altoncustomtech

Oh yeah, there's probably going to be a fourth build where I would run a DCON or GCON coming up.

I'm just giving credit where I feel credit is due. BTW I would give just about anything to be a play a bigger role in that kind of stuff. I love every SSA product I've tried and do everything I can to get the SSA name out there. Not only do the products kick ass but the way you guys run things and take care of customers is top shelf in my book as well.

This enclosure at SonicElectronix is probably the best buy for a sealed prefab enclosure. After sub displacement it's really close to the optimal recommended enclosure volume for the DCON 12", it's a fairly well constructed enclsoure and the price is a hair more than $40.

The DCON is going to be your best friend for budget bass, I promise. I've bought four of them over the years, a 12" for my sister's Durango years ago, two 10"s for my wife's Traverse last year, and just last week a 12" for behind the seat in my son's pickup truck. I didn't buy more of them after I got the one for my sister because they're a budget friendly sub. I bought more of them for my own builds because the one I got for my sister has hands down been one of the best subs I've ever played with and deservingly so ESPECIALLY for what it costs. It's going to perform fine on the power you have in a sealed enclosure and in the future if you decide to upgrade your power a little and either build/have built a nice ported enclosure for it you'll never believe it's the same sub. I've told people in the past that if I had known what the DCON was capable of I would have bought two of them and a smaller amp for my minivan (which has two Fi 12" Q's and a Sundown SAZ-2000D $1200+ worth of equipment) and saved myself a ton of money, and I meant every word of it. Don't get me wrong, the Q's and the Sundown amp combo are absolutely unreal and honestly one of the best buys in audio equipment I've ever made over the years but I'm positive I would have been every bit as happy with DCON's in their place and put the money toward other things.

Try moving the balance to just one side, if you all of a sudden get better bass response then you either have one whole set wired out of phase or just the woofer. Out of phase means that not all the speakers are wired + to + and- to -. There are certain cases where out of phase is a good thing, it might even help your case, but that's what testing and tuning is for.

Great choice on the sub! I think you're going to love it. That's all I wanted to comment, Aaron's got you covered just fine otherwise.

No, no, that's awesome, just so rare anymore. I see so many people talking about running stuff not just at 1 ohm but at .5 and lower that seeing someone who wants to actually run higher just caught me off guard. LOL That's going to be fantastic! I know I love my XCON, I'm certain you'll love yours as well!!

RMS is a real world measurement, or can be and that's why you look at it. The peak ratings that many manufacturers use is strictly a marketing gimmick to lure in new buyers who aren't educated to the fact that the peak wattage number can be any made up number they want it to be. I like to refer to the peak amplifier wattage ratings as ILS ratings, If Lighting Strikes, lol. The RMS ratings you were referring to are measured ratings BUT they don't use music or speakers to make those measurements. They use a single frequency or tone and measure using a high power capacity resistor. It's the only way to get consistent, repeatable measurements. They have to use a single frequency to keep the output constant and consistent. They also have to use a resistor because a speaker is what's called a "reactive" load. Due to the physics involved in the inductance of the voice coil and several other physical factors the impedance, resistance or in other words the load the amplifier sees changes with frequency. So let's say at 1khz our imaginary speaker has an impedance right at 4 ohms, but say at 100hz the impedance is 10 ohms. Because of that the measured power applied to it would change just because the frequency did. A resistor is a dummy load, no matter what frequency is applied the resistance never changes. Therefore it's possible to get a consistent and repeatable measurement. Once you go and hook it up to a speaker and play music through it everything changes. The only analogy I can come up with to explain the dynamics in music is driving on a country road. The majority of the surface is somewhat smooth and the suspension doesn't have to travel much but mixed in with that is bumps, holes and things that make your suspension travel much more. It's varying constantly and therefore is dynamic in its response. Music works much like that where the smoother parts are the quieter instruments and parts of the song (think woodwind instruments, backup singers, a rhythm guitar). The rougher parts are lead guitars, the lighter rhythm of the drums, the lead singer and the roughest parts are the hard drum beats and bass guitar riffs and those parts of the song. All together it's a cacophony of sounds in a rhythm one finds pleasant to listen to. As far as the many more things it's a bit complicated to explain some of the aspects. The simple ones like location, aiming, mounting and deadening are easy enough and if you can get them right makes a lot of the other aspects less of an overall issue. Location doesn't mean just right where they put them from the factory. In fact the factory location and aiming are often about as bad as one can get for both. The best location depends on the speaker being used and what it's being used for. Typically the closer you can get the aiming to "on axis" or aimed at you, the listener, the better it is. Mounting refers to how the speaker is attached to the vehicle. The most common factory mounting methods are plastic rings or baffles or right to the sheet metal of the vehicle itself. Neither are great options as a speaker can produce a considerable amount of mechanical energy, especially when turned up loud. It should really be mounted to something solid, unmoving and acoustically dead. Which brings us to deadening. Deadening stops panel resonances (unwanted vibrations), mechanical noises (an interior panel slapping against the body for example), and blocks outside noises from coming through and into the cabin of the vehicle. As you can imagine this all can be quite an undertaking to accomplish inside of a vehicle. Which is why I keep saying "as close as possible".

