Impious

It's not true, because "better grade" (i.e. fancy and expensive) RCA's are unnecessary anywhere in the system.

Have a link to the owners manual?

I'm not sure what you mean?

Exactly. Without details of the motor, it's impossible to know how well the recone will work. And it's basket, not gasket. I thought it was a typo but you've used it in both posts now. No idea, we have no details of the motor. I would guess you probably don't even know the diameter of the coil. But beyond that, you don't have enough information about the motor to even begin to determine if the resulting subwoofer will be decent or crap. Nevermind my above posts, this statement settles it. YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS TRYING TO CUSTOM BUILD A SUBWOOFER. That simple. Don't do it. You don't know enough yet. It's not your fault, and I'm not calling you stupid or dumb as a person. But it would be a horribly stupid and dumb idea for you to build a custom subwoofer with the complete lack of knowledge you currently possess. Thiele Small Parameters

Pioneer Premier DEH-P600 hedunit, a pair of 10" Sentrek subs in a prefab bandpass enclosure with a 200w Sentrek 2-channel amplifier and Pioneer 6x9's in the rear deck. For those who don't know since Sentrek is now defunct.....they are pretty much equivalent to Pyramid. Although I was able to upgrade my Sentrek amplifier to a Lanzar Vibe and the subs to Kicker Comps (which were all the rage in my area) after about 6 months. Everyone was a n00b once.

Whether or not a prebuilt recone will "work" is going to depend upon the dimensions and design of the motor and the dimension and design of the recone. Just because you are getting a recone from a good brand, doesn't mean the end result will be worth a shit. This recone "custom sub" boner going around right now has left the n00bs with the idea that you can just randomly mix-n-match parts with great results and without an understanding of what it takes to properly design a driver. Just buying a prebuilt recone and dropping it into a different motor isn't a good way to go about doing things. Also, you will need a way to measure the T/S parameters of the subwoofer after it's built otherwise you will never be able to design a proper enclosure for it.

A good place to start; The Subwoofer DIY Page - 4th Order Bandpass Systems It has links to calculations in the side bar. General rule of thumb; the more efficient within the passband, the narrower the passband will be. So if you want to increase efficiency of the design, you're going to reduce the bandwidth. The size of each enclosure and tuning frequency will determine the bandwidth (and other aspects) of the enclosure. They are chosen based on design goals. Make sure you get T/S parameters for the sub you have having built. Without them an enclosure will be impossible to design.

x2. Ours will finally be paid off this spring, after about 10 years of trying to get it paid off. Never again. Like everyone already said, save and then buy. You'll feel better in the end knowing that the stuff is yours and you don't owe anyone for it. Not to sound like a dick, but the credit card wasn't the problem. Your irresponsible use of it was. Credit cards aren't evil if used properly. And as KU40 said; they are a good tool to begin building credit with and helping your credit score in the long run when used responsibly.

I honestly wouldn't worry too much about a single complaint with the BBB. Hell, I had a BBB complaint against me. I didn't do anything wrong, the customer just didn't like what I had to say, was upset about it and wanted to complain to someone. I would probably go to each shop and see if they can tell you how they would go about installing it. How and where they would make the connections, how and where the unit would be mounted, etc. Go with whichever gives you the warm & fuzzy feeling inside. It will probably be the installer talking to you...see which one gives you a feeling of confidence.

You don't need to build subwoofers for a living to understand that they recommend you tune high because the driver's Fs is ri-pucking-diculously high. I have some 7" mids here that have an Fs only 2hz higher than the Fs of the 12" HDC3. You're 7" mids are midbass drivers. (and a Fs of 43hz on a 12" inch driver isn't super high, and the 10 inch has a Fs of 41hz.) And remember the T/S specs aren't averaged between a few woofers, they took 1 woofer and took the T/S parameters without a break-in period.(Break in period lowers Fs quite a bit in a few cases.) No, an Fs of 43hz for a 12" driver is ridiculously high, and the reason the driver needs to be in a high tuned enclosure.

No, they don't.

With companies like RF you are paying for a custom engineered product from a corporation with employees and facilities to maintain, from engineers to customer service, and the need for internal R&D expenses (etc) primarily sold through a dealer network that also has employees and facilities to maintain and a product sold only to one market; the consumer (ignoring the OEM side of some companies like RF). With internet amplifier companies like Sundown you are receiving a product that was selected from a buildhouse, some part changes made and a different label stuck on the heatsink. The buildhouse sells units business to business, anywhere from a couple to dozens of companies and the internet company reselling the product doesn't have nearly the overhead as it's usually the owner and maybe one or two employees who likely have no benefits that need paid for (etc). That's not an overly detailed description, but it's easy to see why internet companies can sell an amplifier for a third of the price of an amplifier with comparable power in a retail store, and why the amplifiers in the retail store aren't "a ripoff"...they're selling for what they need to make a profit and stay in business.

