bmccann101

iTrader: (16)

interesting advice happening as with every car audio post.

Kinda why i got out of the biz haha.

OP.. you sound like a smart guy, researching etc.. good luck, nothing like trial and error.

Cant go wrong w good components installed professionally.. thats what i say.. at the end of the day, its a stereo, and its meant to be played and enjoyed.. some enjoy a shiny trunk full of gear, others ( like myself) like to see nothing at all in the car.. jsut smooth, blended and enjoyable sound that doesnt need tweaking , adjusting or to be toyed with between music types... press play, smile etc etc..

there are multiple ways to skin a cat when it comes to car audio, as you can see.

There certainly are WRONG ways, and there certainly are poor components, and there are bad ideas and practices, but honestly, they are all fairly good when installed and tuned well.

Pick a buget, go and listen and buy locally or save $ and buy online.

thats pretty much all there is to it.

Ill roll AL;ine til i die knowing what i do about the companys history and the reason behind thier price differential. Owning a shop in Alaska, Alpine was the only product that always survived the winters. On a circuit board level, the quality and price of every transistor etc is far far far higher than the competition. Tolerances are near aerospace quality.. hence the price is nearly double that of Pioneer for the same features etc etc..

When one speaks of true high end audio, component engineering are ultimately important. Burr Brown DACs, aircore coils, torroid powersupplies etc etc..

bottom line is that car audio can be done for cheap, and it can be done for a ton of cash... it can be done poorly or well in each capacity.

I prefer simple, i prefer NOT to run amps into low impedance regardless of their ratings... i never series a voice coil, and i use huge wires and overkill for capacitors.

I believe the thing to be the most aware of your system design is the loss of voltage, and the rising of current on a fairly dinky alternator.
All this music comes from power from somewhere, and thats your alternator and its poor little diodes.. and they are ALWAYS over looked, askjed to do far more than they are designed for, and are supposed to magically allow you to make thousands of watts in your car becuase the sticker onthe amp says so.. doesnt happen that way, and we can blame physics.

REgualted voltage supply amps ( such as the PDX Alpines) are a very safe choice for our cars, verssu the other amps im very familiar with such as Phoenix Gold, JL Audio etc etc..

Tuning:I learned how to properly cross over a car system and then eq by a recording mastering engineer. Makes a huge difference who tunes your car, jsut like anything else.

bottom line, its all about enjoyment, so go buy some stuff, start your build... and enjoy my man.

faiz23

^^^^^ to much to read and I am in a hurry. When doing Installs professionally for a living and being MECP certified. I always told people it is not the products you spend money on or the name of the brand. It is how you install it and tune it to make the sound stage blend and the imaging correct. I would take your time and use deadner on the panels and use MDF spacer along with clean wiring. I can use a crappy pyle/jensen system and make it sound better than a high end brand just by using proper enclosures for the door and installing / tuning properly versus just slapping in high end brand and call it a day.

l8r

bmccann101

iTrader: (16)

agreed.. and MECP is the word, I was MECP cert as well back in the day. So heres two pros giving ya feedback OP.

BronZy

Thanks for the advice guys.

Unfortunately I can't really go and check out this gear before I buy it, I live in New Zealand and we are a bit in the dark with this stuff. Most of what I am looking at is not available here. What I can buy locally is absurdly priced. As an example those alpine amps are $1000 NZD, the exchange rate at the moment is about 0.87 NZD to 1 USD, so its like you guys paying $870 for the amp. A pair of Rockford components that are on Amazon for USD 160 are in stores here for NZD 899...

I used to do audio installs as a part time job when I was younger, so I know how to run wiring, mount everything securely, deaden the key areas and do a bit of fabrication, I also know that good gear can sound like crap if it's not installed and set up properly so I'll take my time with it. I'll take the car to a pro to get it tuned once I have it installed.

I'll update this thread as I get the gear installed, head unit should arrive in a few days so I'll get that done pretty soon, might do some of the pre-wiring while I'm at it...

Thanks again.

BronZy

Just a bit of an update, I'm thinking I'll stick with the Alpine PDX-M6 for the mono amp. I know that it’s expensive from a $/watt perspective, but by all accounts it’s an excellent quality amp that I will be able to reuse in the future. It’s also apparently quite light and battery/alternator friendly.

My old car had an 800w RMS 15" Sub with only 375w RMS of amp going into it and it was far louder than I needed. It was in a custom box, reverse firing and because the last car was a hatch, it was aimed directly at the rear window.

The Q10 his sub has less cone area and will be set up for sound quality rather than sheer loudness, but the Z has a smaller cabin... On the balance of things I think 600w RMS will be plenty, and I like having the headroom to upgrade later on. As mentioned in my previous post those amps are way overpriced in NZ so if I decide to upgrade to the PDX-M12 I won’t have any problem selling the M6 for at least what I paid for it.

I have heard about “strapping” amps together, is this a reliable way to make extra power and are the PDX amps suitable for it? If that were the case an alternate option to getting the M12 could be to get a second M6 if I’m not happy with the performance of the first one.

bmccann101

iTrader: (16)

Not sure what strapping amps together. But yes. You can always add another easily. One for each subwoofer.
You wont b let down w the Alpine. You'll end up w a very adult system you'll enjoy.

