I haven't had anything in my car for a while, so I am looking to to do something VERY simple for the 4th. Of course simple shouldn't promote bad sound, so I am looking for suggestions from experienced gurus...

I will be running no deck (yes thats right!). Just an MP3 player playing FLAC files fed to an external crossover to boost the signal and obviously for the crossovers themselves....

This time I am going to run dedicated midbass, just not sure how to attack everything else. I thought about running a simple full range driver from ~300 and up for simplicity...

I have been toying with full range drivers at home for a while now and I love the sound. I want to carry that trend to the car. I don't want any(or limited) passive components, I only have four channels of amplification, a limited budget, and for the time being no external processing...at the most I would just crossover a tweet up high (5-10k) with a cap...

So now, the question at hand, in your experience (now I know this depends on the drivers, but in a general scope) with 3 way systems, what has been the best placement for the midrange in 4th gens? I know that running a midrange up high generally isn't a good idea due to early reflections with the windshield, so I guess I am limited to the door/kick...

As far as tweeters, I figure A pillars directly on axis would be best. Since upwards of 5k directionality becomes an issue, I figure I may get away with running no lowpass on the midranges so long as they are far enough off axis...

So what do you think guys? I really don't like the idea of running mids in the kicks, so i am honestly stumped as to what I want to do, has anyone tried midranges in the A-pillars?

Whew sorry for the long post, thanks!

-Serg

 

how big of a midrange do u wanna put in the pillars? i recently installed a 7" mid in the door and installed tweeters and pitched the rear speakers. and are running the speakers active and they sound GREAT! u can check my build log
http://forums.maxima.org/showthread.php?t=552438

 

3 inch most likely, 8s in the doors, possibly tweeters as well...

Gone active before, definitely want to do it again, but again I only have 4 channels of amplification, and I want to run dedicated midbass, which leaves me the two options noted above: Either a midbass and full range, or a midbass + mid/tweet in parallel...I am just concerned with the placement of the Full range up high and on axis...

Forgot to mention, I have about 75rms at 4 and 110 at 2 to work with...

Edit: This is exactly what I am talking about, Except active: http://www.theautophile.com/products...sNavFrame.html

Problem is placement, where would I go about placing the mid-tweeter?

 

I'm skeptic of running an MP3 player straight to an external crossover. If running through a headphone jack you lose some quaility in your "lossless" format.

A driver with full range capability is completely different in home audio than in car audio. Full range enclosures require a lot of airspace and special enclosures, not just a 3" full range driver.

It is best to keep your midrange and tweeters together and on axis, and the easy place to do this is in the kicks. You can do it in the pillars but you have to make sure you have enough airspace for the mid and glass work is required (obviously) to aim the speakers on axis

Also, in a three way setup the tweeters are crossed much higher than the 5K range. There are really there to hit that top end sparkle. The tweeter in my 2 way setup is crossed at 5K

Your budget really does not support running a 3 way setup. You can get much better results running a simple 2 way active.

 

You have a lot to learn my friend There really isn't very many options for stand alone CD players and external DACs to reduce jitter for automotive applications, a hard drive is a much better interface combined with an external DAC than a CD player ever will, flash memory is even better since it has no moving parts , which is what I have...

The specific MP3 player I have has been measured to confirm how good it sounds (Cowon), with a flat response, very low distortion(in the order of .0005%) and high S/N ratio, so I am confident that it will outperform most standard automotive CD players (with a few high end exceptions of course)...

Also the DAC chip it uses is a Wolfson Not bad at all

As far as speakers, contrary to common myth, there is nothing that differentiates automotive speakers from home audio speakers (with the exception of pro audio transducers). T/S parameters don't tell the whole story, but they don't lie either.

Either way, 3 inch drivers could hardly be considered full range as they have lower limits. A better term would be "Wide range" driver, as I am not trying to cover the "full" audio spectrum with just one driver. The only reason people make "special" enclosures is to extend the bass response to get as close as possible to the full reproduction of 10 octaves...

As far as going two way active, been there done that. There are major limitations I hit when I was doing it last year. I simply could not get my sound stage off the ground and I wasn't willing to sacrifice the midbass response I had with the drivers mounted is stock locations and mounting them in the kicks...

BTW try playing around with your crossover points, I found for my setups crossing over lower than 5K sounded best to my ears and had better imaging...

 

No one? I'm disappointed