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Building a High Fidelity Sound System Build (Attempt)

mmdb

Drag Racing Champion
Location
California
Happy to see that logo at 6 o'clock, looking good!!!

Thank you sir!... though it's just the grill. The actual sub is still crooked if you look closely. hah!

Got the PS8 Pro back. Set the gains again with the new Zen V in the loop. They recommend pumping up the volume all the way up on the headunit and then setting gains. Welp, the headunit did NOT clip (nice), and the gains were set. There's a ton of headroom that I'll never use, but good to know that I can dial back down the frequencies as I cut off the top peaks of the signals.

The graph below shows a 1/6 octave graph for both the left and right wideband speakers only. I'll do the midbass and sub later. But without any EQ thus far, the sub hits very nicely. I'm pretty happy with the output. I played some bass heavy rap songs and it shines. I dig it (10W6V3).

WB_EQ_5DB.jpg
 

tshrey

Ready to race!
Location
Lon Gisland
Just those widebands and the stock sub would already sound better than the Fender system based on that response curve. This thing will really sound good when you are done.
 

mmdb

Drag Racing Champion
Location
California
Thanks @tshrey. Wide bands will always beat a stock 2 way setup (tweeters in a-pillar and woofers in doors) in any car (I think).

Check out these graphs from the sub. They're RTA graphs from the hatch being open vs closed.

HATCH OPEN:

SUB_HATCH_OPEN.jpg


HATCH CLOSED:

SUB_HATCH_CLOSED.jpg
 

tshrey

Ready to race!
Location
Lon Gisland
So I finished one pod and wrapped it in alcantara.

PXL_20210307_171118126.jpg


The shape of my pod makes wrapping it a total bitch, it is impossible to do without a cut line and I didn't think ahead with regards to where the cut line would be. If you make the cut on the bottom of the driver you will never see it, so I will be pulling all this off and doing it again. As I said before, since your pods are all convex anyone with any experience should be able to wrap them in alcantara without a problem (or wrinkle).

Also swapped out the door speakers to a set of 6.5" I had good experience with. What I can say is that, although power is down (going from a 2 ohm dual vc driver to a 4 ohm single you get 4x less power to each door) the sound is sooooo much better. Those factory drivers are truly garbage. It isn't some weird eq effect done in the amp, the hollow sound of the stock system is entirely due to the door speakers. Also, a much wider sound band is sent up to the tweeters than you would think (the tweeters have caps on them to provide a basic 6 dB high pass), if I had to guess I would say my dash speakers are playing down to about 800 Hz before they really roll off.

I have several weeks of a very busy schedule ahead of me so I'm going to leave this as-is for now and set up the amps and dsp later, this sounds great for the time being (just have to get over the artificial pain of seeing my volume control up at 3/4 all the time :)

That sub curve is pretty amazing, so much for worrying about coupling to the interior well. When you let your DSP do its thing you will have control over every part of that sound.
 

The Dude

Autocross Champion
Location
PNW
Car(s)
MK7 GTI S
So I finished one pod and wrapped it in alcantara.

View attachment 205707

The shape of my pod makes wrapping it a total bitch, it is impossible to do without a cut line and I didn't think ahead with regards to where the cut line would be. If you make the cut on the bottom of the driver you will never see it, so I will be pulling all this off and doing it again. As I said before, since your pods are all convex anyone with any experience should be able to wrap them in alcantara without a problem (or wrinkle).

Also swapped out the door speakers to a set of 6.5" I had good experience with. What I can say is that, although power is down (going from a 2 ohm dual vc driver to a 4 ohm single you get 4x less power to each door) the sound is sooooo much better. Those factory drivers are truly garbage. It isn't some weird eq effect done in the amp, the hollow sound of the stock system is entirely due to the door speakers. Also, a much wider sound band is sent up to the tweeters than you would think (the tweeters have caps on them to provide a basic 6 dB high pass), if I had to guess I would say my dash speakers are playing down to about 800 Hz before they really roll off.

I have several weeks of a very busy schedule ahead of me so I'm going to leave this as-is for now and set up the amps and dsp later, this sounds great for the time being (just have to get over the artificial pain of seeing my volume control up at 3/4 all the time :)

That sub curve is pretty amazing, so much for worrying about coupling to the interior well. When you let your DSP do its thing you will have control over every part of that sound.
is that your fucking garage?
 

mmdb

Drag Racing Champion
Location
California
^ Looks good from what I can tell. I need to get mine rewrapped as you mentioned. BUt yes. I wish i had a lot of room in my garage!

here’s my work area
06E8EC5B-5AE2-4A30-AC62-54EBE018CCC1.jpeg
 
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Adurm

Go Kart Newbie
Location
Fl
Either of you maniacs can update your build here. Some of us are living vicariously through you both.
 

tshrey

Ready to race!
Location
Lon Gisland
I'm done with speakers. Everything is much better even staying on the stock amp, just have to fade forward and use more volume. Pulled the passenger seat last night to start work on installing my DSP.

