna deck out my van of something, that could be sweet! I would go with 1x15, but I don't think any single 15 could out-play my 2x12's, so I'm sticking with em. Altho I'm kinda curious about those L7 square kicker subs, I knew a guy with a single 10 in the hatch of his camaro, that sounded better than any 10 I ever heard. I'd prolly go so far as to say better than any 2x10 setup I ever heard. Even if it lost a little spl over my 2x12's, if it went lower I might be interested, but it's not really worth the $$ for me to try it and find out.. |
#11
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
Altho I'm kinda curious about those L7 square kicker subs, I
knew a guy with a single 10 in the hatch of his camaro, that sounded better than any 10 I ever heard. I'd prolly go so far as to say better than any 2x10 setup I ever heard. Even if it lost a little spl over my 2x12's, if it went lower I might be interested, but it's not really worth the $$ for me to try it and find out.. I have always been impressed with Kicker's Sqaure subs, in particular the L7 series. When they first came out I TRULY thought it was a gimmick to draw attention OR a way for SPL competitors to squeeze more cone area into a givem size baffle (obviously, square subs would fit together better that round subs leaving less unused baffle area). HOWEVER, I remember exactly where I was (you know, one of those seminal moments where you always remember where you are and what you were doing) the first time I heard one, I was at Car Audio City on Aurora Ave. in Seattle (I think I have the name right) in 1999 or 2000. They had a single L7 12" in a ported box and I was absolutely spellbound by the incredible amount of bass this thing could produce, it was like a pair of 15"'s (in fact, I remember asking the staff if there was another subwoofer or multiple subs also playing, the answer was obviously no)!!!! I probably stayed there for several hours just listening to this incredible subwoofer, trying to wrap my head around the fact that so much bass was coming out of a single 12". Like you said, everytime I've heard ONE, it's like hearing TWO. Naturally I wanted one, but the price was high and realisticaly I could achhieve the same level of bass at a lower cost with two or more lesser subs as opposed to a single L7. Of course the ultimate in my mind was a pair of 12" L7's, the problem with that, however, is that I certainly did not have the power to drive them adequately, which would require more than a powerful amp, but a complete upgarade of my electrical system starting with a large HO alternator. Too much money. But for someone who does not want to use too much space for a sub box like in a very small car, they cannot be beat. Anyway, those are incredible subs. I don't know if all the marketing BS about the square shape is what makes them so incredible, but they certainly deliver the goods, BIG TIME. MOSFET |
#12
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
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 |
#13
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
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 |
#14
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
And I just can't help add one more thing. What the hell is it with me that
bugs you so much? Why did you try and sell my car on an on-line car sales site, a nasty trick I reported to your IP which might have explained your mysterious three month absense from this group. What have I done to you? I try to be polite and helpful to all. I am NOT an EE and I would certainly not claim to know everything in the world about car audio. And I certainly may make a mistake now and then, and I have absolutely no problem copping to my mistakes. But here's the thing, I HAVE been involved with car audio for over 20 years now. That is absolutely, positively true as my wife would more than attest. I HAVE worked for Phoenix Gold in their marketing department as I have an MBA from the University of Portland, class of '95. All of these facts can be checked out and verified, my name is Nicholas Victor Tanner. Phoenix Gold would be happy to tell you I have worked for them and the University of Portland Business School would certainly be more than happy to verify for you that I got my MBA in 1995, hell, I'll Email you a photo of my degree. They would also tell you I taught a Consumer Behavior class to both graduates and undergrads as an adjunct proffessor, and NO, I don't mean I was a TA, I designed the curriculm, had an office, office hours, the works (I did this in the evenings and was paid quite well, I mean it's a private Catholic school), the students called me Dr. Tanner which was technically incorrect as I don't have a PhD, but YOU KNOW I didn't correct them as I liked the sound of it. What education do you have, just out of curiosity (I want to know the education level of your average troll). I competed in IASCA events for years and have installed DOZENS of systems for friends, family and myself. Again, do I know it all? Of course not. But do I know a hell of a lot about car audio? I think I can honestly say, yes, I do. Certainly enough to help 90% of the questions that come this way. So again, I don't know where all the annimous (do you know what that word means?) comes from. I REALLY don't. But you're blocked so I won't hear any response and frankly, I really don't care. 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 |
#15
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Oh man I'm borred.......