Any hard surface acts as a "mirror" for sound waves. Luckily for us, the wavelengths of the of subbass soundwaves are significantly longer than the dimension of the enclosure....so these reflections aren't a problem.

Huh?

Depends on if "4ohm" means 4ohm per coil. The L7's were sold in both dual 4ohm and dual 2ohm.

Duran is like, wow, that was soooo 4,000 posts ago... Mark is like, wow, that was soooo 25,000 posts ago...

You don't need to build subwoofers for a living to understand that they recommend you tune high because the driver's Fs is ri-fucking-diculously high. I have some 7" mids here that have an Fs only 2hz higher than the Fs of the 12" HDC3.

[email protected] Or you could try to message him on here: Rudy - Viewing Profile And another +1 to dealing with Don. Great guy with great advice and superb products.

I would hope so. Depends on how poorly the speakers are installed, however. Your headunit won't output anywhere near 4V playing music at normal listening levels. I used an Eclipse deck with 8V outputs on an amplifier that had an input sensitivity range up to 1.5V with no problems. You will be fine.

I wasn't criticizing, just clarifying for others who will end up reading the thread. Many times people learning the more technical side get wrapped up in numbers without considering the actual audible implications.

I really don't care who dropped who. Read through my posts; I never really argued one way or the other on the actual details of the matter. My point was to discredit your business sense and you're idea that it would be a stupid business move by RF to drop BB, originating from your comment "Do you think a large corporation would give up it's largest sales tool on principle?" The answer is yes, I do think it's possible a company would and gave several reasons from business 101 (literally, it's pretty basic business principles). You're just too naive to understand why. BB may have dropped RF.....doesn't invalidate my points that 1) it could have made business sense for RF to drop BB, and 2) that regardless of how it happened, it very well may benefit RF in the end. But unfortunately these ideas are lost on you, as you don't understand business.

Yes, it would need to account for port end correction. But as was mentioned, what's the real audible difference in this scenario? Are you really going to hear a difference if tuning is 1 - 2hz different?

Rockford was a niche company, grew and expanded, then moved to the big box arena just 10yrs ago. Once that happened, their company image dropped and people started complaining about a decrease in quality. Seriously, I couldn't tell you the number of times I've seen or heard someone say something equivalent to "RF's gone to crap since they started selling them at BB". Funny, I googled "rockford+crap+best+buy" and the very first link it pulled up was a thread on another forum with the first post being: "I don't know if this a good or bad thing for Rockford, but it has to be good for speality retailer like my shop. Best Buy picked up Kicker to replace them. I can tell that rockford going to best buy wasn't great for the image in the highend dealers eyes. It made them look cheap. Maybe rockford can change there image be changing there direction." Interestingly....that sounds like EXACTLY the effect I was talking about. Hmmm......

You obviously didn't read the story, nor understand how it relates here. Nor are you looking at the larger picture. You think you've got it all figured out because you "think of money".....unfortunately you aren't looking at the strategy of how to generate that money. That is business. Money is not. Money is what results from a strong business strategy. If you have a poor business strategy guess what?.....you're not going to make any money. There's more to sales, revenue and profit than simply the number of units moved out the door. You also have to consider your brand's image to consumers in the market. You then have to realize how that brand image will affect what products you can offer in the market and what price you can them sell for. You also have to consider how the competing products being sold via the same outlet as your products will affect your pricing strategy and the level of quality and product you can offer through those outlets. If RF is branded as a "Best Buy" product it will affect the consumers perceived image of the brand. BB isn't known for their high quality car audio products, RF would more than likely prefer to be known for producing high quality car audio products. So how does it affect your company image if one of the most prominent retailers of your product is mainly selling low to mid level, mediocre, mass-market products? You'll be labeled as such as well. This will in turn affect the perceived level of quality of all of the lines of products and how much the consumer is willing to pay for those higher lines of products. If you're producing a high quality, higher cost, higher line of product but the consumer doesn't perceive it as such because of your brand image they aren't going to pay what you're asking.....where's this money you speak of going to come from? Also, in order to compete in the BB market you will have to price your products accordingly, which means you either eat into your own profit margin or produce a lower quality product, which again will affect your brand image and how the consumer perceives your entire product line up. So if you want to be known for high quality products that are sold through an independent dealer network (which will improve sales of those higher quality products and improve your ability to sell them for your asking price) but your lower lines are of decreasing quality because you need to keep up with the BB market that you're lower lines are being sold through, what's going to happen? Not as many people are going to be looking at those higher line of products.....sales fall, dealers start dropping the line, and soon all you're left with is the lower end low quality cheap product sold through Best Buy. If this isn't the direction you want to take the company due to profit margin, or product mix, or recouping costs, or relative percentage of sales of independent retailers vs national retailers, etc......where's this money you speak of going to come from? You're not looking at it from an objective business standpoint, you're looking at it from a blind "units = $ " standpoint which is not a solid business strategy. Oh, by the way....you claim RF's profit is down, they are about ready to tank. This happened while they had BB as a national retailer. So how's that strategy working out for them?