Trep's 1999 F150 Ford Single Cab Truck

[Trepkos 1]

Woo, My first time deadening anything or even touching deadening material, I think is went pretty swell though considering it was my first time and I was doing this alone.

Only trouble I really had were the corners and ofcourse the multitude of wrinkles.

Now time for the ensolite, now Im a bit scared because Im hoping I have enough ensolite to finish the door panels completely after using as much as I did on the floor. I decided to just single layer the floor since it doesn't rattle that much if at all.

Going to try putting the floor back in now and begin installing the amplifier, distribution blocks and etc.

Ensolite went fairly smooth, few wrinkles here and there. Probably not the most presentable and professional job but it should work.

[coobies5 43]

looks good imo

[Trepkos 1]

With everything in the cab in the place where they will more than likely sit.

Another view.

[Tmax98 3]

looks good

[Trepkos 1]

Fixed the remote wire by wiring it into the ignition.

Then I began to work on removing the old component system's components and deadening the doors, unfortunately due to time restraints I only got this much done.

Installed the tweeters.

Got atleast 85% of the internal wall of the door deadened, triple layered behind the speaker.

That is but only one door though, tomorrow is going to be a tough work day though. Hopefully cutting new baffles, installing the wiring, install baffles and midbass, crossovers, finish deadening and installing the subwoofer for good.

These crossovers though are huge and won't fit in the door panels so Im hoping I can fit them under the seat in the middle with the distribution blocks.

[coobies5 43]

thats crazy, i had to splice my remote turn on into the ignition as well in my f150

[skierman 0]

Noticed the Ole Miss tag. Hotty Toddy, nice work.

[Trepkos 1]

[QuestionMan 0]

I've been watching this log since you started, its great, thanks for taking the time to put in details. This gets me itching to start on my frontstage (right now i bascically consist of substage. period. lol), gotta wait for the $ though. I'm a little nervous about fitting the mids and tweets in my doors, not gonna lie lol, but nice job on yours.

Edited June 24, 2008 by QuestionMan

[Trepkos 1]

I've been watching this log since you started, its great, thanks for taking the time to put in details. This gets me itching to start on my frontstage (right now i bascically consist of substage. period. lol), gotta wait for the $ though. I'm a little nervous about fitting the mids and tweets in my doors, not gonna lie lol, but nice job on yours.

Im about to include a log of entries I made on the other thread on caraudio.com involving the whole tweaking an tuning process and other difficulties Ive faced and still facing to help update you guys on the situation.

[Trepkos 1]

Tuning Journal

Entry One

Well, I wired it up and did a test run and there is not much movement coming from the sub woofer at all. Been playing with the setting a bit, Ive been looking for the forum post telling you what each setting was but its been deleted.

The mids and highs sound good, not crazy good but good, bit of distortion on the midbass because it tries to hit the low notes harder than I guess its suppose to.

Anyways, if anyone could tell me...

The issue was actually a lose wire in the back terminal of the box on the outside which was knocked loose when we were moving the box into its location behind the seat.

Entry Two

How much deadener? probably roughly about 1.3-1.5 rolls.

Regarding the speak

ers, yeah I realized to stop the distortion my gains are pretty much a tiny bit above their minimum. The subwoofer is working now, one of the wires was lose on the back of the box when we were fitting the box into the back wall, must have knocked one loose.

It hits now, extremely loud. At volume 21 of 35, it shakes the entire internal cab, but I'll have to do some tweaking. The component set sounds really nice and midbass is reasonably loud.

The deadening stopped alot of the external rattling tin-bucket related sounds plus improved the midbass response and also stopped most of the rattling inside the truck(unfortunately things within and on the dash still make a few noises).

Tomorrow we will be putting the seats, which may be the hardest part of the installation because of all the equipment inside the truck.

I was incredibly optimistic at this point due to getting the subwoofer moving and moving well, but alot of trouble and heartbreak was soon to come. Most of my description here is ever so slightly exaggerated.

Entry Three

Well an update. For some reason, the midbass is trying to hit notes lower than the frequency I have set on the LPF on the amplifier. The subwoofer is hitting okish, but everytime it does hit, the speakers on the right side distort or shut off completely(temporaily though)

I think we can all spot the problem here from the above description, but I couldn't....at the time.

To fix this problem, I found out that the RCA's needed to be switched behind the HU, and the two-channel amplifier needed to be on HPF instead of full.

