Anyone one done this?
I'm leaning towards this for a few reasons...
I can custom mount the 4 and tweeter on the dash (or rather in it) to make it fit and it will sound better than a plate...

1 speaker in the door would be easier to hear than one in the kick panel... I know I may have to mount it out some for the magnet...

Rafael

 

I'm thinking of doing this to in my truck. Got 5.25" Kappas in kicks but they lack in the mid-base. Was thinking Dayton 7" in the doors would help.
But keep the tweeter in the kicks with the mid.

 

I prefer the tweeter higher on the stage and closer to my ear... I see a few people complain about the plates on the dash, so if I get a 3 way component, I can put a bigger driver up there and move it around to where it will fit, plus the woofer in the door.

Rafael

 

When I get time I'm going to build a 3 way, but I'm not wasting time with the mid and tweet in the dash. Way too many drawbacks having them up there... my mid and tweet will be in the kick, with the woofer next to them in the door. This arrangement will minimize phasing and imaging problems between the 3 drivers. With a 3 way system, you have twice as many crossover points as a 2 way, which means you get twice as many headaches if you don't set it up properly.

 

So, help me see the light...

Phasing.... if your speakers are hooked up right, that's not a problem...unless you mean something else by phasing...

Imaging.... How can speakers that are pointed at your legs, carpet, console & seat have better imaging than ones on the dash... They may be a tad further from your ear than in the kick or door, but much less interferance and a more direct shot to your ear.

Any other issues of having the speakers in the dash I'm un aware of?

Not trying to argue, just wanting to understand your point, thanks,

Rafael

 

There's an awful lot more to phasing than how you hook the wires. A speaker's phase is a dynamic element that changes drastically with frequency, and is heavily influenced not only by the driver itself, but by the passive crossover network used to integrate it with the other driver(s), and also by it's position with respect to the listener and the other drivers used in the system. It is essential to have a smooth phase relationship between two drivers, especially throughout the crossover region where they will both be playing the same thing. Moving the speaker a little bit can destroy this critical phase relationship between the drivers, and the farther apart the drivers are, the harder it is to maintain this relationship. If you're starting from scratch and building your own crossover network, you can somewhat compensate for a lot of these issues, but when using a stock out of the box crossover that comes with component speakers, you'll never get it to work as good as just having the drivers as close to each other as possible.

As for imaging, having your speakers point at your feet eliminates a LOT of problems associated with having them pointing at your roof (i.e. in the dash facing straight up). The dash is just about the worst position you can put a speaker if imaging is important to you. Your path length from the driver's side speaker and the passenger side speaker is very different, which gives a very heavy bias to whatever one is closer to you. You can compensate with the balance control, but without compensating for the arrival time (i.e. the driver side isn't just louder, it gets to your ears sooner), you're only attacking part of the problem. The even bigger issue is that you get nasty comb filtering at higher frequencies due to the combining of the direct sound wave off the driver with the reflected soundwave off the windshield. The effect is a doubling of output at measurable frequency multiples, and a cancelling at divisions between those multiples. The result is that your frequency response looks like a "comb" (hence the name). You don't really find the sound objectionable at first, but what it does is completely wreaks havoc with your mind's ability to distinguish precise locations on the soundstage (i.e. it kills your imaging) and also causes a harsh sound that many people unfortunately mistake for clarity.

The majority of these problems are not at all an issue as soon as you move your speakers to the kick panels. The new drawbacks that you get with kicks is that they're more expensive/difficult to construct, they do have issues with passengers blocking the drivers, and you get a 150-400hz bump in output due to the tiny airspace behind the woofers. However, price/difficulty aside, I consider the other drawbacks (blocking and midbass bump) to be a very small consequence for the drastic improvement you get in all other areas. There is enough reflection from the kick panel area, that the difference in sound when you have a passenger is very minor, and although you will lose a few dB at higher frequencies, the sound and the image is still clean and balanced.

When you get into a car with a well-designed set of kick panels and close your eyes, what you'll hear will NOT be sound coming from your feet. You'll hear a soundstage that's as wide as the rear-view mirrors, as high up as the middle of the windshield, and pushed out well in front of the dash board. You can pinpoint vocals at the center, and you can easily localize instruments placed anywhere in the soundstage where they're supposed to be. You can never get any of that with dash speakers, at least not without a tremendous amount of work far exceeding what it takes to get these results with kick panels.

