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OT: personal experience with automotive subs


Daddy Dee

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OK, I live close to a suburban Jr. Hi / Sr. Hi School. There is a line of slow moving traffic on my street twice a day. So... I get to hear some fairly impressive (though not musical) automotive sound systems. What is surprising to me is the subwoofers that cause my house to buzz and rattle. Even in today's rain, all car windows are up. Still, they are definitely moving some serious LF air. I just hear them for a few seconds at a time. I wonder what this does to the hearing of the human beings inside the vehicles.

I'm not complaining or even seriously irritated... just an observation mostly.

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many of the juvenile idiots have the subs in the trunk- neatly isolated from the listening chamber by a thick wall of padding known as the back seat. You might be hearing more bass than they do.

yes they are going deaf and serves them right.

my problem with these ultra loud car stereos is not just the general nuisance, but the very real traffic hazard they pose to themselves, emergency workers, and other motorists because often times sirens cannot be heard above the din.

They should be outlawed.

M

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Yes they are dumb but can be nearly as much fun as throwing a whole brick of fire crackers in a burn barrel.

In many towns they are illegal under noise ordinances, or can be prosecuted as disorderly conduct. The town where I went to college did this routinely if kids were getting stupid. I had one friend who was a little into it, and I always carried ear plugs when I was with him. The stimulation of the nervous system in the presence of that kind of acoustic pressure is unique. Then again, so is the amusement/disdain of everyone in the area as you drive by with license plates and quarter panels rattling to high heaven...

On the other hand, the factory console-mounted sub in my Element is quite musical in its factory-tuned context.

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The brick of fireworks in the barrel reminds me of when we would throw dynamite in the sewers [:o] It felt like it would echo for hours because the sound would travel down the sewers and out the other holes down the street and would keep going for quite a while [H] My goodness that was fricken loud and awesome. We started off with blackcats and small stuff, but being stupid we just had to take it up a few notches.

...at least it had better rhythm than the rattling cars always going by...

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lol, this is way off topic, but we made a compressed air grape shooter....the grapes (skin and all) would liquify upon hitting a board across the garage. Put a nail in the grape and we could put the nail right through the board. We made a much larger one for my phsyics class in school to shoot tennis balls at the military history class that was going to launch tennis balls with trebuchets (modern versus ancient warfare kind of thing). We were able to reach terminal velocity of the tennis ball which would strip all the fuzz off the balls [H] I still have the cannon in my garage back home and have been meaning to add some explosive power to really get things moving. Along the way we tried implementing a piston to allow for fast action shooting, but the piston would tear the PVC apart - craziest thing I've ever seen.

Anyways, I highly recommend going that route [6]

And to bring it back on topic, maybe we can build a bunch of these things to shoot grapes at the annoying people as they drive by...I won't suggest putting a nail in the grape though to shatter the window, lol [;)]

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I have a killer system in my car and it sounds as good as the home system if not better.

I run two Orion NT2 10" DVC subwoofers in a sealed enclosure in the trunk, the inside of the enclosure was also treated with bass linear panels. I run an Orion Xtreme XTR-100 dual mono block amplifier with balanced inputs rated at a mere 50W x 2 into 4 ohms, I am running it in 2 ohm stereo and it hits deep and low. None of that ten men beating on the side of a rubber raft bass here folks.

The front stage is a pair of a/d/s 236is 6.5" woofers, 336PX tweeters, and the 346is crossover networks, I also have an a/d/s 200i plate (4" woofer, 1" tweeter) mounted in the cup holder spot and controlled with a 100W L-pad. I just have some Magnum Professional 6x9 woofers in the rear deck for additional mid-bass. The front's and rears are crossed over at 80Hz and up with an 18db slope. The subs at 80Hz and down with a 12db slope. My Alpine 7998 has time correction to allow everything to reach you at the same time.

I can use the i-personalize on Alpine's site to plug in the distances and dimensions, commit them to a CD-R then load them into the deck in one swift move.

Trust me when I tell you this car will best 85% of all the systems on this forum easily. Ask my brother in law Gilbert he was absolutely amazed and I have upgraded just about everything since then. The Orion XTR-100 and XTR-200 were $2500 new, think 115db S/N ratio and a damping factor of 1000. With 2 Farad's of capacitance and 4 gauge wire feeding everything and a 135A alternator, she rocks!

Car audio can be killer, when done correctly but no one seems to focus on sound quality anymore, just boooooooommmmm.

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I used to have a Rockford Fosgate Punch Power sub (one of the first ones they made) with an Alpine 1000 watt bridged amp. I wish I would have tested the SPL level that set put out.

I remember one time listening to a techno bass CD that had tons of content in the 15Hz to 25Hz range and my eardrum started distorting. It sounded just like when a sub distorts bad but it was inside my ear and it hurt like crap!

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Hey Mark,

I actually got one of the 12" Power Punch subs given to me for free in my car...I've only got 200 clean watts going to it, but man does it go loud. I wouldn't call it very clean, but then again the cabinet it's in was modified from the original crap configuration that I received it in. One of these days I'll get around to putting it into a sealed sonotube cabinet (already got the parts) and then I'm sure it'll crank the low notes much better.

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bass in a car is not that hard to get just cause you have a small amount of air to move in a cabin of car/truck. what is hard is to get the sound of two channel setup, imaging, depth, detail, location,etc in a car and that includes getting the sound to come from the front like at home.

i had a chance to play with that this past summer and my son has the results of that experiment in his truck. horn loaded down to 100 hz and i mean real horns, not like those slot loaded horns. everything coming from in front of you like off the hood. i had the imaging happening but still needed work. and i plan to fix that in my own truck. we'll see........

boy

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Bodcaw Boy,

What kind of speakers did you use that would be horn loaded for car use? The only ones I know of where made by Pioneer.

-Jon

When I had my older cars (various 80s/90s Grand Marquis) I used a line tunnel dual 12 inch sub that my Dad designed with a Pioneer head unit and about 200 watts of power. It measured clean down to about 31 Hz, so it sounded really deep. It didn't get very loud, which was fine with me. Just enough to supplement the existing stereo, and fill in the bottom end. With HPF on the mains set at 80, it really cleaned things up. The nice thing with those cars was, you could have a nice sound on the inside, but it was so well insulated, that very little sound leaked outside. I was running in Stealth mode!

-Jon

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