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So I got home and had a package waiting for me. I picked up the 4 channel ssa amp when there was that friends and family sale going on. I was always on the fence about em but once that sale kicked off I just had to pick it up. Loved the pics of it and in. Person this amp is beautiful and has a nice strong solid build feel to it. Im replacing my hifonics Zeus 2000.4 amp so I can't wait to hear the quality this amp puts out. It it will be powering a pair of 8" Rockford pro audio. A pair of Rockford punch 6x9, pair of the ssa evil mids. And evil tweeters. Just thought id share. I don't see much of real hands on experiences with the amps.

Good. Shipped my oldest off to college in Aug so things around the house have been...different.

Love the pictures, thanks for jump on the F&F sale. Hope you enjoy that tank.

Test fitting pieces

Baffle just sittin there. Just to give you an idea of what it will look like

Fit on my hammer crimper

As for your statement that I always ask about drivers, indeed a good preference is helpful in narrowing things down but you are on a budget, doing a three way, and surely have goals that seem well thought out. As always the install (including tuning) is more important than the driver choice so as long as they have the capability to blend together you are fine. So yes, personally I would spend your money first on the mid, second on the beefiest XBL midbass you can get and then forego spending much on the tweeter.

I really just wanted you to compare the low frequency roll off of what you could achieve with the 4 vs the 3. That is all you can possibly gain and normally the small dash pod squashes it. If you can gain, then by all means but if not then I wanted you to draw the conclusion that works best in your car. Figure I could have just answered but thought that helping you think about it would be helpful. The FF85 is a great little driver. I run the TB W4-1337 as my near field setup at my desk for nearly the same reason. The W4 though requires a ridiculous passive crossover to tame it full range however (IIRC the crossovers were around $250 in passive components alone). Anything off axis and they would still need a tweeter. The other aspect of the 4" driver is the trade off of higher frequency. I know you see that people blow the little ND's, but IMO that is solely due to complete lack of experience. They can take plenty, but when you are looking at a driver that is only playing 6k+ you shouldn't expect that it makes your ears bleed and of course the beauty of the 3 way is that you can control that. Do realize that most people want loud setups. In fact in any blind testing with almost any quality of product the louder one is chosen. Exactly why blind testing is so hard. Obviously drivers that are horribly different in FR can toss the statement out the window. The second sad fact is that most people don't find loud clean setups to sound loud. In other words most people on any audio forum would want to drive their poor tweeter into oblivion so it sounds good to them. This is how you blow a tweeter. Outside of that the other largest reason for blowing a tweeter is not being diligent in checking your crossover settings before turning them up. How you tune has an effect on this as well. You should tune the mids first and get them to do everything you want. Then add the tweets only for filling in what the mids cannot. Expect it to take 30+ hours of listening and adjusting to really dial it in and then you are in the right mindset.

I’ve played with several DSP’s now and if you decide to go that route I think that next to the smaller miniDSP offerings the best overall one I’ve used for the money is the JL TWK88. That’s just my opinion though.