Help car speakers

[tris-]

just installed a big phat sub in my car but the current speakers are only rated 50 watts RMS. sadly this means the bass is drowning out the higher frequency stuff as its quite a bit louder. i could turn the sub down but wheres the fun if the windows arnt shattering?

it seems googling that most speakers are about £20 a pair, is this about right? i reckon the space for them in the doors is about 6" and im looking for some that are about 200 watts RMS each (should handle future upgrades that way). can anyone recommend any, or are they all pretty much the same quality in the price bracket?
in the future ill probably go for a new head unit too as the current one is 4 channel x 50w, cant bridge or anything though.

 

[Chilly]

eugh - just turn the sub down. dont need to be a dick disturbing every person you drive past.

 

[tris-]

nice way to make an assumption you mother fucking assumer.

i dont turn the volume up untill im out of the streets. street driving i keep it at a normal volume. there is still nice bass at low volumes and outside the car you cant hear it (i checked, and i checked with a high volume. couldnt hear shit).

now, can you recommend me anything?

 

[Chilly]

hah ok, sorry

I know a lot about audio, specifically big fat fuck off systems in clubs and gigs and stuff but roughly zero about car audio since I down own a car.

 

[tris-]

i see, well ive got a more general question i suppose too.

id much prefer if i could get as little bass as poss from the speakers, obviously the sub is always going to sound better. can you specifically buy stuff like mid > high range speakers and very little low range?

 

[Chilly]

Yeah of course. You'll need either an aplifier that can drive the mid tops separately fro the bass OR a gizmo called a crossover that will split your signal for you (and you can tweak the nobs to change the crossover point to suit your equipment). I' not sure about car versions of these, but a medium quality 1U pro unit will set you back 100-200 quid. I'd imagine a cut down car version would be a quarter of that, perhaps a third, depending on quality etc.

Also, you dont want to feed your bassbox medium/high frequency because its not designed to respond at those frequencies and may cause varying types of damage depending on how robust is it and how loud you clang it out.

 

[Chilly]

Ah also, crossovers operate at LINE level not speaker/amp level (this means you need two amps, one for bass + the rest).

alternatively you use active speakers that have their own crossovers and amps built in. I'm not sure about car audio so wouldnt know about the availability of such kit there.

 

[tris-]

ive set the amp cross over to low, it was either that or flat/high. we managed to install everything perfectly so no probs with the amp and sub. the way it works is that from the front amp, there is an RCA output, and on the sub amp there is an RCA input. so it is effectively two amps.

there is an amp for the front speakers, so i need speakers called mid tops?

 

[Chilly]

mid top just means middle and top frequencies. Happily these tend to be orders of magnitude more efficient than full range speakers (not to mention smaller) so you can get more decibels for your watt from a given speaker size.

You need those + an amp that wont send them bass - sending bass to mid/tops will certainly fuck them so you need to be particularly careful here. Imagine running a flat DC signal through your speakers: thats what youd be doing by pumping bass into them.

 

[tris-]

on the front amp there is the choice to turn down the bass to zero.

firstly would this do the trick for these type of speakers?
secondly would doing that stop bass going to the other amp? it is a line thingy and low input.

 

[Chilly]

I'd test the bass yourself to verify that. If you can stop bass to the front entirely then you should be laughing. a 100W RMS mid/top pair will do you fine in that setup, even with like 750W of bass - its the efficiency at higher frequencies kicking in.

 

[tris-]

cheers.
whats a simple way to check that my self?
im not an expert by any means.

 

[Chilly]

your ears pal. disconnect the sub, tweak the bass see the effect. reconnect sub - turn it down and listen to see if the sub is still going. Disconnect the fronts entirely and fiddle the bass nob, if the sub changes at all then you know the nob effects the sub out too.

 

[tris-]

before i put the sub in i did try everything at zero so i could set it back up to how i wanted it.
didnt hear bass when it was low, but that could shit speakers too?

 

[Chilly]

no bass from the bassbox when bass level was low on the amp or?

 

[tris-]

so youre saying on the front amp, turn down the bass and see if it affects the signal to the sub amp?

assuming the signal doesnt change, the bass nob is working on the front amp for the front speakers?

on the back amp there is a cross over switch to decide what frequency it will supply the sub. i reckon that probably works, so that would sort it anyway?

forget that. im lost now

 

[Chilly]

the first half was correct I would explain further but I need to run out, plus iv had a few so not entirely in the position to be lecturing on electronic systems!

