Is there ANY compitent car audio place in MN? Dealing with JL Focal or HAT preferably

Soooo every place here around Rochester is garbage, idiots tell me to have my LP cross over at 200hz+ or I have to explain to them that a W7 is a single 3ohm voice coil for 10 min like frick. If ur a JL audio and Rockford dealer and have W3's and 7's laying around and I say I have 2 12" W7's and you don't immediately know 1. 1000w RMS 2. 3ohm single voice coil and 3. 90% chance they are wired into 1.5 ohm and 4. my Rockford T1500bd-CP is 1 ohm stable so will be fine at 1.5 then I'm not going to buy anything from you. Also if you wont tell me a price for something and or your prices are higher than Bestbuy's I'm not going to buy anything from you.

I'm looking for a set of nice components but I would like to hear them first, then have them properly installed sealed and deadened.... is this that hard?

Mach 1 is a HAT dealer but I have read some sketchy reviews of the place that sounds like every car audio place down here...

 

Uh...

I'm a fan of DIY.

Audio shops are pricey because of the low volume. There's no way around it. It's a market that's pretty dead since internet sales have skyrocketed. Things are just too cheap online to compete. Big box stores can get away with it due to volume and tons of other sellable products, but audio shops, they have to work on large margins to get by. What they can get you (sometimes) is quality services like install and fabrication if they can find and are capable of retaining talented personnel. Also, DIY is so strong now with high online content. The sheer amount of brands and new brands, a lot of audio shops simply do not know or cater to such things. Specialty is kind of a DIY game. Car audio is a business is a tough business and requires both passion, the right people, and excellent business savvy to make it. It also requires a strong market, something Rochester doesn't really seem to have.

As for your LPF at 200Hz, that kind of depends on what your full ranges are capable of doing. If you've got crap for rull ranges, then a high LPF setting may become necessary. When you look at the physics of speaker size, excursion, and SPL, you start to realize how piss poor 6.5" woofers are at low frequency output. There are some high excursion woofers on the market that let you get away with low to mid level dBs at low frequencies, but it's a huge crutch, more than you can imagine. Cabin gain only helps so much. In the end, most full range and subwoofer packages should be crossed at 125Hz to 150Hz to allow reasonable output with minimal distortion. High output may be higher. I'm not feeding you BS here. It's simply a function of physics. SPL is very specifically a function of the amount of air volume you can move. At each frequency point for a given SPL target, a certain amount of air needs to be moved by the speaker. When you actually look at these numbers and compare to woofer size and excursion capabilities, you will very quickly find that these little 6.5"/7" woofers are hugely incompetent at their task for anything under 100Hz and still largely incompetent below 150Hz a lot of the time. Now competency is a matter of high loud you're trying to go without distortion, so that's a dependent system of how loud you need it to get. A 2" woofer can play 60Hz cleanly, just super quietly.

 

I said higher than best buy not higher than the internet lol, I'll pay Crutchfields prices (retail) on some Focals, and on the Pioneer 80PRS I want if the shop works with me on my instal plan and they are friendly. JL C5's I would probably just get on the internet for $300 and pay them to install, same with HAT there is a guy on forums that sells open box ones for like $400 vs $650.

The other thing is is my W7's are no louder than my W3's so I want to get a custom ported Baltic birch box made for my W7's, I'm willing to pay $300-400 for this but I don't want to be BSed I want someone knowledgeable to tell me why they are making the box the way they are the f and the fq and the port tuning and everything so I know they will know what they are doing. I haven't been able to find on I like on the internet + shipping is like $100 or more.

Yeah I know what your saying, IEM's have like 8mm drivers and go down to like 40hz cuz they only have to move the air in your ear.

 

Like I don't just want to take out my stock components and screw in some $500 ones, I want to make sure they are sealed deadened and aimed right and I am not sure how to do that 100%.

 

Don't get my started on IEMs....I kid, but yeah, I had a phase. You've probably read my reviews on head-fi.

3-way active HU, you're talking my language.

I've never been compelled to do anything special for subwoofer enclosures. Just make it the right size and right tune frequency for the intended goal, and then be a little intelligent about design and bracing to keep it all solid. Subwoofers have pretty light duty when it comes to sound reproduction, not only in range but also SPL. Even a low excursion sub still trounces the highest of excursion mid woofers in SPL output.