D1 coils on a single sub? What amp are you running again?

15 feet isn't long, hell in the audio world 30 feet isn't long. At least not for that application. Power (watts) is a product of both CURRENT and voltage. First, look at it like this, say for the sake of easy math we're talking about 100 watts even. It would take 10 volts AND 10 amps of current to have 100 watts in our imaginary circuit. Now I wouldn't want to try to flow 10 amps of current through a 20 gauge wire, it would get ugly. However the power supply in an amplifier turns your cars 12v system into an AC signal, runs it through a step up transformer, and then turns it back into DC for the amplifier section. Now, let's say that in our imaginary circuit that the voltage is 50volts, not 10, that would mean the current would only be 2 amps to supply 100 watts of power. The 20 gauge wire may still be a little light but for the distance of run inside a vehicle it's manageable. Now we get into the other part of the way it works in audio. Just because an amplifier is rated as being capable of 100 watts of output does not mean that 100 watts is coming out of its outputs all the time. In fact, the only time the output gets anywhere near the full 100 watts is when the input signal is causing the amp to try to produce maximum output. In other words only when you have the volume cranked. Even then it's not holding there at maximum. Music is dynamic, it's lots of low to medium level material with some high level and occasionally maximum level material. So even at full volume 90% of a full song is low to medium level material, 7% is high level material and 3% is maximum level (depending on the music itself, how it was recorded and the quality of the recording. This is only an example). That means that even when you are listening to your music as loud as it can safely go that your amp is only outputting in its upper power ability 10 to 20% of the time. That's why we try to tell you that reading into and worrying so much about the numbers is such a waste of time. Trust me, I used to worry about every little number and everything years ago too. It wasn't until I spent a lot of time on here reading up on things, asking questions and talking to people that I realized that all my time and energy was focused on the wrong aspects. There are far more important, far more consequential things to worry about that make a much bigger difference than the power you're running to the speakers. That's not to say that what you're worrying about doesn't carry with it some merit but it should be lower on the scale than things like HOW the speakers are installed. Things like location, aiming, deadening, and many more items are the sum of HOW they're installed. The closer that stuff is to as good as it can get the better the overall result no matter how much power you run or things of that nature.

The best recommendation I can think of making that will point you in the right direction for a good quality amplifier is to tell you to look at the selection of amplifiers that are available in the SSA store here with the forum. There's no horsecrap max rated amps on this store. Additionally to reiterate what these guys are trying to tell you, don't get so caught up in the numbers. You'll go around and around in circles scratching your head and asking questions about every little detail when in the grand scheme of things it's really not that relevant. So far you've not even given any kind of budget for the amp. That can help us give some recommendations and/or point you in a good direction.