 

[tris-]

ok thanks for the help, ill get cracking on it next week and see what happens.

 

[Kryten]

Probably a bit late to come in on this, and not assuming I know much about car audio either (as I don't) but there are indeed separate crossovers easily available. When I was flogging them, we had a couple for around £40. They looked like they were made by someone with parkinsons, a soldering iron and a Make Your Own Radio kit but they were apparently very effective - these were passive crossovers and required little to no power.

Now, my last car had an in-line crossover system, no amp, nothing special, just a single capacitor/resister on each speaker - well nothing on the door midranges, something on the big rear speakers and largish caps on the in dash tweeters. I've no idea what they were value-wise but there was nothing else in the circuit and a 3rd party head unit, and it worked rather well.

I don't know what your experience level is with any electronics, but this may or may not be of any help:
Passive Crossover Networks

 

[tris-]

thanks kryten but im not sure its needed here, i think anyway.

ive made a couple of discoveries while i was tweaking the amp earlier. the sub amp we call amp2 and the head unit we call amp 1.

- if i turn the bass down on amp 1, it seems to stop sending a "boosted" bass signal to amp 2. at the previous amp 2 levels, with amp 1 bass @ 0 i got no response from the sub.

- this allowed me to listen to the speakers only and i couldnt hear any bass.

- if i fiddled with amp 2 settings, i managed to get response from the sub with amp 1 bass still @ 0. with the new amp 2 settings, the bass is much more crisp.

does this show that amp 1 is able to stop sending a bass 'signal'?

now back to amp 2.
its got nobs for high pass and low pass. i dont know what these mean but going by what chilly was saying earlier i turned high pass to zero (think it was anyway) and low pass to maximum. there is also a switch called "filter selector" which ive had set to low since i installed it. can we assume this selector switch will fuck off everything but the bass frequency? therfore meaning if i setup the mid and treble on amp 1, it shouldnt own my sub?

 

[tris-]

chil dog where art though

been looking about and i think the closest i can come to the speaker in question is something with a tweeter, another bit but not a sub in it. it also has a thingy bob built in so each bit gets the right stuff.

does this help? is it what im after?

Frequency Response

75 Hz - 22 kHz

Sensitivity

91 dB

Impedance

4 ohms

Resonant Frequency (Fs)

88 Hz

 

[Gumbo]

When I was using my RS Turbo (which I still have stored, somewhere...) I had a decent system in it. Nothing outrageous, but enough to get good sounds. The best thing I did though was buy some really good alpine tweeters and mount them discreetly, pointing right at me, in the dash. They brought all the high end sound to just the right place and balanced the system out beautifully.

People do seem to go mad for subs and it's all the in car audio boys seem to compare, but if you actually want to listen to music whilst driving, then attending to the top end is just as important.

 

[tris-]

thats what im after gumbo. my bass is spot on now. the thing with those speakers i listed above is the tweeter can actually be dismounted from the driver its self to be placed anywhere you want it!

with the bass turned down on my headunit, my current speakers are just a blur of high pitched shit.

 

[Chilly]

chil dog where art though

been looking about and i think the closest i can come to the speaker in question is something with a tweeter, another bit but not a sub in it. it also has a thingy bob built in so each bit gets the right stuff.

does this help? is it what im after?

Frequency Response

75 Hz - 22 kHz

Sensitivity

91 dB

Impedance

4 ohms

Resonant Frequency (Fs)

88 Hz

Ideally you'd be after a 100hz-22kHz but that will do, and with no bass going to it it'll be fine.

I'd say thats a reasonable bit of kit to go for and also that your previous results from knob fiddling were correct in that the second set of settings are the ones you want. As for the low/high pass filters I'd just tweak em til they sound right. I could explain what they do but it will only confuse you more.

 

[Gumbo]

Ok, then mount the tweeters to where they are pointing right at your head. Low frequency sounds tend to emanate in a bubble, which is why you can mount the sub in the boot, high freq goes in thin straight lines, doesn't bounce around, so direction is far more important. It makes me laugh when I see 3 way 6x9's jigsawed onto a parcel shelf in a clio, the tweeters in those speakers are doing fuck all to improve the sound.

 

[tris-]

cheers folks.
i read somewhere of someone putting them behind the air vents in the dashboard. not sure how feesible that is for me but its all worth a go.