Well, after about a year of tweaking, tinkering, and adjusting, my audio system is complete. Well, probably not, but it is for now. Here are some pics. JL Audio 450/4, 500/1 ,10w7, Diamond Audio Hex's, custom ambient crossovers for a second set of aluminum tweets, and JL audio 6.5 CXI's in the rear. It sounds great. The only thing I may have to do is upgrade the battery. Only problem I have is when the thing is at or close to full power with some serious bass. Otherwise, it is fine for my normal listening. The box is custom fiberglass that I made myself. In the second pic, you can see the fans that I installed to cool the amps. The ambient tweets are crossed over at 9kHZ, and are attenuated through the RAF on the HEX crossovers. If you have any questions, or want to see more pics, feel free to ask....I have a whole log of the construction of the system.
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Awesome job! Love the clean install! Hope it sounds sweet...

 

nice work

 

Thanks guys. I think it sounds great. I wish there was more room in our A-pillars, as I really wanted to flush mount the ambient tweets in there. I suppose I could have made some fiberglass pillars, but I think I'm all fiberglassed out for a while. LOL

 

Looks very nice and clean, good job!

 

Awesome job. I had a blast installing my stereo in the 05 sedan as well... I never had the know-how or ***** to do fiberglass though. Nice to see someone else do a sedan up nicely.

 

excellent work...

 

Nice work.

So, how's the center image? Does it fill in?

And since you shot pics of the passives, it looks like a 3rd-order highpass with a resistor (impedance optimization, assumedly, alothough that tweeter is pretty neutral). What's the lowpass for the woofer? And what's the HP xover point?

 

I am bldg a similar system the weekend after labor day. JL 1000/1, JL 450/4 MbQuart QSD 6.5's, 12W7, 05 Double-Din Conversion in da workx, Eclipse 5435 and some other stuff. I currently have other stuff in but I am taking it all back and goin fiberglass and shtuff. Will post pix of the old system and da new one. It's gonna b sick.

 

Yup, good work. It is a 3rd order high pass x-over at 9khz. No resistor though. It is run off of the RAF network on the Diamond HEX comps. The comps have a built in resistor for the RAF, and it's attenuated at -5dB. So the woofer and regular tweets are run off the Diamond x-overs. The ambient tweets are aluminum, and the door panel tweets are silk. I did this to try to reaise the sound stage. It is not as centered as I would have liked, but definitely better than when I had the tweets and the woofers mounted in the stock location. I really would like to eventually mount the ambient tweets in the a-pillars (right now they are in the stock location). That should really help with imaging.

 

Here is a shot of the back of the x-overs before I mounted the back plate and zip tied everything on.
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We have different approaches to accomplish the same result - lifting the image - but I'm glad you like your results.

The silk tweets you are using have a resonance of about 1750-1800, which limits their highpass xover point to about 3500 or so with reasonable power handling.

I actually use that same tweeter in my house brand speakers (I purchase it from its German OEM).

What I would try to do is use a tweeter with a lower mechanical resonance - say 900-1000 - and then play it lower - say 2000-2500 - to pull the vocals up and hopefully into the center as well (I too would rather go into the A pillars, but not yet convinced that I'll have to...) Since the Diamond woofer is rolling off at the top end anyway, and is also "beaming" its HF response at the top end with poor off-axis response, you get more realistic upper mid to your ears, IMO.

But, hey, I'm just some guy, you know? Nice system.

 

Interesting approach...what about lobing issues with that? You obviously know what you are talking about from the 5 out of 10 posts I have seen by you. Are you MECP? Hmmmm....so Diamond doesn't make that tweeter? Who is the manufacturer? When you say play it lower, are you referring to bandbass, or still HP, just at a lower frequency?