See I told ya that you're a ****brick. You're the biggest **** tart on rac in many years. Over the years your advice has changed more then the weather. I don't know who tried to sell your car, must of been one of your fans or someone you ripped off on Ebay. http://tinyurl.com/ysz5gv In article , "MOSFET" wrote: And I just can't help add one more thing. What the hell is it with me that bugs you so much? Why did you try and sell my car on an on-line car sales site, a nasty trick I reported to your IP which might have explained your mysterious three month absense from this group. What have I done to you? I try to be polite and helpful to all. I am NOT an EE and I would certainly not claim to know everything in the world about car audio. And I certainly may make a mistake now and then, and I have absolutely no problem copping to my mistakes. But here's the thing, I HAVE been involved with car audio for over 20 years now. That is absolutely, positively true as my wife would more than attest. I HAVE worked for Phoenix Gold in their marketing department as I have an MBA from the University of Portland, class of '95. All of these facts can be checked out and verified, my name is Nicholas Victor Tanner. Phoenix Gold would be happy to tell you I have worked for them and the University of Portland Business School would certainly be more than happy to verify for you that I got my MBA in 1995, hell, I'll Email you a photo of my degree. They would also tell you I taught a Consumer Behavior class to both graduates and undergrads as an adjunct proffessor, and NO, I don't mean I was a TA, I designed the curriculm, had an office, office hours, the works (I did this in the evenings and was paid quite well, I mean it's a private Catholic school), the students called me Dr. Tanner which was technically incorrect as I don't have a PhD, but YOU KNOW I didn't correct them as I liked the sound of it. What education do you have, just out of curiosity (I want to know the education level of your average troll). I competed in IASCA events for years and have installed DOZENS of systems for friends, family and myself. Again, do I know it all? Of course not. But do I know a hell of a lot about car audio? I think I can honestly say, yes, I do. Certainly enough to help 90% of the questions that come this way. So again, I don't know where all the annimous (do you know what that word means?) comes from. I REALLY don't. But you're blocked so I won't hear any response and frankly, I really don't care. 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 |
#16
Posted to rec.audio.car
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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 |
#18
Posted to rec.audio.car
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Howdy, you CHANGED your Email address...NUTJOB, PSYCHO!
Like I told you more then likely someone you ripped off on ebay tried to sell
your worthless car. You know all about crooks and how they do it, being one yourself. In article , "MOSFET" wrote: Here's yet another example of your very weird obsession with me. And EVERYONE can see this for themselves to prove my point. I had you blocked but you CHANGED YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS JUST SO I WOULD SEE WHAT YOU POSTED. Your address WAS and I blocked you and now your address is . I have blocked that one as well but I'l bet you'll CHANGE IT AGAIN. If this doesn't prove you're like some crazy stalker I don't know what does. OBVIOUSLY anyone who would go through this much trouble would certainly pull a stunt like try and sell my car online, I mean duh. And BTW, you can change your Email address as many times as you like you psycho nut-job, I'm NOT going to read anything of yours and just add your new addresses to my blocked list. CRAZY! CUCKOO!!! STALKER!!! NUTJOB!!! But hell, go ahead and just keep trying things. I'm curious to what lengths a crazy, obsessed Internet stalker will go to try to dis me or make my life miserable or whatever your crazy, ****ed up mind thinks you are doing to me. The REAL answer is nothing, except mild amusement and subtle bewilderment. But changing your Email speaks VOLUMES about your psychotic nature. MOSFET "Captain Howdy" wrote in message ... See I told ya that you're a ****brick. You're the biggest **** tart on rac in many years. Over the years your advice has changed more then the weather. I don't know who tried to sell your car, must of been one of your fans or someone you ripped off on Ebay. http://tinyurl.com/ysz5gv In article , "MOSFET" wrote: And I just can't help add one more thing. What the hell is it with me that bugs you so much? Why did you try and sell my car on an on-line car sales site, a nasty trick I reported to your IP which might have explained your mysterious three month absense from this group. What have I done to you? I try to be polite and helpful to all. I am NOT an EE and I would certainly not claim to know everything in the world about car audio. And I certainly may make a mistake now and then, and I have absolutely no problem copping to my mistakes. But here's the thing, I HAVE been involved with car audio for over 20 years now. That is absolutely, positively true as my wife would more than attest. I HAVE worked for Phoenix Gold in their marketing department as I have an MBA from the University of Portland, class of '95. All of these facts can be checked out and verified, my name is Nicholas Victor Tanner. Phoenix Gold would be happy to tell you I have worked for them and the University of Portland Business School would certainly be more than happy to verify for you that I got my MBA in 1995, hell, I'll Email you a photo of my degree. They would also tell you I taught a Consumer Behavior class to both graduates and undergrads as an adjunct proffessor, and NO, I don't mean I was a TA, I designed the curriculm, had an office, office hours, the works (I did this in the evenings and was paid quite well, I mean it's a private Catholic school), the students called me Dr. Tanner which was technically incorrect as I don't have a PhD, but YOU KNOW I didn't correct them as I liked the sound of it. What education do you have, just out of curiosity (I want to know the education level of your average troll). I competed in IASCA events for years and have installed DOZENS of systems for friends, family and myself. Again, do I know it all? Of course not. But do I know a hell of a lot about car audio? I think I can honestly say, yes, I do. Certainly enough to help 90% of the questions that come this way. So again, I don't know where all the annimous (do you know what that word means?) comes from. I REALLY don't. But you're blocked so I won't hear any response and frankly, I really don't care. 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 |