 

Audio

Point 1: Phasing.
I understand about the passive crossovers. Go to electric, it should clear that up and give you better control of db crossover points, slopes, filters, etc…
We have 2 ears. So “stereo” was created. I’ve heard that “ideally”, a woofer should have a mid in the middle of it and a tweeter in the middle of that, so all the sound comes from 1 point. But this isn’t real world. Take a drum set. Bass drum at the bottom, snare drum further up and cymbals and cowbell further up… So if I breakup the speakers, woofer at the bottom, mid further up and tweeter further up, aren’t I in essence creating a stage from top to bottom too?

Point 2: Imaging.
Regardless of placement, dash, door or kick panel, they all are going to have issues, unless you sit in the middle of the car (concerning when and how loud the sound hits your ears)…. Issues for the dash… Glass, hard reflective surface. Issues for the kick panel… I’ve seen some that try to aim at your ears, but as with the dash, not ideal. There is a lot of things down there, carpet, hard under dash, hard pedals, hard console, seat, legs, pants, etc… both hard (reflective) and soft (absorbing) sound surfaces… Wouldn’t this also throw off your imaging?

The best sounding things I’ve heard is a nice pair of headphones. The driver points straight at your ear. The more items in the way of the sound and the ear, are just that… in the way… Not that the “dash / glass” is ideal, but the kick panel seems to have more issues to me…. And I would prefer to create a stage from top to bottom, also, not just left to right. And being that my ears are near my head and not my feet… further up…

I know people say many things in the audio industry, all sounds comming from 1 point, sounding good through the RTA, but not necessarily to a person's ears.. a long time ago, when MB Quart was "the thing", to me they sounded bland, compared to other speakers (they were mostly paper then)... They've improved them now and they sound better to me... I gues the final judge is your ears....

 

Not exactly. Going electric does give you more precise "ideal" slopes, but that doesn't translate into real world results because we don't have "ideal" drivers. Electronic crossovers also make it difficult to shape a slope to better suit a particular driver. A text-book 12dB/octave slope seems great until you actually apply it to a driver that's already got a certain rolloff characteristic, and your resulting slope winds up being a 20dB/octave slope, which is going to have an associated phase shift that's virtually impossible to integrate with the other driver. Additionally, when using electronic crossovers, you will still have the same phasing impacts as you get from a passive filter. Electronic crossovers are better for people who don't understand all of the subtle nuances of crossover design because you aren't as likely to do as much damage, but to get a truely impressive filter, whether it's passive or electronic, requires a ton of talent and experience.
Yup, if that's what you want. I like my music to be reproduced as faithfully to the original as possible, not my own "rendition" of it. Plus, moving the speakers apart, in addition to spreading out the image, will still create a disaster around the crossover frequencies like I mentioned before. In that range, not only will your frequency response be all over the place, but your image will be smeared, inconsistant, and unpredictable. But hey, if that sort of thing floats your boat...

Yes. A car is not a perfect environment by any means. My goal is simply to minimize as many major issues as possible, and for me, that means kicks. As I addressed in my last thread, it's my opinion that the kick panel location gets you a lot closer to perfect than the dash location dispite the unique drawbacks associated with it.

The stereo image in my IROC, while far from perfect, is worlds better than it ever could be when using the stock dash location. The soundstage is just as high, but it's far more accurate and far wider with no near-side bias.

Headphones are absolutely one of the best sources of affordable, accurate, and detailed sound, but they suffer one substantial drawback that prevents them from being real popular in the audiophile crowd... lousy imaging. You can not reproduce an accurate soundstage from a conventional stereo recording when the sound is to your side and not in front of you.
Have you ever heard a well implimented kick panel system, or are you just making assumptions? Nobody that's ever heard my car left it preferring dash speakers. Nobody. I've had a LOT of skeptics sit in my car with the same pre-concieved misconceptions that you've got, and every one of them left my car 2 minutes later with a completely new opinion.


