Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
#1
Posted to rec.audio.car
|
|||
|
|||
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 |