Third Eye Vision

car: 1997 Nissan Altima 4 door. Seats dont fold down, so I take advantage of the armrest that folds down and gives access to the trunk. sub budget: About $200, looking at the SA 12, Lethal Injection 12, Fi SSD12, and I was looking at the Ascendant Audio Chaos 12 but didnt see a price listed. box budget: I can afford to spend the 200 on a custom box if that is what will be best for my situation. total budget: I suppose I could allow myself to pick up a soundsplinter rlp12 if I don't get a ported box and stick with sealed. trunk space: no issue, since I'm only running one 12. output: Since my subs sound so terrible at anything over 60hz I keep my crossover at 60hz, and everything under 60 hits pretty hard. I've never heard a ported box so I guess ignorance is bliss. I really like underground hip hop, the beats dont knock as hard but I prefer the music/lyrics. Edit: I'm running stock electrical and again I'm not trying to get my car to be the loudest in town, so I'm going to be running at around 600w. I think that will be plenty for one sub. My alternator is only like a year old so I'm not looking to get a 300amp alt or anything unless this one goes out. Thanks for the replies.

I don't want to upset anyone by saying I'm looking for an SQ setup if I'm actually looking for SPL, so I'm hoping someone can steer me in the right direction. I don't like mainstream rap music, and I don't ever plan on getting my setup metered or compete, so big dB numbers arent a concern. I listen to mostly underground hip hop and a little bit of rock, like 80s metallica/slayer, so hardly any of the songs I listen to dip into the really low frequency range. I'm running 2 audiobahns in a sealed box at about 2.7cf, and because of their design, they are incredibly cramped in my enclosure (go into WinISD and look up the Audiobahn AW1251 and let it select the optimum sealed box, and you'll see what I mean). The only time my bass doesnt sound boomy or muddy is if I actually play Young Jeezy or something that only has real low notes. So basically all of the music I want to listen to sounds like shit, and everything I don't want to listen to sounds decent. So what should I be looking to build? Should I even be looking at getting a custom ported box built? And if so, should I just be looking to tune it higher? From what I've read on here people that tune their stuff low just listen to jeezy and three 6 mafia, and when people tune higher they are looking to hit big spl numbers so I think thats where I'm confused. Can someone shed some light? Edit: Not really sure how to sum it up, but I am NOT looking for real loud deep bass at low frequencies, I am looking for good sounding bass up to about 80hz and I do not have an amp for my door/deck speakers. I dont know if that is considered an SQ setup or not, cause of the term being so subjective, but I don't see any point to me building a box/sub setup that only sounds good on music that I don't listen to. Most of my music doesn't get too low to able able to take advantage of a low tuned ported box.

You could try emailing sub companies that come with those on the subs, I got an old fosgate 12 from a buddy a few years back that had one on it. Im hoping it fits the lethal injection 12 im orderin soon.

If the stuff on SSA's store is out of your price range, check out sonicelectronix.com they have a lot of the usual brand name stuff for pretty cheap. Not sure what your electrical is like or if you are planning to go over the 600w recommended rating, but last time I checked they had some older model Kicker 500w amps for 199 bucks. I was gonna grab one til I found a refurb sae1000d for 230 bucks, so obviously I went with the sundown.

i had this same problem, where is your bass level at on your deck? i was told to leave that where you normally have it before adjusting the gain on the amp. i turned my bass level all the way to negative 15 and only got up to about 12v on the multimeter. after i fired up my car the bass sounded real weak until i turned the bass level back up to zero, im assuming this is where the lack of voltage is stemming from. im gonna go back out this weekend to see if that was why. edit: my deck has a seperate subwoofer gain control on it besides the whole EQ. i think what most people mean when they say turn all your settings to zero is the eq. but someoen can correct me if im wrong -15 on the sub output would be all the way DOWN. You'd want to set the gain with it at 0, as that is all the way up. That's why you had low voltage at the amp's outputs- input voltage from the head unit was low. my bad i should have clarified that when i first did the dmm test i had read that i was supposed to have all the gain/bass levels at zero, which i took as all the way down. it was only after i gave up that i read online that they should be at the normal listening level.