Running Dayton Reference speakers, 7" in the doors, 2" up in the pods. Didn't like the alcantara wrap on the pods, nothing else is the car is that material. Switched it out to mellotone speaker grill cloth.

PXL_20210313_211621100.jpg


PXL_20210320_200804325.jpg
 

the

Autocross Champion
Location
Alabama
Car(s)
GTI
Holy crap man... when I was a teenager our idea of building a speaker box was literally buying some wood and shaping out something that worked with our trunk/behind a couch style truck seat. This has to be some of the most next level fabrication work I have experienced. Take the like sir.
 

Adurm

Go Kart Newbie
Location
Fl
Those pods are fantastic. I didn't realize dayton made a 2 inch wide band. I got some cdt unity widebands that i was going to fab into the little triangle but it never came about. Dayton makes good stuff. I have a couple of their subs for home audio and they move some air.
 

mmdb

Drag Racing Champion
Location
California
I'm done with speakers. Everything is much better even staying on the stock amp, just have to fade forward and use more volume. Pulled the passenger seat last night to start work on installing my DSP.

Running Dayton Reference speakers, 7" in the doors, 2" up in the pods. Didn't like the alcantara wrap on the pods, nothing else is the car is that material. Switched it out to mellotone speaker grill cloth.

Looking good. How low do those 2" play? Do you have an mic to get the freq. response? Would like to see what that looks like. Also, what's your processor setup?

For me, I've spent time getting to know the speakers. I'll post up pix to give you an idea where I cut the freq. to get a sort of linear response. I have the bass ramp up around 150hz - adjacent octaves climb pretty fast but try to keep it around 3db per octave as the bass peaks. Since the sub-bass can overpower the mids, I need to raise the vocal range a tad and add a little bit of higher dBs to the higher range to give the music some zing or sharpness. I'm happy without a tweeter. These things can go up pretty high. I'll follow up with more graphs when I find time to tune again.

@Adurm what's your current setup? Link me to your build. Would like to see what other folks are doing and what the results were.

ABC2.jpeg

ABC4.jpeg

ABC1.jpeg

ABV3.jpeg
 

Adurm

Go Kart Newbie
Location
Fl
Unfortunately i don't have a build. I have stuff left over from other cars that are waiting to be installed. I'm in an sq5 at the moment but having some mechanical issues and debating if i should spend the 4k to fix or trade for a gli. I'm sitting on some hertz hv165 mids, focal ps165? Mids. Cdt unity 7.5 widebands, image dynamics idq10 and ID 5 channel amp. I have a set of audison voce tweets but one shows an open circuit. Not sure if that's fixable, plus one of my focals shows impedance bouncing around on my dmm. So i think that's toast too. I wanted to do front and rear active but everyone online says no or do the R-L thing which i don't understand. The majority of the sq car people like they music to come from the front like you're at a concert. Well i want to be enveloped by the sound. I still need a dsp with 7 or 9 channels and another amp.
 

tshrey

Ready to race!
Location
Lon Gisland
No real measurement, just used a phone to set up those 2" in the last car. I had them rolling off at 12 dB/octave starting at 400 Hz. My high frequency hearing got wrecked from a fever as a kid, I start to lose sensitivity around 8k, am down about 3 db at 10 and then it falls off a cliff and I can't hear anything above 13k. So I am also perfectly fine without a tweeter, these widebands are very flat up to what I can hear. Also as an aside whenever I mention my hearing to any audiophiles - everyone reports 20-20k as the human hearing range. If you are over 20 years old you should give yourself a test with your phone playing tones for a reality check. I don't know anyone, even teenagers, that can actually hear to 20k; my daughter could when she was 6. The best any adult friend can hear is an 18k tone; my wife, who tells me I'm deaf, couldn't hear a 15k tone. It is pretty funny how people spend truly nuts amounts of money for tweeters that can only play above 3k when these widebands are available (and add the ability to bring the soundstage up vertically so much).

AudioControl DM-608 is the DSP I have, still figuring out the mounting of it but I have most of the wiring run for it. Once that is in I'll mount the amp under the driver seat for the four front channels and switch the head unit output to use my amp. I was going to go full nutjob and install my McIntosh car amps but they are so big, I just decided to do a couple of class D amps I have laying around. I'll do sub stuff later, working in the back hatch I can take my time because I don't have to have the car torn apart for that job.
 
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