A couple shots after mounting the Diamond Audio S600s tweets flush in the door. I had them mounted in stock location until my ears bled..this new spot sounds very nice.



During install, wires not yet connected at this point--

 

Another angle:

 

Perfect compliment to MB Quart 12"

 

Nice, I need to do this too.

I'm going to put mine in the kick panel though, looks much flatter and still pretty close to the mids.

 

Good idea. I spent a few days moving the tweets around with velcro. Anything near or around the mids sounded pretty decent to me. I was surprised how flush they fit in the door though, even with the curvy-ness there are no gaps.

 

You did a nice job on the install, but that is a lousy spot for the tweets. Down low in a set of kicks would be the best place, but the stock location is very good, although just a tad bit far from the woofers depending on the component set. If the tweets were making your ears bleed, why not just attenuate them? By moving them you just have them firing into your legs and the soundstage is likely on the floor.

 

I think this placement is better sounding to me. The tweeters rotate to a pretty extreme angle so I have them pointed up and back towards me. The mids may be in the leg, but the tweeters aren't. I have found many references including JL audio that recommend this setup.

http://www.jlaudio.com/evolution/pdf...Si.pdf#search='jl%20audio%20silk%20tweeters%20diameter'

 

i mounted mine to the kickpanel using Boston's directional mount. sound is great, just a bit funny on the staging. i need to re-aim them up a bit to bring the soundstage up further. otherwise, i would recomment everybody mount their tweets down there. with a quality install, your sq should increase. nice job on the tweets dan, your install is looking better and better every time i see it!

 

Thanks Motown, like I was saying I velcroed the tweets to about 20 spots and down low sounded more pleasing to me every time. Up high reminded me of that annoying sound Jim Carey made in "Dumb and Dumber" ;-))

Anyway, thanks for all the help this year, I noticed everyone on this site from Chicago is really cool. Maybe I should visit sometime.

 

Motown, You are a BA man right? On their website they have a few installs that use a component system down low (or even coaxials) and an ambient neo tweeter up high set at 8khz and above. Have you heard or seen installs that use this secondary imaging tweeter?

 

yup, ba all the way. i just looked at their website at the installs in question. only reason i could figure for them to use a 2nd set of tweets up front is to correct an imaging problem. given the low soundstage i was talking about in my previous post, maybe angling them up further won't fix my problems after all. that's the only reason i could think of for them to use the extra tweets. that's pretty interesting, i'll have to think about that. i'd be curious to see more pix of that Z install to see how they did it. that .pdf didn't show any pix of the kicks or doors... hey, what did you end up doing about the grills for your doors? i was just thinking today bout how much sound is being interrupted by that sh!tty grill...

 

Did you check out the other installs on the BA site? There's a Malibu or Impala (?) that shows quad tweets, I bet they just used their Component Z6 in the stock spot for the Z with the tweet attached, and then the imaging pair up in the stock tweet location. CDT Audio and Diamond Audio websites also have some interesting information and pics on the use of imaging systems aimed at the windshield, apparently for the very high end of the freq spectrum. For $150 it may not be a bad idea to try. Since many of us have a 4-channel amp with 2 chnls just running rear fill, this signal could be split to also run the imaging tweets/crossovers. I'm going to spend the rest of my workday trying to find more info ;-)

Anyways, I am still in work on modifying the grills. The Diamond audio set came with some interesting grill covers. they are plastic spacers in which a metal grill rests. I am trying to mount this to the original grill using bondo and epoxy, it will either look nice or end up in t trash bin, we shall see.

 

now i see what you were talking about. could be an interesting idea. i'd be curious to see what using the angle mount in the far corners of our dash would sound like. sail panels are a bit close to the ear for my taste. i would think if you used the angle mount provided to park one in the 2 far corners of the dash, probably firing across the dash at the opposite side of the car, you could really open up the sound stage. for the extra cash, yeah it's worth thinking about. you'd really have to attenuate them a lot though. i'd think with an array of full-range capacitors and some time, you could get it right. but it'd be a lot of work to tune it right IMO.

on a side note, what kind of epoxy are you using? check out hzemall.com's liquid plastic product. may be easier to work with than bondo and epoxy and the finish is pro-quality. could be more what you're lookign for. i wanna see it when u'r done...