When picking full range speakers, take care in how you intend to install them. If you intend to install them on-axis, you can get away with a higher crossover frequency between the woofer and tweeter. If your system will be flush mounted in the doors very off-axis, you need the tweeter crossed really low, and this will greatly limit your choice in component speaker sets. If off-axis, Focal may not be the best choice. You have to work with off-axis roll off of the frequency response if it's crosssed too high. Your upper midrange will roll off above 1kHz when very off-axis, and even your tweeter will roll off above 8kHz when placed very off-axis. You can fix this through independent left and right EQing to even out he frequency response between the more on-axis passenger speakers and the more off-axis drivers side speakers. However, you can mitigate most of the issue with a speaker set designed with a lower crossover point. Now this does mean the tweeter has to be more competent in lower frequencies as to both sound good with low distortion and have some level of SPL without distortion. A little, 1" tweeter has to do a lot of work crossed below 2kHz, but some sets are geared for this kind of use, and they do work better in off-axis installs. You get better symmetry in frequency response between driver and passenger speakers and a more consistent sound stage. Both time delay and loudness will make the "center" pull side to side, so equal frequency response keeps it centered better. Do it through setup or processing, your choice, maybe a little of both.

 

Ha yeah? I have SE215's and 535's, Sony XBA-H1's, Klipsch Image S4's and R6's lol.

So if I wanted to use the factory off axis location what would I want to look for? I want a low tweeter x-over to lift the sound stage up as much as possible but I also listen fairly loud.

So is that why Focals all come with that pod thing for the tweeters? I'm thinking about the PS 165FX or PS 165V. How hard are they to aim? I'm tempted to toss a pair of small book shelves on my dash and call it a day lol.

 

I personally haven't done anything through them yet, but I've heard good things about http://innovativeautomn.com/index.html through others and have had them recommended to me many times.

 

Well...before Alpine decided the Type-X component speakers weren't worth keeping, I'd suggest those as a great option. The old Reference set was insanely great bang for the buck at around $160 online. Alpine smartly set a rather low x-over point for their Type-X sets at 1.8Hz. Anything sub 2kHz is decent for off-axis. Also before Pioneer decided to take their PRS components, pull them from the market, paint them a different color, and bring them back at several orders of magnitude more expensive, the PRS set was quite good too and at one time could be had online for around $225. The woofer was amazing. It was the best woofer I've ever used, and I say this as a person who at one point I had Seas Excel woofers in my car. The tweeter of the PRS was meh, but there's tons of alternatives to swap in, especially when you have the processing to set x-over, level, and TA. That makes mixing and matching so easy.

These days I'm kind of the mindset once you spend the little extra for a HU with 3-way active control, you just start building your own speaker set. I'd just step over to the home audio market and piece together some gear that's highly competent. There's just a ton of competent hardware. The hard part is finding the sound characteristic you aiming for. That's the tough part. There really isn't a nice way to go about this without trying a few options out and keep your favorite. If that means you buy 3 or 4 pairs of woofers and 3 or 4 pairs of tweeters of all different varieties, that's sort of what you do. Just like you found with IEMs, every single one sounds different. There are some reviews and user comments out there that can fuzzily guide you to some good picks, but in the end, you're still pretty much stuck trying a bunch out until you're happy. Personal preference plays a big role. By going this route, you gain a LOT of control over what you get and can package when aiming for certain performance metrics. If you want to cross the tweeter at 1kHz, you find a tweeter that can actually do that...and then buy it. Do you care about which woofer to pair it to? Not really. You can pick whatever else you want, and you'll still be able to set x-over and sound levels to get it all working great. That is the beauty of both active control and the huge home audio product market. Plus you get to play around with some more interesting designs, say a 2" full range set on-axis in the a-pillars, paired to a midbass in the door. You get a lot of wiggle room to do some neat stuff, and that's a lot of fun.

 

Yeah I liked the Type-X's, idk what Alpine is doing anymore.

So what about on axis? Are they hard to aim? And you need a lot higher X-over point? I'm afraid that there will be audible differences from the right and left sides being further away, and being more directional. Thats why I wanna throw a small book shelf on either side of my gauge cluster lol.

I'm planning on getting speakers before the 80PRS thats why I'm looking at components. Then I'm probably going to run the PRS to a 4 channel and run my rears off the deck, so I can turn them on and off depending on if I have passengers or not.

I'm thinking about these, http://www.crutchfield.com/S-KTYxfzU9P2C/p_091PS165V/Focal-PS-165V.html I'm kind of confused between there PS and intigration series, these have the highest sensitivity. I know what horn loaded tweeters are but what are "partial" horn loading tweeters?

Does like 80w at 88db sensitivity = 160w at 91db or doesn't it really work that way?

http://www.crutchfield.com/p_130TSC172P/Pioneer-Stage-4-TS-C172PRS.html?tp=106 yeah a little to rich for my blood.

 

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