BronZy

Strapping is supposedly like bridging two amps into one speaker. So you would run two 600watt amps to provide 1200 watts to the sub.

On another note, this seems like a really stupid question but I can't find an answer on-line. If my front speakers are 150w RMS, rears are 75w RMS and a PDX-F4 amp is approx. 120w RMS per channel. The front speakers will be fine, but the rears have significantly less capacity for power than the amp is dishing out. What do you do in this situation? Is this something that you address in the hardware set-up or is it just a matter of adjusting the front-rear balance on the head unit?

gvulakh

iTrader: (2)

As far as the "strapping" you could use a mono sub amp or bridge a two channel into each voice coil of dual voice coil sub.

For your rear speakers I would keep the gains set very low or to a level where they do not have any distortion. Same goes for your components...........be careful setting those gains. If you're getting the DLS set I recommended they can handle a good deal of power. If I remember correctly I had 150watts rms per side in the Acura install I did.

BronZy

Cool, yeah I had no doubt at the DLS fronts would handle the power, it was more a matter of not killing less powerful rear speakers while at the same time not under-powering those fronts.

For rears I was considering a pair Focal 6V2S midrange woofers, they are only 75watt RMS. So ideally I want to push only 75 watts to them, but the full 120ish watts to the DLS UP6i fronts.

I basically thought I would set the balance full forwards, adjust the gain until the fronts don’t distort. Then adjust the balance backwards until slightly before the rear’s start to distort. Or am I on completely the wrong page here?

BronZy

Never mind... gain is independently adjustable between the front and rear channels. Easy.

gvulakh

iTrader: (2)

I would leave the fade/balance alone on the head unit and work the other way. Set the gains to a safe level while everything is balanced then fade to the front to your liking. This is what makes sense to me. I'm sure others will chime in with opinions.

gvulakh

iTrader: (2)

been a while since you installed a 4 channel amp eh?

BronZy

Yeah a few years haha. Even back when I did the installs I used to just run and mount the hardware and a guy I worked with would tune the amps once I had them in, I'm hardly an audio pro. Thankfully the not-so-graceful art of pulling the guts out of a Japanese car came back to be pretty quickly when I took my dash out last week, so I'm not too worried about that aspect.

gvulakh

iTrader: (2)

I'm no pro either. I never had any formal training. I have been tinkering with car audio for about 17 years on and off though.

I think you'll be happy with the DLS set. After I heard them I wanted a set but I don't have the motivation to redo my doors. Let us know how you like them.

BronZy

Yeah for sure. Just looking at some door pods now to get the most out of them. But wow, the pods are as expensive as the speakers themselves.

bmccann101

iTrader: (16)

Amps cannot be installed in that manner to one sub. Creates a dead short. Or a fire.

BronZy

I can understand your point, but that really is a personal preference. Everyone has their own price:benefit ratio that they are happy with. It’s a curve with further and further diminishing returns the more you spend. Personally, in this context I'm happy to spend around $300 front speakers. Above that and I don’t believe the quality improvement justifies the price increase. Someone else might think they are not getting good value for money spent over $100 while another might think $1000 is justified. Don’t judge the budget, it’s more about getting the best for the money you ARE prepared to spend.

BronZy

Just spent a fair bit of time reading up on crossovers, my concern is the mid bass drivers. If I look at something like these: http://www.dls.se/en/car/prod.html?produkt=en_428 which have very good reviews for their midrange, they have a frequency response of 30 – 5000 Hz. So I would use the amp low-pass to stop them from interfering too much with the subwoofers frequency range, but would I then need to add some sort of high-pass filter to keep the sound nice a clean and stop them from trying to reproduce frequencies over 5000 Hz (maybe even a bit lower)?

bmccann101

iTrader: (16)

theres no reason to go all the way to active x overs for anything but the highest of ridiculous high end systems in cars exponentially quieter than ours.

the majority of staging and presence comes from the X over and the tweeter in a component set.
Mid bass must be strong and linear but its really a game of whos got a good tweet to play low enuff to allow better staging and localization.. the old ALpine DDDrive f17c set up was amazing, thier tweeter was soft dome AND played to 800 hz.. insane low. ALas they are not avail anywhere used anymore, theyre gone now, very old.

BronZy

Yeah I definitely wasn't looking at active crossovers. I think in my post I had high and low-pass confused… Low-pass will allow frequencies below the set value, correct? So I would be using the amps built in crossover in high-pass mode to filter out the ultra-low frequencies which are the domain of the subwoofer. Because the mid bass drivers won’t reproduce high frequency sounds, should I be looking at some sort of inline passive low-pass filter which cuts out frequencies above about 5000 Hz? Is there even such a thing or am I just over thinking this…? Maybe I would just be better to switch the filtering off at and send the full signal to the speakers.

The only thing that really sparked a bit of interest here was that the crossover for the fronts will limit those woofers to 5000 Hz, so I thought the rear woofers might sound off if they were getting the full signal.