The SAE 1200D is the same price might as well go big or go home. i think he said hes gettin a single LI 4 ohm DVC so hes gonna be running at 2 ohm, so he wouldnt be able to take advantage of the extra 200 watts that the 1 ohm load lists.

i had this same problem, where is your bass level at on your deck? i was told to leave that where you normally have it before adjusting the gain on the amp. i turned my bass level all the way to negative 15 and only got up to about 12v on the multimeter. after i fired up my car the bass sounded real weak until i turned the bass level back up to zero, im assuming this is where the lack of voltage is stemming from. im gonna go back out this weekend to see if that was why. edit: my deck has a seperate subwoofer gain control on it besides the whole EQ. i think what most people mean when they say turn all your settings to zero is the eq. but someoen can correct me if im wrong

x2 hope it doesnt go up. I might have to buy elsewhere. What was the previous model price for a 12 inch? they updated their site and the price hasnt changed, they even added the copper coil option stock.

i was looking at ssa's store and your listed enclosure size for a sealed box is 1 cf. i got a 1.3cf sealed box right now, what would be the recommended power level to run in an enclosure of that size? I'm orderin one of your 1000w amps this weekend and figured might as well run the sa sub too. edit: im only going to be pushin a 2 ohm load, im not going to be givin it the full G at 1 ohm.

Well I emailed shuriken after reading this to tell them that I was considering using their 60ah model that lists like 1500 cranking amps as a starting battery to see what they thought about it. They emailed me this morning saying that battery cant handle being used as a starting battery, and that they only stock one battery that is designed for dual usage like that. So like you said the numbers they are posting for CA's are either exaggerated or they are measuring wrong. Thanks for letting me know those were phony numbers before I went out and threw that battery under the hood. I guess I'll just rig it up in the trunk.

Thanks for the help guys, I set it to 4 volts since that was what my head unit says it is. It sounded pretty weak, then I remembered i had the subwoofer level on the deck turned all the way down to -15. so i turned it back up to 0 and it sounds good. I'll have to readjust everything later, but I turned on a song that hits good and the voltage didnt drop below 13v so I think I have it set pretty well. I'll have to check it again later since I only let it play for about 30 seconds, it might drop more if I continue to play. edit: i had the dmm set at VAC 200

yeah I made a cd with test tones, 50hz for my subs, and the rest are to match my eq on my deck. I read the pinned article on here on how to set amplifier gains and thats what I was going by. The calculations explained how to "gain down". Like if you had an amp that put out more than your subs, to do the math by the rms of your subs. Which is what I'm trying to do. His example was 100w x 4 ohms, and the square root of that was the voltage you wanted to set the amp to. For that setup it was 20v, I did mine at 600 x 4 ohms, and I got 48.9v. I matched it up with JL's website and their tutorial explained the same thing, only their target voltage was 31.6v. I must be understanding it all wrong.

x2, and you shall be set. i thought it was supposed to match up with the chart like JL's website says, where 600w at 4 ohms should be 48.9V edit: i have a 1000w rms amp, and im trying to get it more around 5-600 so my stock electrical can keep up with the output until I can purchase the wiring for the big 3 as well as a new battery.

i just went out and purchased a multimeter so i could set the gains properly on my amp. i unhooked my subs, put on a 50hz test tone and turned my stereo up to 24/35. i put the multimeter plugs into the -/+ terminals to test voltage and all i got was 3 volts. I turned the amp up 3/4 of the way and it only gave me 9. any ideas as to what could be the problem?

I compared the cranking amps with the battery I have now and it's much stronger, I have a duralast gold that lists 750 cold cranking Amps and 935 cranking Amps. The shuriken bt-80 has 1900 cranking amps, doesnt list cold cranking but if its anything like the duralast im guessin its a few hundred less than 1900.

