Car Audio experts!

[ayuaddict]

hello gentlemen,

today we are gathered here in this thread because of a very pressing issue.

as some of you may know, i have semi-recently acquired a TE31, turn to fig 1. for reference.

fig 1.
http://a787.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/17/l_fdb21487deaff0da0a247bef64873cca.jpg

for now i don't plan for this vehicle to be any kind of performance oriented machine, just a nice reliable daily with a slight "cool factor".

so, i have decided to put a nice sound system in it, i do a lot of side jobs and one of my main customer bases is audio installs, now just because i know how to wire shit up makes me no expert at audio - quite the opposite actually. well, sometimes people give me their old equipment after i install their new shizz, and so far i have accumulated a decent pioneer head unit, two 6.5" pioneer component speakers, two 6.5" infinity speakers, four 1" dome tweeters, a 10" pioneer subwoofer and a rockford fosgate single channel amp.

i have installed all of said items and it sounds pretty good.

but not good enough.

i am looking to purchase a 4 channel amp and some crossovers for the tweeters (currently i just have filters for the tweeters but nothing that keeps my mids from attempting to play highs or lows - i want them to just play mids)

basically i want really nice quality sound and clarity.

if somebody could give me some suggestions, that would be greatly appreciated.

i plan on running a capacitor with this setup of course, would it be okay to have one larger (around 6 guage wire) coming from the battery to the cap then having two slightly smaller wires branching off the cap to power two amps?

also, what kind of crossover and amp is good? also does it matter about watts?

thanks for all the help kind sirs!

[turtl631]

Cap is silly, you don't need it. A really good sounding setup would have just front mids and tweets, preferably in kick panels so they're not far apart from each other. You could see if the head unit has a built in crossover, and if so, get a small 4 channel amp to run the mids and tweets. They could probably be crossed around 3500 or so, depends how low the tweets can play. I wouldn't just run a bunch of mids and tweets everywhere in teh car though with no crossovers, you're gonna have way too many point sources of sound and it'll sound crappy. Cross the sub over really low also, so it's not playing boomy midbass. You don't want to be able to tell wehre the sub is located...it should be handling very low frequencis only, preferably like 60-80 Hz and down.

[ayuaddict]

okay great thanks for the info.

what amp would you recommend?

also what kind of crossover?

ive seen two different kinds, a larger thing with like dials on it to control the frequencies im guessing and those little things you wire the tweeter and mid to.

im pretty clueless on this subject so any help will be greatly appreciated.

thanks.

[turtl631]

Well, some head units have a built in crossover. Some amps do also. If you use a built in head unit crossover, you'll need a separate amp channel for each speaker, since the frequencies will be divided by the HU. I would just get whatever 4 channel amp you can find...the tweeters don't need much power at all. When I had a decent car audio setup, I ran a 5 channel US Amps amplifier and an external crossover, since my head unit didn't have one. The amp was nice since it had 4 50 watt channels for mids and tweets, and 1 250 watt channel for the sub. It was more than enough to listen loud.

The type of crossovers you wire the tweets and mids to is called a passive crossover. It goes after the amp, so you only need 2 channels, but unless you have a prematched component set, chances are a given crossover won't be optimal for your tweets and mids. Car audio isn't really going to sound that great in the big picture, since a car is a terrible acoustic environment, but you at least want to get your setup in the ballpark of what should work well. You definitely want a filter on the mids, especially on the low end, since asking them to play bass is going to stress them a lot and mess up the midrange quality.

[Future240]

Also depending on how poweful the sub is, you may want to look into sound deadening material.