No, actually the enclosure is definitely far more important than the driver being used. It's possible for a great driver in a piss poor designed/built enclosure to be out performed by a sub-par driver in an excellently designed and constructed enclosure. Even though it's a generic sub it could still perform better in a ported enclosure. Being what it is there's probably not any T/S parameters available for it to model and find out. For a better understanding of what the specs mean and what to look for when choosing a driver for a particular application I highly suggest buying and reading "The Loudspeaker Cookbook" by Vance Dickason. For what it's worth I wish you could've gotten the DCON's. They're some of my favorite subs, I even have a pair them waiting for my slow ass to get the enclosure built so I can get them installed.

I loved working with it when I built my enclosure for the Jimmy. Much lighter, easier to cut and shape, but so much more expensive that it's hard to justify the price difference IMHO. You sure knocked it out of the park with that enclosure though, it's a beautiful work of art!

Surely by now those mids should be broke in and things dialed in a bit better, how's it sounding for you? Still loving those mids?

Welcome to the forum!!! Don't get discouraged by the time it takes to get there, it's definitely worth the wait! Take this time to work on getting everything else ready to go for it. I second Aaron's notion to start a build log for it!!

It's looking awesome Steve. I would love to see it in person one of these days.

Yeah, they just don't know any better or don't care enough that it becomes important to them. Either way, ignorance is bliss, is it not?? lol

I love it! SSD??

I love my 10" XCON!! I don't think you'll be disappointed in the least keeping the XCON and going down to the 10" size.

Welcome back! Glad to hear that the experience seemed to have been a positive one that is getting things turned in the right direction for you. Wish that was the case for more people. Looking forward to seeing you get it all rebuilt!

You typically want to set the SSF 3-5hz below the tuning frequency of the enclosure. However, just because someone tells you the enclosure is tuned to 35hz, or that's what the calculator said when you designed it, doesn't mean that's exactly what it's tuned to. There's a simple way to set the SSF using some test tones, and not that retarded CC1, that will be far more accurate. First off, get yourself a set of test tones that covers your target tuning frequency +/- 15hz at least, a full set is handy to have on hand period. Those or a tone generator on your phone, tablet, or as a piece of test equipment. Before you start, turn your SSF all the way down so it's not interfering with this procedure. Start with a tone that's about 10hz higher than your target tuning frequency and turn it up enough to get the sub moving very noticeably. Now, start changing frequencies one at a time down toward your target tuning frequency and watch the cone movement on the sub. Watch for the sub to move the least amount and then start moving more again and at that point you've actually gone below your tuning frequency. Back up and go back and forth a few hz until you're sure which frequency the sub was moving the least amount. THAT frequency is the REAL tuning frequency of your enclosure. If it happens to match the target frequency then great, if it doesn't don't be surprised. Lots of things that get missed in calculations, cuts, and construction can affect the final tuning frequency, it's no big deal. Now, change to a frequency that is 3hz to 5hz lower than the real tuning frequency of your enclosure and turn it up enough to really (and safely) get the sub cone moving good so it's easy to see. All you have to do now is turn your SSF dial up until the sub cone is moving about half as much as it was when you started and your SSF is set PROPERLY. That's all there is to it AND you have the added benefit of knowing exactly what your tuning frequency is.

Up for sale is a pair of gently used Boston Acoustics GT2125 two channel amplifiers. They're rated for 125wrms x 2 @ 4 ohms, 200wrms x 2 @ 2 ohms, 400wrms x 1 @ 4 ohms and 600wrms x 1 @ 2 ohms. According to the literature the amp is 1 ohm stable stereo, however it neglects to give a power rating for that wiring configuration. They're super clean and super nice and if it wasn't for a couple of things that are going on I probably wouldn't be selling them as I had intended to use them to power the Peerless SLS 8" woofers as the new dedicated midbass drivers in the Jimmy. I'm looking for $300 for the pair or $175 a piece, buyer pays PayPal fees and actual shipping.

PM Sent....

^^^^Exactly. Not only seen it other places and in past threads on here but also experienced it first hand. Although I've noticed it seems more prominent when running subs in a smaller than optimal enclosure with limited port area and on big power, of course that's a limited observation since I don't get around nearly as much of this stuff as you guys.

Absolutely beautiful install and car!!! I would love to see it one of these days.