Who here has actually taken the time to mount their components correctly and image their mids/highs properly? Where did you mount your tweets and mid bass. I would really like to fabricate a set of kick pods, though my foot rest besides my clutch is more valuable to me than having perfectly imaged components.

What x-over points are you guys using infront, and how many of you find time alignment very useful? I think it is about time I finally get my mid range and high range up to par.

 

I mounted my mids and tweeters in the stock door locations (on custom MDF baffles) and spent time aiming the speakers. I have excellent stereo separation with a perfect L/R balance and good ambience. I high-passed the mids at 70Hz and low-passed my subs in the rear deck at 65Hz. The bass is very tight and up-front.

 

You have any pics of how and what you did?

 

without doing any fabrication, the factory locations of the tweets and mids are close enough to getting the best sound you can get as far as imaging goes. I personally think that kick panels are only good for some serious midbass drivers, sizes 6-8 inches.

having the tweets installed in the kicks wouldn't be a good idea since higher freqs/tweets have a unidirectional sound(does that even make sense?). in layman terms, if your ears have a clear line of sight to the tweets, the sound is as good as it gets , as far as positioning is concerned.

obviously, subs can be mounted anywhere, facing in any direction, and can still be heard, even with obstructions in the path of the face of the woofer, due to low freqs and the amount of power being fed. as much as possible, tweeters should be as close to ear level(height wise) as possible, and have the same distance(or close to) from the listening position(ears level) as the midrange/midbass drivers to get the most out of your components, imaging wise. so in short, the stock locations are fine (a pillar for the tweets, doors for the midrange).

hope this helps a little.

 

I currently have my MB Quart comps installed in factory locations and it sounds pretty good. Of course you have to mess with the time corrections and so on. This weekend, I am going to the junkyard and grabbing a winshield pillar trim from a 4th gen with the Bose stereo. Those have tweeter locations which are much better than the regular tweeter location in the door. As soon as I install those, I think I will have perfect sound imaging in the front.
If anyone has already done this I would like to hear the results.

 

If you mount the tweeters high in the door or in the A pillars, you really need to aim them carefully, because those mounting locations tend to make the system side-biased. In other words, you are putting one of the tweeters really close to your ears, so you are gonna get blasted with that one channel more than the other channel, unless you make an effort to aim the near speaker far off axis of the near listener.

The most important thing to me when it comes to building and tuning a sound system is a perfect stereo balance, like with a really good pair of headphones. Most car stereos tend to be side-biased to the nearest speaker, and that doesn't sound good. You wouldn't listen to headphones with the balance set almost all the way to one side, would you?

 

I get what you are saying but it's nearly impossible to have perfect sound for every seat in a four door car like a Maxima. I am not saying it can't be done, but it would probably take A LOT of tuning....really a ridiculous amount of time spent doing time correction. With this being said....my goal is to make the sound perfect in terms of my seat(drivers). Obviously I don't want it to sound like crap for all other passengers but it is just nearly impossible to make it perfect all around.
Your headphone example is understandable but a bit extreme. The only thing that bringing the tweeter up to the A-Pillar instead of the door would accomplish is raising the sound stage, which I think is good. I don't think that bringing it higher would put it closer to the ear...the distance would probably be the same except right now the tweeter is down and to the left while aftewards it would be up and to the left...the distance being the same.
I agree that aiming the tweeter would be important and having an Alpine with T-Correct is also key...without that feature I would not touch a thing and my car would probably sound like crap.
I am not an installer and can't say I'm a huge expert at car audio but I do know a thing or two. Let me know your thoughts.

 

I didn't tune the system for the rear-seat passengers at all. I almost never have anybody back there, so I don't care what it sounds like in the back. I tuned the system for the front seats, first for proper frequency response, second for stereo balance in each seat (again, to sound like you are wearing $1000 headphones in each seat). I didn't use any time alignment electronics, just speaker aiming.

Tuning the system for only 1 seat would be fairly simple, compared to both front seats at the same time.

 

Then I gotta tip my hat off to ya....
I imagine it took you quite a while to perfectly aim the speakers so that both front passengers get good sound. If you could tell me what you did I'd appreciate it.
I took a look at where the tweeters would be on the A pillars and they would actually be farther from the ear then they are right now.

 

Yeah, I have those factory A-pillar tweeters (currently disabled). My back-up plan, if I couldn't get the desired sound from the door speakers, was to get a pair of aftermarket tweeters to mount in those A-pillar locations and aim them to help with stereo balance, at an attenuated level. But I don't think I need to bother with that afterall.

Aiming the speakers is really just knowing what you want the system to sound like and taking the time to do a bunch of trial and error. My baffles allow me to aim the mids, but the tweeters are most important when it comes to aiming. Luckily, I can aim the tweeters separately from the mids. I started off with a crossfire scheme where the speaker is aimed at the ears of the listener on the opposite side of the car. That way, the listener is well off axis from the nearest speaker and on axis for the far speaker, which evens the volume levels out. But I found that it still wasn't perfect. My speakers have such strong on-axis response that I ended up aiming the tweeters forward of the listeners on both sides.

 

which way did you aim your mids.

 

Don't be lazy, build some kicks and spend a couple hours aiming them with a test cd. I used to think stock locations worked till i built my first set of kicks when i was 17. never goin back! And yes, they will fit with the clutch. just remove the plastic dead pedal and you should have room. Drill a 2" hole in the rear of the kick so it can vent into the carpet and you will not have to make it as large. Also, stuff it with some polyfill.

Tweeters on the dash are extremely hard to pull off correctly. Many sq competitors do extremely well with them in the kicks. This is because the pathlengths in kicks are much closer than on the dash.

 

Right now my tweets are in the doors and I have a feeling that the installers didn't really flush mount them but kinda put them away from the opening. In understandable terms...I think my tweeters are deep in the door tweeter locations instead of being close to the grill. That's one big problem that I have...but as soon as I get those A-pillars this weekend I imagine that problem would be solved.
The way I'm thinking of doing the aiming is to sit in my car...get a piece of string and line it up from my ear to the tweeter locations and use that to aim them. I don't know how correct or scientific that is but I think it should work. The only problem I see is that the passenger seat won't benefit at all and will probably lose SQ.


Micah....how is the sound stage with the tweets in those locations? Do you notice any difference between a regular setup and having the tweets up there?

 

Well, the only tweeters I have in my car are down in the stock door location with the mids (the tweeters are suspended over the mids). As far as sound stage, lead vocals sound as though the singer is centered a few inches from my face with other instruments and vocals spread from door to door, which is exactly what I expect from stereo playback. There is also quite a bit of ambience filling the interior and I'm not using rear fill speakers. I don't think mounting tweeters higher up would improve my system, so I didn't try it.

 

I c....Well I'm gonna go tomorow and hopefully find the A-Pillars so I'll let you all know. It'll take some time to get this installed but hopefully my installer friend will do it on Sunday. Thanks for all the input.