 

Hey that looks like good stuff. I was just using a two-part epoxy and bondo for the space between the stock grill and the diamond one, then sand and texture paint the result. Have you tried the liquid plastic? That may come in handy for some other projects I've been considering.

REgarding imaging, BA seems to be leaning towards that solution, but I also found some other sources that seem to indicate that it works pretty well. I mean a lot of us are choosing the lesser of two evils (weevils?) here right. Either you put your tweeter down low and get great "point-source localization" but degraded imaging...or you put them up high and get a higher soundstage but a "split" sound quality that drives me up the wall on accoustic or solo instrumental songs.

I was thinking the same thing about spots for imaging tweets. Those angled corners of the dash do look possible. You mean the ones with the oval shaped vents right? The sail panels seem odly shaped for tweets don't they? if they were pushed back and flat it could work there. But alas, I'd like to keep from drilling any more holes in stock panels if possible. I think I will try putting the imaging tweets in the stock location, flush mounted but aimed towards the windshield, perhaps the sail panel will get in the way a bit but oh well. I was thinking of cutoff above 8.5k and highly attenuated. Worse case scenario I can take them back out.

I have some other projects going on too regarding sound dampening/noise attenuation. In addition to the 50sq ft of Extreme I have in the car, I am adding 2 gals of liquid dampener to floor, any non-flat/ hard to reach, or any other areas I didn't hit with Extreme (wheel wells too). On top of that (to areas that this is possible) I am adding a layer of closed-cell acoustic foam, then a layer of open-cell foam, and finally a top layer of closed-cell foam. Lastly I am stuffing some areas like the front fenders with poly-fill stuff. All together there will be about 50lbs of sound attenuation product in the car.


Dano

 

this seems to be a quick fix to a shittty tweeter ....

placing it off axis to hide that harshness of it ? I would return them and get something that sounded correct.

You would be much better suited to make a small pod on the kickpanel to allow on-axis response. Then, if they still suck, return them for something else.

jim

 

I hear ya Jim, but I really chose this location because of the sound and not the quality of the tweeter. I can rotate these tweeters to face me or across the car, so I'm not sure how they differ from kick axis placement. These are silk Diamonds. I would have hated the localization of any high-powered tweeter in the stock location. With my short legs, the spot I have the tweeter in right now is perfect, sounds great and doesn't hit my legs at all. I don't see how the kick panels would be much better, they are blocked by my feet and legs on my side too.

Kick panels were my second choice and maybe I'll put another set there some day. But my main issue right now is both kicks and doors put the soundstage too low for me. I am considering getting imaging tweeters.

 

Even a silk dome tweeter in the stock location is too much. Just a bad location overall, too high up.

 

^ The hight's not really the bad part. Anytime you have HF on plane with your ears, that's not bad. The problem with the stock location is two fold. 1. The physical distance between it and the mids and the bigest problem....2. the reflections off the windshield. Don't believe me? Next time your in your car, put a hand in front of the tweet between it and the windshield and see what happens when you eliminate those reflections. It's a real eye opener.

 

interestante'.... So what's the solution? How do we get the sound quality and imaging? I think the best bet is taking everything out of my car and setting it up inside around my couch ;-)

 

I don't have a solution, but I do have an easy experiment to try. The distance between the stock woofer location and the stock tweeter location is a bit too far for some particular comp sets. It really doesn't have anything to do with the brand or type of tweet (silk or metal), but more with the crossovers frequency settings (not attenuation settings) and the speakers themselves. This is why you will read that speaker xyz has good "off-axis response". What it sounds like is happening with the DA and possibly the BA comps you are using is exactly what you think, the tweeter and woofer are too far away from each other. What happens in this situation is during particular musical events, the sound is localized and things sound out of place. A trick to overcome this is to wire just one of your tweets out of phase. ie hook up the negative lead to the positive lead. What this does is provide a gap or filler in the "lost" frequencies during the musical solos or sudden sweeps across the frequency spectrum.