Entry Four

The RCA's were actually backwards, I think there may be some issues with the subwoofer RCA and I need to do some more tweaking with the mids and highs.

Aha! But the RCA's are fine unlike I had thought. More to come.

Entry Five

Im way up north from you.

Anyways heres the update.

The same issues that plagued me the last install are back so I'm not sure what the problem is, since everything has been replaced and changed since the last install EXCEPT the RCA cables, which are KnuKonceptz Krystal RCA cables. I'm going to play around with a few other RCA cables and see if I can find the solution.

The problems are the following:

1. The subwoofer will not hit unless the bass boost is turned up on the remote bass boost. Supposedly the subwoofer should be able to perform better than that off of a Hifonics Bxi1606d amplifier(which argueably may not be able to output the complete advertised wattage), but there should be atleast some movement from the subwoofer at its current settings.

3/4 on the gains, bass boost on the amp at 0, HU bass boost on 0, lpf at around 45hz and the subsonic set at 15hz.

This was the same problem with the last system except for even the bass boost on the amplifier and HU bass settings could be turned all of the way up and not affect the output.

2. Due to some extremely stupid RCA backwards wiring, the midbass might be blown because of the fact that they the amplifier that was powering them was being sent a signal from the subwoofer pre-amp on the HU.

3. The remote wire didn't work eventhough it had worked before the installation when I initially installed the cd player. But in the course of the installation, hoping that I would not have to fool around with taking out the HU during the install, I had to wire the remote to the ignition due to the remote wire not outputting any voltage as before.

4. Midbass is repeatedly trying to hit lower notes than its suppose to and bottoming out in the process which sounds horrible. The component system itself doesn't sound very cost effective at the moment, Im hoping some tweaking will help that or the fault might lie in the RCA cables.

A rainbow SLC 08' 6.5" component set being powered by a sundown sax 100.2 two channel amplifier should be extremely crisp, clear, and loud. Instead the midbass is bottoming out and making a popping noise whenever it tries to hit the lows, the tweeters sound so-so, and the set won't get very loud without overly distorting or the midbass popping.

Thats the gist of it, Im going to either try to fix it myself today or find alot of the problems and tune the sound of it, if all else fails then Im going to take it to some professional installer and see what they can make of it.

This system should sound alot better than it does.

Hehehe you can sense the disappointment in that post but atleast I was pinpointing problems and drawing up solutions to try and fix them.

Entry Six

Well the subwoofer hits really hard if you turn the remote bass boost up, but otherwise, notso much.

Up goes the HU subwoofer setting and up goes the gains, down goes the bass boost and say hello to real loud yet nice and responsive bass.

Entry Seven

Nothing wrong regarding the RCA cables, took an Y-Adapter to it and it didn't make a single difference between the RCA's running from the HU and the RCA's coming from the Y-Adapter.

Maybe the impedance is off, is a DMM in anyway accurate in showing the impedance load on an amplifier or of a speaker?

Impedance is fine, RCA's are fine. Im missing something here.

Entry Eight

Any tips on tuning the the component set some more?

Theres three switches on the amplifier, LPF, Full, and HPF, I managed to stop the popping by switching to the HPF. But theres no real midbass now, and the subwoofer is not playing any notes higher than the 40-45hz. '

I'll go outside and play with it a in a minute though. I thought most people dont even have to mess with any kind of bass or subwoofer outputting options to get large amount of bass from their system.

Now as you can see Im trying to work on the component set, mainly the amplifier settings.

Entry Nine

Played around with it and got no real positive response from anything you told me. Noticed the subwoofer kinda bottoms out below 34hz, the tweeters distort heavily on bass hits, the mids pop unless the amplifier is set to HPF.

Pretty awful to be honest, Im very disappointed. Im going to go to a professional audio shop tomorrow and see what they're opinion on the situation is.

Alot more disappointment....

Entry Ten

Well, I went into the audio shop today and got my professional opinion, he didn't actually come outside and look at the system or play with the settings but more-so just talked around the information I was giving him.

He basically said for me to flatline or reset the HU and turn all the settings down on the amplifiers, then turn the subwoofer output up on the amplifier and set the gains from there and then set everything else on the amplifiers from there and then the HU EQ settings.

He also told me that I knew too much "intellectual bookie horse chit" about car audio.

Followed what he told me and Im getting a better performance, I may have to move the midbass to about 100hz on the crossover because its having trouble hitting notes in the 80-85hz range. The subwoofer is hitting fairly hard with the bass boost on the remote and amp turned all the way down, the gains turned mostly up and the HU subwoofer setting on +5(out of +15).

