Impious

Back in the day I had an add-on accessory for my Pioneer HU that would automatically mute the stereo anytime anyone in the vehicle was making or receiving a call on their cell phone. Problem was it wouldn't turn down the volume, just mute it while the call was in progress. So if you forgot to turn down the volume on the HU while it was muted, as soon as you hung up the stereo would un-mute with the volume at the same level it was before the phone call. Back then I had a stereo that was pretty loud (145+ db on the old mic style termlabs), so you wouldn't even be thinking about it and then the stereo would un-mute and start blasting. Scared me a few times as you aren't really ready for going from silence to 140+ db right after a phone call.

No it doesn't have to be in an enclosure. Most people wrap the backside of the driver in towels to absorb some of the midrange and create some frontwave/backwave separation. It's not perfect but it works.

If you think that's big, try fitting 3-ways in your kickpanels Took me a couple hours to even figure out how I wanted to do it. Ofcourse that's why everything takes me 18 times longer than it should, I spend more time thinking about shit than I do actually building it.

Different model years. The black Velocity amps were the older models, the white are newer models. They were getting blown out a couple years ago so they were really good deals for the power and quality. I haven't had the DR's for several years. Sold off the majority of my collection. I wanted to buy 2 DR amps from you when I first got into the game They were sweet old school amps. I wish I could have kept some but needed the funds to buy more stuff. Well, really I needed the money to replace the money I'd already spent on buying more stuff, as usual.

The sign says No Dogs! Yeah well, the sign's wrong......

Two comments. - all rules of thumb fail - "try" was the right word, but also implies that it isn't the only position you listen to them before settling on one Personally for any listening position (either both seats or strictly driver seat) I almost always start with them aimed basically towards the back of the HU. The key word is "start", that isn't always exactly how they end up. But off axis usually ends up working out best for me in the end. When doing kicks you should end up spending hours trying out different aimings, different positions, different arrangements, etc. You might find in your vehicle a different aiming scheme works better.

Different model years. The black Velocity amps were the older models, the white are newer models. They were getting blown out a couple years ago so they were really good deals for the power and quality. I haven't had the DR's for several years. Sold off the majority of my collection.

What made you decide to add one now? Same reason I decided to get rid of 147db of bass for a killer front stage, something different? Shits and giggles. I got bored, needed to entertain myself. I like to atleast do something to my stereo every year, but my original plans got tossed to the wayside due to life. I've had that Brahma sitting in my closet for a few years, decided to finally put it into service and figured while I was at it I might as well build something with a little boom boom since it'd been so long. And it's sort of nostalgic, takes me back to the days when I was first getting into the hobby.

It was sort of funny watching the dust fall like rain from my headliner when I first turned her up. Mind you it's been close to a decade since I've had a sub with significant output in my own vehicle.

I feel old......it's too loud.

Out with the old: In with the.....well, still sort of old, but new to my car;

I can't believe this statement didn't show up until the 3rd page.

Nice grab on that MS8. Warning though, it's not quite as plug-n-play as advertised It takes a little bit of tinkering still.

I wouldn't worry about AP. They can be a bitch to properly tune (getting the right density/restrictiveness of AP material to optimally affect the response) and IMO with a high quality driver and proper consideration to installation and tuning equivalent results can be obtained. One thing a lot of people do which I've done in the past is almost a pseudo-AP enclosure by venting the kick directly into the carpet (if you're not willing to vent outside the vehicle). This gives the driver a little more breathing room and can also reduce some of the internal reflections within the enclosure.

Stage height for the most part isn't going to come from your mids, it comes from the upper midrange and tweeters, which in a 2-way the tweeters will for the most part cover. In the midbass and lower midrange generally speaking your ears can't even determine "height", just left-right ques. The significant portion of the height ques are going to come from the tweeter in a 2-way. And following that the height has more to do with proper FR, proper time arrival and reflections, etc, and not necessarily the physical location of the drivers. If you sat in my car with your eyes closed I don't believe you'd be able to tell the speakers were next to your feet. As for width, you're only losing a couple inches in going from doors to kicks. Not enough to make a huge difference in width, although the ability to aim the drivers and get them away from the reflections/diffractions from being behind the door panel (as most people mount their mids) can often make a larger difference. In my car I get better overall imaging from the kicks without giving up really anything in width, and with venting to the fender airspace isn't an issue. But the main problem in my car with midbass in the kicks is I have a huge nasty peak that's generated. One of the things I should have done this summer was figure out if under-dash pads or something could have helped solved that issue but I haven't (forgot, dammit).....so for now I just let the MS-8 get rid of it for me.

IMO the best starting position to work from is to aim the drivers basically at the back of the headunit. This puts them being aimed almost straight across the vehicle, angled "up" slightly. Reason this seems to work well is because it puts both seats at approximately the same listening axis to both sets of speakers. One of the keys to proper imaging is to have the frequency response coming from each channel (left and right) to be equal to each other at the listening position, and with both speakers being at approximately the same listening axis this alleviates some of the FR issues related to the speakers themselves on each channel (although this obviously doesn't solve issues related to the acoustics of the vehicle creating differences in the FR between the left and right speakers). And by having the speakers at approximately the same listening axis for both seats, this creates a better environment for the stereo to sound "good" from both front seats. Sounding good to passengers isn't a requirement though. It's up to you. It's impossible to optimize a car stereo to sound good from two different listening positions. So by attempting to make it sound "good" from the passenger seat you're inherently going to have to give up something from the driver's seat. Ideally if you concerned yourself only with the driver's seat you would get better results than trying to also make it sound good from the passenger seat. Yes, I would have the mid up higher and the tweeter down lower for the reason you mentioned.....it keeps the tweeter further away from the underside of the dash. As for airspace......my kicks are vented into my fenders, so airspace isn't a problem Something to think about. Some people ascribe to the small is good theory......personally IMO that's not a great solution. Remember than an enclosure is a 2nd order highpass filter, and it affects the Q which affects the decay portion of the transient response. You can model the approximate response in any enclosure program, and you can mock up an enclosure for testing purposes larger than necessary then use wood blocks to raise and lower the enclosure volume so you can see what you think about how the volume affects the midbass response.