The RTA is far too primitive tell you how good a car sounds. The RTA analyzes one thing... frequency response. Unfortunately, the RTA doesn't even give you an accurate portrayal of what the frequency response is because it hears it differently than your ears do. The human ear is very good at being able to identify (and to a large extent, ignore) secondary waves and concentrate mainly on the primary wave. If you talk to your girlfriend outside, then talk to her inside, she still sounds like her both times (although she still does sound very different), but if you were to measure her voice with an RTA, the frequency response would be drastically different. This is why driver responses are measured in either an anechoic chamber or with a gated measurement that measures the direct wave only for a short time before reflected waves can arrive at the mic. An RTA also has no way of measuring any kind of distortion, which is a major contributer to how something sounds.
Yes, your ears are indeed the final judge, but as you listen more, and take the steps necessary to become a better listener, whole new aspects to the sound open up, and you find that your tastes mature accordingly. What's really exciting is when what you hear starts to correlate with what you've learned, and once you can begin to recognize what characteristics of a driver, crossover, or installation result in that subtle change in what you hear, then your ears become a very powerful tuning tool.

 

just subscribing in here.. but in my chevy z71 I have 5.25 components in the kicks and 6.5 midbass woofers in the door at a slight up and over angle.. excellent imaging. set it up with an rta and dual 33band eq's, sound stage is amazing.. especially after I installed a single 4" component set (one woofer, one tweeter) in the center of the dash and set it up with an audiocontrol esp-3 processor.. vocals literally melt through in perfect clarity

 

Audio
Crossovers, ok, we agree that you at least need 1 

“Yup, if that's what you want. I like my music to be reproduced as faithfully to the original as possible, not my own "rendition" of it.” Do you mean if you were sitting in front of the musician’s who are playing it or trying to be the numerous mics used to record it? Either way, the sound does not come from 1 or 2 (stereo) focal points when its live… but you hear it that way with 2 speakers…

“Plus, moving the speakers apart, in addition to spreading out the image, will still create a disaster around the crossover frequencies like I mentioned before. In that range, not only will your frequency response be all over the place, but your image will be smeared, inconsistant, and unpredictable. But hey, if that sort of thing floats your boat...” Ok, tell me if you’ve hard this… to have “stereo effect your left right speakers must be 6 feet apart”? Again, “stereo” was created to give a left right stage, or to “spreading out the image”, as you say. I can record a bass with 1 mic, but by panning the sound to the left or the right, in essence making it louder / quieter on one side, it seems to “move” across the stage… being that the speakers are already placed apart, now sound is manipulated to do the same…. So it’s ok to do it from left to right, but not up and down?

You stated you have great stereo, mid window imaging in your car. I would love to hear it, can you bring it to Tampa Bay?  Next question: Do you have any speakers in the rear side panel? If so, those speakers are contributing to you mid window sound, and they’re even closer to your ears than the kicks or dash! Turn em off and listen to your car, did the image go down any? If they’re playing the same L & R signal, wouldn’t they muddy up the stage that you want coming from the front (as you stated with the headphone comment) ?

You stated, “Headphones are absolutely one of the best sources of affordable, accurate, and detailed sound, but they suffer one substantial drawback that prevents them from being real popular in the audiophile crowd... lousy imaging. You can not reproduce an accurate soundstage from a conventional stereo recording when the sound is to your side and not in front of you.” Headphones aren’t popular with audiophile crowd? I don’t think that’s true, my sony headphones were $100 and non of my cheap headphones compare to how they sound… I took an audio recording class in college, the teacher had a set of electrostatic headphones, audiophile… Then you said, “You can not reproduce an accurate soundstage from a conventional stereo recording when the sound is to your side and not in front of you.” So at you side and not in front applies, but at your feet and not in front doesn’t’?

My point is that a stereo recording is not accurate either, because in a live performance instruments are at different heights. You can reproduce the left/right with stereo, and yes, if you break up the speakers, not every sound is coming from one single point… while this may be recreation of the up/down stage may not be accurate, neither is the stereo image from 1 focal point.

Next topic, center channels and surround! Now a days, it can all be recorded digitally, 5 or 6 channels, etc… In the old school days, they tweaked the sound from a L & R track to fill in other areas. Instead of breaking a 3 way speaker apart, they just put a whole one (or 3) in other places. Spreading the speakers out can’t be much of a disaster, they go from front 2 back in the car, each home theater has at least 5 or 6 speakers through out the room…

Picture this… woofer at the bottom, mid further up, tweeter further up. Acoustic bass… Of course the bass sounds would mostly come from the bottom, and a few higher harmonics would slip up to the mid, etc… How about the fingers sliding, sticking, tapping and slapping the bass? With the speakers broken up, you could hear that part moving up and down along the tweeter and mid / woofer through the various frequencies… almost like if he were in front of you. Again, it’s not a true “rendition” but neither is stereo with all sounds coming from 1 focal point.