I set the HPF a little higher which allowed me to set the sensitivity on the sundown amplifier also higher, unfortunately this makes the system mids and highs extremely loud it also causes the rainbow crossovers to attentuate the tweeters. I can probably grab some silver wire jumpers and modify the crossovers to get rid of the tweeter volume precaution mechanism. I was also reading the rainbow audio manual for the first time since the component set installation(I just read it to learn how to install the tweeters in their flush mount cups), and I learned that the crossover can be manipulated for alot of different sound and power management with the aid of taking silver wire jumpers and arranging them on the crossover circuit board, that'll be interesting.

With the HU subwoofer setting higher and the gains set quite high, the bass is much more clean and responsive plus I set the LPF so it plays over a wide spectrum of frequencies ranging from 25hz to 70-80ish. Now to readjust the midbass and stop the tweeters from attenuating(though I do not want to kill the tweeters).

This is where things begin to look up.

Entry Eleven

Yep still tweaking, I'm thinking about setting the subwoofer output to +15 on the HU and then setting the gains a bit lower to even it all out. The mids and highs are coming along, I moved the Front speakers EQ to the octave of 90hz with a -18db slope per octave on the HU. I played some test tones with the two channel amplifier only activated and found that the 70-79hz range was causing the midbass to bottom out, the 80-89hz wasn't really really bad, the 90-99hz was playing smoothly.

One of the worst sounding songs on my system(which is saying alot now, since its starting to come together) is Fake It by seether. Where the beginning intro with static is amplified by the tweeters making it sound awful where as on computer speakers, that static and distortion is muffled.

Oh yeah, one of the bars on the grille came off when two of the screws broke holding it in, Im guessing from an incident where the seat was moved back and must have broke it. I will fix that, more ensolite is coming in tomorrow, which I may put behind the 6.5"'s in the door. And maybe do a bit more deadening work, Im planning on cleaning the inside of the truck a bit and also places on the door where there is tar from the deadening material.

And that is my latest submission. Funny to see the evolution of this tuning process.

[Aaron Clinton 2,372]

Love all the details!

[Trepkos 1]

Love all the details!

Thank you, glad that some people actually read them.

[tezin87 0]

I agree, this was a very informative build log. Good work.

[Trepkos 1]

I agree, this was a very informative build log. Good work.

Thank you all, the tuning is coming along real nicely.

I am planning on putting a small amount of this extra ensolite I ordered behind the midbass in the doors to stop any reflecting sound waves. The tuning is coming on smoothly, I need to work on the tweeter attenuation and hopefully fix it in the crossovers as well as set the crossovers up.

[Trepkos 1]

IMG]http://i286.photobucket.com/albums/ll101/Trepkos01/DSCN2021.jpg

[coobies5 43]

lets see some vids now = D

[tezin87 0]

I hate sitting so close to the steering wheel....I've been doing it for 5 years now. But I'm sure it is worth it with what you've got behind your seats. Let me know how you like those rainbows once you get them all dialed in. One side of my pg rsd's blew after less than a week of play time and I'm looking for a new comp. set.

[Trepkos 1]

I hate sitting so close to the steering wheel....I've been doing it for 5 years now. But I'm sure it is worth it with what you've got behind your seats. Let me know how you like those rainbows once you get them all dialed in. One side of my pg rsd's blew after less than a week of play time and I'm looking for a new comp. set.

The rainbows already sound very nice and worth the money and much better than my previous pg rsd set.

[tezin87 0]

I'm thinking about picking up a pair of those maybe at the end of the summer. It's hard to get the good stuff though when you're on a college budget. How hard was it to remove that back trim with the dremel? If I did that in my ranger I'd free up a ton more space.

[Trepkos 1]

I'm thinking about picking up a pair of those maybe at the end of the summer. It's hard to get the good stuff though when you're on a college budget. How hard was it to remove that back trim with the dremel? If I did that in my ranger I'd free up a ton more space.

Not hard at all, just make sure you get a durable preferably metal disc.

[tezin87 0]

Ok, thanks. Where did you order those rainbows from? I'm going to start shopping around soon.

[Trepkos 1]

The rainbows came from 6spdcoupe on caraudio.com forums.

Just register there and PM him. The set was $260 including shipping.

[tezin87 0]

Already registered there...just never posted. I like it over here more Thanks for all the tips/advice, its really appreciated.