Keep in mind that article only deals with the "impulse" side of the transient response but not the "decay" side of the response, which is dictated primarily by system Q. And yes, you can have too much motor force.

I guess now I'm sorta against doing a three way since it'll require more processing and my budget won't allow for something like an ms-8, bit ten, and so forth. If I could find a single driver say around 4" diameter with a depth less then 3" I could mount it in dash and have it on-axis with the driver seat (my dome, lol). I may be able to fit a 4" diameter driver in the kicks along with the ex-anarchy, maybe maybe. I'm pretty set on the mid bass drivers so I'll likely order those in a few days, once I get them then I can place them in the kicks and start making some mockups, see what space I have left for other drivers. If you are buying an amplifier anyways.....you could always use the on-board xover in the amp to lowpass the midrange and highpass the tweeters. It'll limit your amp selection to something that will allow a high enough highpass/lowpass for the midrange and tweeter xover point, but then you could still get by with a "3-way" processor and run a 3-way active front stage with a tweeter.

My 3-way Bravox are all in my kicks. You can't tell, my stage is still ~6 inches above the dash. If you are doing an array (even a small one) my opinion would be to stack the drivers vertically and not horizontally. Something similar to your 5th picture above. The reason I would say this is because the dispersion is reduced in the orientation of the array, which works to our advantage if you're trying to avoid reflections, and generally the off-axis FR is also worse in the orientation of the array. So if you stack vertically you are limiting dispersion towards the dash and floor which reduces reflections and you aren't sitting in the off-axis area, if you run the array horizontally you are going to have more reflections off the dash and you'll be sitting in more of the "off-axis field" from the opposite side speakers.....which isn't good. Though again, I don't think tweeterless with an array is a great idea. If you have a 6" center-to-center spacing (with two 3" drivers) then the interference is potentially going to start around 2250hz and get worse as you increase in frequency.

IMO not a good plan to try to run tweeterless with the driver aimed at the windshield. Not a fan of reflecting off the windshield to begin with, but trying to do it with a driver running full range on the top end is going to be a bad idea. Also IMO not a good idea to try to run tweeterless with an array of midrange drivers. Due to the driver spacing you will run into some interference issues in the upper octaves which will mess up the response and you won't be able to EQ it out. That said a 3-way with a midrange array I think is a good idea properly implemented. I wanted to try one this summer but ran out of time and money. I think an MTM in the kicks would work pretty well. But requiring a 3-way front stage will limit your processing options as you would need a "4-way" processor. If you wanted to go with dash mounting about your only realistic option running tweeterless is to get the midrange drivers both on-axis with you.

Are you building this strictly for competition or is this your daily listening system? If it's your daily listening system then I'd say fuck it, as long as you are happy with how it sounds then don't worry about the meter. If this is a system for competitions, then you have a lot to learn. A 32hz tuning isn't going to have an extremely high peak SPL on the meter. In determining the best frequency to play the vehicle is part of the equation, but the combination of the vehicle plus the enclosure are going to determine what frequencies works best for your particular scenario. It's not something we can tell you over the internet, you have to do some testing to figure it out. I don't know who gave you that information about the port, but it seems extremely arbitrary. What's important for a port is having sufficient cross sectional area and low port turbulence. It doesn't have to be a slot port, round ports can work great especially with proper flare. And it doesn't have to be a certain minimum length....the length depends on your tuning.

You're never going to get crafty if you don't attempt these sorts of things. The only way any of us have learned what we've learned is by spending a weekend in the driveway messing things up a few times before we finally got it right. Or you could pay a shop to install them if you really don't have the tools and patience to try it yourself.

Maybe I'm old fashioned but I don't understand the point of spending ~$400 on something strictly to surf the web when I can spend on the same amount of money and get a fully featured laptop. I have an extra 20 seconds to spend to wait for my laptop to boot up. I suppose maybe in a corporate environment these might be beneficial, but for the individual consumer I fail to see the point. Ofcourse this is coming from a guy who doesn't have a smart phone & just got text messaging on his phone last year.

You do not want midbass under the seats. Nor in the middle of the car. In the rear can technically work but there are some conditions that would have to be met and it's not extremely easy to do right. Best place would be front doors or kickpanels. Some "subs" will work well as midbass. Others won't. So it's really just going to depend. IMO rather than try to add midbass to your current setup, you would be far better off just getting rid of the 4" front speakers and replace them with a 6.5" comp set.

I think they do, but I watched that Micheal Moore doc. on them. They apparently have a high level of crime that goes on in their parking lots (theft, kidnapping, rape), they install cameras, but have no one to monitor them. It wasn't Michael Moore, it was a Richard Greenwald documentary called "The High Cost of Low Prices". Regardless, I'd call & report it to the police. From what I could find briefly via Google the value for a crime to become "grand theft" instead of just petty larceny in California is $950. If you could establish that the value they took was over that amount it would be a felony which might help your case considering it's probably on camera.