I use to own a car stereo shop, I am a CMA certified installer and am also legally blind. I don’t hear better than most people, I just listen better than most people.

You seem to know a lot about this subject & I would love to hear your car…. I have never installed a stereo in a 3rd gen, just evaluating my options for the future. I appreciate your responses and thoughts…

Rafael

 

Any recording, at best, is a crude attempt to at re-creating the original, but that doesn't change my desire to reproduce it as accurately as possible. Your milage may vary. There's no "right" or "wrong" here. If you aren't worried about keeping it as close to the original as possible, great, you just saved yourself a lot of time and money.

Again, you can do what you want. We have 2 ears, both sitting on the same horizontal plane. That makes it, by definition, impossible for us to localize sounds on the vertical plane. If we had a 3rd ear on the top of our head, we'd be all set, but we don't. That's not to say that it's completely impossible to identify height, but it's done mainly through frequency response changes and our familiarity with the sound. It's something that's also nearly-impossible to identify without a TON of practice and an extreme familiarity with all aspects of the listening environment. The location of the speakers in the kick panels isn't going to pull the image down, nor spread it out, if things are set up properly.

Sorry, that's a 2 day drive for me.
I don't have rear speakers because they can and will degrade the stereo image. They will pull your soundstage back, essentially giving you the "headphone" effect. Due to differences in sound from the front and rear, it will usually make the image unstable also.

I didn't say headphones didn't have a place with audiophiles, I just said they aren't popular, and compared to conventional speakers, that's true. They represent a very small segment of high-end audio sales.

When I'm seated in my car, my feet are approximately 4' farther farward than my ears. While this may not give me the optimal equilateral triangle that you generally want to have in an ideal setting, it still pushes the speakers out far enough to provide a solid soundstage.

I agree. Like I said earlier, current technology provides us with very crude reproductions, and if you want to further degrade it by smearing the vertical image, there's nothing wrong with that. I just don't choose to, and sometimes when discussing this with others, I errantly assume that they don't want to either.

The problem here, not unlike 2 channel audio, is that you're at the mercy of whatever "effect" the producer was after. Most of the multi-channel recordings that I have attempt to put the listener in the middle of the band, instead of in the audience. If you like that sort of thing, then great, but I find myself listening to the 2-channel versions of these recordings instead, because I really have no desire to hear drums behind me, a guitar to my left rear, and another guitar to my right rear. I prefer the recording to put me into the audience, not into the band, but again, that's just my opinion. But, regardless of what effect the producer was after, when I listen to it, I want to hear what he wanted me to hear as accurately as possible. Ultimately, that's the best I can hope to achieve from my audio system.
If that floats your boat, then fine. What you're more likely to get is a sound that is incoherent and all over the place. You're not going to hear things moving up and down the vertical soundstage... you're going to hear the fundamental coming from down low, the harmonics coming from somewhere in the middle, and the higher frequency sounds (like fingers sliding on the strings) coming from up high. All the sounds stuck somewhere in a range of frequencies where you have multiple speakers reproducing it are going to just come from all over the place instead of a solid point on the stage. The result is an image that's all over the place, and keeps jumping all around as frequencies change rather than staying where it's supposed to. Add to that a bunch of phasing problems that cause the image to completely fall apart, then re-appear, and mix in a terrible frequency response that changes drastically for every inch of movement your head has, and it completely ruins the experience for me. Again, your milage may vary.

I'm very surprised to find out that you're blind. Most of the blind men that I've come across in the past who are involved in this hobby tend to put a very high value on accurate soundstage and imaging, because the localization of sound is a very big part of their every day life, so they are even more critical of it in their music than most other people.

I've been around it a long time, and I've been through the full spectrum, from being a 16 year old bass-head using flea-market equipment (and too stupid to understand that the more expensive stuff really was worth the extra money), to designing and building my own home & car speaker systems. This is one of these hobbies where there is always more to learn, especially when you decide to take the plunge and get into the design side of things. In the first two years after I started designing and building my own speakers, my listening skills became ten-times better than they had gotten in the 15 years prior to that.

