[tamathumper]

Easy peasy. About 30 minutes and I've got a nice new set of Polk Audio DXI 460's installed. Used the existing half-cup, spacers and wiring.



They sound OK.

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[tamathumper]

All right. Sounding OK is not good enough...



I realized that the rear speakers sounded so good, I wanted some love in the *front* too, so back to Best Buy I went and picked up a set of 5 1/4" Kickers, and put them in.



NOW it sounds good. I sat in the car for about an hour learning how to use all the USB functions of the Kenwood and listening to music, so it must be good enough now.



And the best part is, both pairs of speakers were open box deals, so instead of about $180, I spent a little more than $100 for everything.

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[flash]

have you done the dynamat extreme yet?

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[tamathumper]

Nope, it's still "in the mail".

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[flash]

ah - once you do that, you will notice a marked improvement - if you have any questions as to how to do it, let me know

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[tamathumper]

Will do.



With the little speakers in our cars, the sound is necessarily "thin", even after EQ-ing, but I'll improve that someday perhaps.



For now, I'm on to bigger and better things. Like getting the belts and rollers and water pump done for precautionary measure.

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[tamathumper]

How much room is under the seats? Low profile subs are only about 3" high, and they'd round out the sound quite nicely,...

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[flash]

no dice - nothing will fit under there



there are ways to add subs in the car - i did - i am actually contemplating eliminating mine though, and going with a 6.5" boxed driver in the door - we'll see

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[tamathumper]

Rats.

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[rxter]

I routed a radar detector wire from under the dash to the A pillar and looked at that screw and cover as well. Instead I just went around the side plate of the dash. With a little finesse you can just wrap the wire around the side plate and into the door jamb surround. It's a bit snug but will fit OK. I can take a couple of pictures tonight if that would help.

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[tamathumper]

Wires are routed, but thank you. The GPS antenna wire is much too big to be able to fit into the rubber mold, but the mic wire might have snugged in there.



I just realized the door panels have an in-line filter in them, as do the new speakers I mounted in the doors - I wonder if that's thinning out the bass more, or are they both just performing the same function?

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[flash]

make sure you have the woofer hooked up to the right wires



also, stripe is NEGATIVE on these cars - connecting stripe to positive will put the speaker out of phase, and the bass response will suffer - basically what it does is make the speaker cone move backward when it should be moving forward

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[tamathumper]

Negative (stripe) is definitely hooked up to negative. Also, there's only one set of hook-ups on these speakers, even though they have both a "woofer" and a "tweeter". I had to bind the wires together, but I figured that was how it was done on the old speakers anyway, because both sets of wires were just hooked to little tabs that amounted to a bus as far as I could tell.

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[flash]

ok - well, even the best 5.25" speaker won't produce anything below 60 hz in this car anyway, so you won't get any bottom end out of it to speak of - that will have to come from a bigger driver - since you have a cab, your options are limited, but not hopeless - it all depends on what compromises you are willing to make



you can help out the rear speakers by running a better 4x6 (unless you have the enclosed 2 way system or enclosed single 4") - the pioneer 3-way goes down fairly low, and if you use the backing enclosures from crutchfield, you can get some warmth out of them

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[tamathumper]

I set the EQ on the amp to boost bass at 120Hz which helped a little, because those speakers aren't going to make anything at 60Hz anyway. I'm currently looking at a low profile sub for the passenger footwell. I'll take some measurements later today.

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[flash]

daryl has put a couple of kenwood subs behind the seats - those added a fair amount of bottom



the footwell will be a problem - anybody with any reasonable leg length will be mashing that with their feet

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[tamathumper]

My wife's only 5' 2", anybody else in the passenger seat will cause other problems. Seriously, I'm looking at machining some aluminum plate to cover it, I can machine vent holes and what-not (not so important with a sub), I just want to make sure the carpet will look OK.

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[flash]

my wife is about the same height - i put an infinity basslink in there to test, and she was right on it - the only way to avoid it was to slide the seat so far back that she was in the back of the car, and not comfortable with being so far back - also, with the feet not able to touch, it was a bit like being in a roller coaster and she felt she was being flung around too much

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[tamathumper]

That unit's pretty round and deep though, I think it's about 8" deep!









I'm thinking something more along the lines of 2.75" deep, like...









And I wish I could get one of these under each seat, at 2.9" deep by 10" round...

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[rxter]

If you are willing to give up some trunk and cut your carpet, or replace it, you can rig a basslink in the spare tire well. Sounds decent. Still the problem of mid-lows in the cab, but I'm not sure you can solve that with a big sub anyway. The best solutions seem to be a custom box in place of the cubbies.



WRT to the stripe, if you are hooked up stripe=negative to the speaker and wired stripe=positive to a Japanese head unit you'll be out of phase. The german's wire opposite to the Japanese.

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