Bobby Kinstle

I've been working on this since fall of last year. Sorry it took so long but we had a baby and the project had to smolder on the back burner for a while. The attached Google docs spreadsheet lists out every speaker in the car by location along with guidance of the frequency response it's expected to play, the impedance of the driver, and how much power it's rated for. The factory driver power ratings are based on some units I found with power limits on the part number sticker, not on actual measurements. Nor do I know the amplifier's actual power outputs, but I'm assuming as long as your replacement drivers are rated the same or better, you should be fine. I tried pretty hard to isolate each driver to my microphone using a clay pot lines with foam placed over the driver during measurement but other sound still sneaks in. This is especially a problem on the door midrange as the door woofer vibrates the entire door panel.

Anyway I hope this is useful for anyone looking to do some upgrading. I myself am about elbow deep into this project on my own car and will drive head first into the rabbit hole this weekend.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

chemengin

What settings are you using for 3D and Surround? Seems that most people on this forum have it on low or off.

Bobby Kinstle

Usually off and never higher than low. I disabled the 3D and set the surround volume to minimum when I was measuring the standard channels.

When I saw on the charts what the 3D effect does to the frequency response, I decided it causes more harm than good.

Lincoln Friske

This is intense. Solid work and thank you. Not sure what I'll use this information for, but thank you!

Bobby Kinstle

Use it to select speakers if you decide to replace any of yours. I spent way too much time obsessing over this so I hope the community finds it useful. I'll update it with my progress. I've already done the subwoofer so far.

volcomic

What setup did you go with for the sub? Thanks for making this by the way. This will help a lot of people down the road when they decide to replace or upgrade their audio.

Bobby Kinstle

I followed the "Possibly dangerous way" on the sheet using the Kicker C10 DVC woofer. It's a great fit mechanically, but it only play a teeny bit louder than stock. HUGE improvement in sound quality and drops the frequency response solidly down to 27Hz. I'll measure it with the microphone after it's had a proper break in. The woofer fits perfectly into the factory cutout with a 3/4" spacer and still has about one finger's space between the surround and the rear deck fabric. I've played it extremely loud without any distortion and I've played bass heavy music for an hour while driving home (only "pretty loud") and the amp was only a little warm to the touch so it seems to be ok (I'm not responsible if you blow your amp). Let me be perfectly clear about one thing though: If you want MORE bass, you'll need to add an amp.





It came from outer bass

volcomic

Ah, so you're just running it off the factory amp? I don't see any reason this would cause any harm to the amp unless you're running a drastically different impedance than the factory sub. If I recall correctly the factory sub has dual 8Ω voice coils, which appeared to be wired independently when I took mine out. If you wired your subs coils in series your amp should be seeing an 8Ω load just like the factory sub.

Bobby Kinstle

I'm running mine 4 ohms per coil, which is why it's "possibly dangerous". Supposedly this same amp is used in another car with a dual 4 ohm sub and someone even made a claim that it can do 2.66 ohms. I don't know about any of that but this particular sub only actually hits 4 ohm at 22hz, spikes to around 25 ohms from 26-32hz (because it's resonating) and then tapers back down to 4ish around 100hz. Plus the amp is a pretty efficient class D design so i did some math and figured it would produce around 4 more Watts of heat at full power. That left my only real concern to be inductor saturation, and since I can play at an extremely high volume levels without any of distortion I know that I'm not encountering that. lastly I never really listened to my system at extremely high volume levels so the actual amp power output is still probably far below its rating. Remember we are only talking about 5ish amps here.

I wouldn't recommend this route to anybody who wants a booming system as it states in the spreadsheet.

volcomic

It all depends on how you wired it. If each coil is independently wired (like the factory sub was), you're at 4Ω. If you wired them in series you're at 8Ω, and if you wired them in parallel you're at 2Ω.