I didn't say tinny. I said boomy and brash. And they are not smooth. No amount of eq will correct that.
To each their own, of course. Your happiness with your speakers is more important than my happiness with them.


Focals are great. I have them all the way around in my other car with a JL 12w6, A/D/S amps, and an audio control eq :bigtu:

Back when I was in highschool and working at a car stereo shop, we didn't have any problem scoring 40's in sound Q with them.


I've also had focals, and they are great. I have an old multi-magnet 13" focal sub for my house. If I ever put another high end stereo in a car, I'll probably go with 6.5" ads mids and the 1.5" soft tweeter...those are without a doubt the warmest, most perfect, easy to tune components i can think of.

oohhhh the audiophiles come out to play...

Oh shit, I thought he said pedophile.

both work for me...lol.

Yeah I also was once in that biz, I did a lot of design, installation, and custom fab. I even did MBQ's for front stage in one of my cars once. They were bright, to say the least. Can't remember what the name of what I replaced them with--what where those white Infinitys called, Kappa Perfect or Kappa Beta or something? Anyway, they had that silk tweeter, LOVED EM.

Old guys usually like MBQ because they sound not bright to them because of their age-related hearing degradation/damage.

word. 40 alpines worked for me on my old car.

Now I have bose in the new one ftw

Threadjack:
Brain, I ran a Memphis PowerBass 10" for a long time in my Ranger... the best car audio purchase I ever made. I still have it in the attic... waiting for the right car to come along.

I'm also a big PartsExpress fan. My first sub project w/8" TangBand @100w in a sonotube that currently sits totally stealth behind my main 43" Toshiba. My second was a Dayton 12"DVC for my dedicated home theater room. It runs off a small(ish) 250w amp. It's total overkill in the 12'x15' room. I wanted the 15"DVC, but when I told the wife how big a 4^ft box was, she put her foot down.

i'll play too.

Right now I'm in the middle of about 14 speaker projects... The more urgent of these (whatever that means) is the coincident home theatre speakers. They're basically a 7" clear poly woofer with a dustcap-mounted silk dome tweet. Very nice for acoustic alignment and visual size. I'm mounting them in some 8" pvc pipe. That's a bad idea for resonance so I've got some plans to tackle that on the inside.

http://gallery.y8s.com/d/13202-1/DSC00134.jpg

You'd be surprised how hard it is to cut a nice flat edge on that pipe! I made myself a fun jig and was able to get clean cuts.
http://gallery.y8s.com/matt/projects/bigpipe/

I plan to make 4 of those and a non-cylindrical center channel to replace my aging home built kit from college. The crossovers are kicking my ass though.

Next is a neat project that's somewhat stalled. It's a dipole 3-way based loosely on the linkwitz lab phoenix. Cool because they're very thin main panels. shown in this photo (click for bigger) (a little dusty). They are very transparent sound-wise but require triamping which sucks--6 amps for stereo. I'm pondering making some passive crossovers for the main panels and running the woofers off the sub channel. Incidentally a stereo pair requires FOUR 15" WOOFERS. Mama.

So for now I ditched the dipoles and cannibalized one of the 15's and made a nice mini (if you call a 15 mini) sub for the home theatre. It's 18x18x10 roughly and uses a Linkwitz Transform equalization circuit to allow me to use a tiny box and still reach down into the 20 Hz range. I LOVE this sub. When watching United 93, it literally felt like i was in the plane when it took off. It kicks some serious ass and makes your hair stand on end. I think it has something like a 23mm one way xmax.

I should take some more pictures of all this so I can be cool like Spam.

Installed a small Alpine 4 channel amp in the trunk today and tested this theory. The Pioneer TS-D161Rs I mentioned at the beginning of this thread absolutely shine with some "real" power. There's no longer any need for headrest speakers. I even have a set and I'm not going to install them.

The amp I have owned for a while, figured I'd use it as it was just sitting in a box. My only hard cost for the installation was a $10 set of 17' long RCA cables. Amp went in the recessed area in the trunk. Next weekend I'll build a false floor to cover it up (and so I don't really loose any trunk room). Will take some pics once I've completed it.

Also I am going to pick up a pair of 6.5" or 8" free air "subs" for the package shelf and run them off the other 2 channels on the amp.

I played house music in clubs for like 6 years...maybe you're on to something.

A couple of pics

http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/5...eredta9.th.jpg

http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/7...eredtc2.th.jpg


Yes, I know it needs to be vacuumed and that white patch needs to be redyed