Ok, I am the final stages of planning my system. Car is a 1997 Nissan Maxima. Musical preference is Rock and Roll( AcDc, Pink Floyd, Rush and pretty much all heavy metal). Amps are going to be all Sundown. I have 4 E8's on order for the midbass powered by a SAX-1004.D, 2 in front doors, 2 in rear deck. Front Stage (in addition to E8 midbass) will be Mach 5 MLi-65's and Seas 27TFFNC/G Tweeters active powered by a SAX-100.4D. My question comes down to the substage. I had originally planned 2 FI Q15's sealed on a SAZ-3000D. Only reason for that is I've always had sealed enclosures, I've never tried a ported. I'm open to opinions here, so here are the 2 options I'm tossing around.

The 2 FI Q15's in a 5cuft sealed box, or 2 Sundown Nightshade 15's in a ported box. Either setup running off of a SAZ-3000D.

Here is the plot for the Nightshade Box. It is 4.9cuft, common chamber with both 15's. 4.02" diameter 3.16" long cylindrical vent.

I know this is subjective, but since I've never heard either driver, and there is no dealers/installers in my area that are worth a darn I'm asking for your opinions.

I would like to go with a Complete Sundown system (except for mids and highs).

Obviously i will have to play around with how the box sounds in the car (driver and port direction), but looking at it on paper, it seems like it would fit well with my listening preferences.

Let me know if I left anything out that would help to answer the question.

Thanks, Bob.

i would say for the kind of music you listen to, i would go with 2 15" fi q's in a sealed box

To bad you can't go by that graph.

To bad you can't go by that graph.

Yea, wouldn't it be nice if life were that easy?

For "more SQ" I'd go with Qs - but since you are running dual 15s I imagine output is pretty important to you.

Two Nightshade 15s vented is brutal - but you will need ALOT more port area.

For "more SQ" I'd go with Qs - but since you are running dual 15s I imagine output is pretty important to you.

Yea, I'm having a little battle going on in my head with the whole SQ vs Output decision. My thoughts now are to try out the Nightshades vented, and if I don't like the sound, I'll do a new box sealed. I read a review somewhere on this forum with direct comparison between the Nightshade 15 and FI Q15. The results were that the sound quality was very similar except the Nightshade was much louder.

I'll have 4 E8's running midbass so I'm hoping they will help the bass sound good while listening to music while the 15's do what they do best and move lots of air

Two Nightshade 15s vented is brutal - but you will need ALOT more port area.

How would I go about figuring out the port area? When I go by either WinISD or the port calculators, they just help you with the tuning frequency. Do I just need to make it wider and longer to maintain the tuning freq but just let more air through?

Thanks again, Bob.

You need more port area.

About 12 in^2 per cubic foot... so for a 5 cubic foot box plan on 60 in^2 of port area.

The 15" version of the Nightshade actually does decent sealed - 80INCHES did it and still pulled 142 dB with one of them.

use AERO PORTS.. 2 6'' aeros ... will give u the port surface area u need and u can change ur tuning.. these can be aquired from www.partsexpress.com