I just saw a post from xspower and one of the questions answered was it's ability to be used as a starting battery. I want to pick up a shuriken to replace my starting battery and was just wonderin if anyone uses them as a starting batt or if they are able to be used as one. I've read they are similar to kinetiks and saw those being used as starting batts. thanks.

Got ya, thanks man. I'll let you guys know how it turns out. Any idea what size fuse I should run in between the alt/batt? I'm running 1000w RMS and I don't plan on exceeding that.

Yeah I'm doing the pos wire too. I figured that part out, my main concern was that there is only one ground coming off my battery, the neg term to engine block. That's why I was asking if I should just replace the stock neg-block wire, or should I replace that and also add a new block to chassis ground, cause as far as I can tell there is none. Thanks for the quick reply.

I'm about to order a 25ft. roll of 1/0 gauge wire to do the Big 3. I watched the video from Maxxsonics on it too see exactly what I needed to do, and it shows him pointing out 2 separate grounds that were stock on the vehicle before he added any wire. One from the battery to the chassis, and one from the engine block to chassis. When I opened the hood on my Altima I saw that there was only one wire coming off of the negative terminal on the battery, it grounded straight to the engine block. Is this a sufficient ground, or do I still need to find another bolt somewhere on the block to make a new connection to the chassis?

my girlfriend just has really big hands!

Hey guys I'm trying to make some test tones with Adobe Audition so I can calibrate my amp as well as my head unit. I'm using the highest sample rate in the program, 192,000, and I'm using 32 bit resolution. So I'm assuming this is the highest quality audio I can get off the computer. Anyways my question is which format should I save them as? I know that mp3 is a lossy format, and the program has like 20 different ones I can choose. The other thing is I have to able to put them onto a burnable cd, so I'm assuming that limits me to just mp3 and wav. But the program lists about 5 different wav formats, so which one should I choose? Any help would be appreciated. A/mu-Law Wave (*.wav) ACM Waveform (*.wav) DVI/I AM A ADPCM (*.wav) Microsoft ADPCM (*.wav) Windows PCM (*.wav) Edit: Nevermind, I looked up the online manual and it says Windows PCM for lossless audio. So mods you can delete this if you dont want it taking up space.

Hey I got an amp that says its minimum impedance bridged is 4 ohms, and will produce 1000w at 4 ohms bridged. Ive been running 2 dual 4 ohm subs to make the 4 ohms bridged mode, but due to power limitations I want to take out one of the subs so I can get more power to push a single sub. Since the amp does 1000w bridged at 4 ohms, would it be safe to assume that if I wired a single sub to run at 8 ohms, it would produce 500w rms bridged? Edit: by power limitations I mean I'm running my stock 80 amp alternator, no spare battery and no big 3. so my subs have to split somewhere around 400 watts, id rather just push one at 400 watts than 2 at 200.

How do you go about finding a good spot in the firewall to drill thru? I had to tuck my wires behind the wheel well and around the frame to get it into my car without drilling a hole cause i didnt want to mess anything up. and because of that I had to use 4 gauge wire or my wire would get crushed by the inside of the door. its pretty shitty looking, but was all i could do.

I plan on redoing my whole system, piece by piece every check. I replaced my old clarion deck with one of those kenwood excelons a few weeks ago. I really liked the clarion but it lacked the ipod connection and I mostly use my ipod. Next payday I plan on picking up some cable to do the big 3 and a shuriken battery. I want to replace my hifonics amp with an mtx 1000XD d class amp to help with efficiency, and last but not least an fi subwoofer in a huge ported box to replace my tired old audiobahns in a small sealed box. I dont plan on doing anything about my interior speakers though, at least not the rear speakers. I might upgrade my front door speakers in the future though.

Thanks dude, after watching those vids I realized I am in desperate need of a spare battery. I'm running off an 80A alternator. doing the math provided that gives me 1152W to spare, and with the cars electrical system using around 40% im left with 483W to divide between my two subs. I'm sure even less than that since I haven't done the big 3. And here I thought I was actually gettin 500w to each sub with my 1000w amp.