Great Selection for Car Audio and Video

Speaker Positioning

Speaker installation is very crucial for performance. Whether you spent $1000 or $10,000 on a set of speakers, if they’re not properly installed, they’d not sound because they should. Though it may seem the best position for many speakers are in the stock housing’s that came with the car e.g. about the door panel near your feet, this is just not so. You would understand why such positions are still used however along with alternative solutions such as center channels for 5.1 dolby, LCD screen, in-dash DVD players. There are lots of factors that need to be considered in placing the speakers within the correct position.

Distance

One thing to consider is distance. When the left speaker is only a couple feet away from your ears, while the right speaker is several feet away from you, then your sound will arrive at different times providing you with poor sound. Since the left speaker is closer, it sounds louder. The best solution is to figure out an area where the difference between the length from the right speaker for your ears and left speaker (also called path length difference), are minimal. This is where kick panels become the preferred location.

Multiple Speaker Placement

If you have a system with two or more speakers per side, you have to check out different locations to get the most effective sound in your car. For those who have a 2-way system with a tweeter and sub per side. The subs are mounted in the stock location at the end from the door. The tweeters are mounted up high on the front corner of the door panel. In the driver’s seat, you can see that there are 4 speakers all aimed towards different orientations and all at a different distance for your ears. This interaction of sound waves at different frequencies coming to your ears at different times seldom sounds good. The best thing to complete would be to squeeze woofer and tweeter on both sides as near as you possibly can to each other. This is why kick panels are used a lot these days. Professional installers use some tricks for example inverting the tweeters’ polarity when mounted for example along with the dash as the woofers are low. Achieving good sound with unconventional mounting schemes is extremely, very hard and is only achieved after sufficient time has been spent trying different configurations.

Aiming

Our ears can distinguish the direction of sound more easily at higher frequencies. Which means that aiming the mids, and more importantly, tweeters towards your ears play a critical role in sound imaging. Midbases are not so critical, but should be also aimed towards the listener’s ears if at all possible. To figure out the best aiming angle involves many hours -even days- of labor. To start, try to aim the speakers towards the center of the car. Experiment with different angles until you receive the best sounding position. Subwoofers should be mounted in advance for best sound. As this is not possible in most cars, mounting subs in the back is not such a bad thing, since most people can’t distinguish where bass originates from. For those who have good midbases heading down to 60 Hz or less and subs picking up the signal below 60 Hz, then the bass will appear to range from front.

Enclosures

Subwoofers require a properly designed enclosure to provide top performance. Midbases and mids also do sound much better if they are set up in enclosures. The best sounding and simpler to build enclosure type for midbases and mids is sealed.

Mounting Speakers

If you are using speakers that fit in to the stock location, make sure there aren’t any spaces or holes. Sometimes creating a wood or fiberglass baffle helps reduce holes and provides you much better sound. Continually be careful when using power tools around speakers. Holes in speakers are certainly not taught in warranty. For unconventional speaker locations, sometimes metal needs to be cut. If you possess the resources, plasma cutters and pneumatics tools work great. For most of us that do not have these tools, a set of metal snips (right and left cut) is adequate.