 

Audio
“The problem here, not unlike 2 channel audio, is that you're at the mercy of whatever "effect" the producer was after. Most of the multi-channel recordings that I have attempt to put the listener in the middle of the band, instead of in the audience. If you like that sort of thing, then great, but I find myself listening to the 2-channel versions of these recordings instead, because I really have no desire to hear drums behind me, a guitar to my left rear, and another guitar to my right rear. I prefer the recording to put me into the audience, not into the band, but again, that's just my opinion.“

Agreed. I prefer listening to music in 2 channel, movies in 5+.

“But, regardless of what effect the producer was after, when I listen to it, I want to hear what he wanted me to hear as accurately as possible. Ultimately, that's the best I can hope to achieve from my audio system. If that floats your boat, then fine. What you're more likely to get is a sound that is incoherent and all over the place. You're not going to hear things moving up and down the vertical soundstage... you're going to hear the fundamental coming from down low, the harmonics coming from somewhere in the middle, and the higher frequency sounds (like fingers sliding on the strings) coming from up high. All the sounds stuck somewhere in a range of frequencies where you have multiple speakers reproducing it are going to just come from all over the place instead of a solid point on the stage. The result is an image that's all over the place, and keeps jumping all around as frequencies change rather than staying where it's supposed to.” The stereo causes the sounds to jump left and right… I like mine to jump up and down too Kinda like the instruments are dancing too!

Stereo recording creates the illusion of space… An acoustical guitar performance may use 3 mics, a foot apart from each other. Left for strumming / sound, middle voice and minimal guitar sound, right side of guitar / chords / sliding(assuming he’s playing right handed … It would be a waste to record an orchestra with the same setup…

Speaker axis: your subs are in the back, right? Ok, so bass is harder to localize and can usually be moved, maybe need to be played 180 out of phase depending on placement, etc… So the tweet has to sit in the middle of the mid, which would be in the middle of the woofer? Why are cheap coaxials made this way (still not ideal) and higher end components have separate speakers… are they intending you to mount them one above the other? How far is your tweeter away from your mid? At what distance is the magical barrier crossed that wasn’t causing “an image that's all over the place, and keeps jumping all around as frequencies change rather than staying where it's supposed to. Add to that a bunch of phasing problems that cause the image to completely fall apart, then re-appear, and mix in a terrible frequency response that changes drastically for every inch of movement your head has” and then suddenly, all this happens? Most loudspeakers have all the drivers separate.

Keep in mind, I’m not separating the tweeter from the 4” mid… but those 2 and the 6.5”... If these are all matched components from a manufacture, the 6.5 is really only playing much lower frequencies than the 4” and tweeter. “phasing problems that cause the image to completely fall apart, then re-appear” and mix in a terrible frequency response that changes drastically for every inch of movement your head has”. I would be using a matched 3 way component set, not an 8 inch woofer with piezo tweeter… Again, at what distance do a matched set of speakers have to be separated from each other for this to start happening? Most loudspeakers have all the drivers separate.

I’m going with a cloth interior, there is enough hard things in the interior to make a good mix, I don’t’ like p-leather interiors (acoustically)…

Next question about your woofer, Ported or Sealed?

PS: Ironically, I'm building Kitt

 

My subs are in the back, and because I never have time to work on my own stuff, my bass integration sucks. There's a clear transition between the subs and the mids right now.

It's not quite that simple. It's important to have the "acoustic center" of each driver the same distance from your ears, and a coaxial doesn't accomplish that. The "acoustic center" of every speaker varies, but general, it's located somewhere between the voice coil and dust cap of every speaker. A coaxial speaker moves the tweeter farther away from the acoustic center of the woofer than if you were to just mount it on a board next to the woofer.

My tweeter is mounted right next to my mid, and is actually set behind it so that the acoustic centers are lined up as well as what's realistically possible.

Most loudspeaker manufacturers will suggest that you put the drivers as close as possible. This doesn't happen "suddenly" but the father apart they get, the worse the problem becomes.

The distance between the woofer and the mid is less critical than the distance between the mid and tweeter because the longer wavelength means your phase shift will be less for any given distance. Although it's less critical, the long distance between the lower door and the dash will still result in problems around the 150-200hz range that you're likely to cross.
Without taking measurements or doing calculations, I'd say that keeping the woofer within 18" to 24" of the mid would yield accepatable results. The tweeter really needs to be as close as possible.
My subs are in a sealed enclosure, though I may do my next set ported... I'm really not sure yet.

 

He's back and typing strong. Great post to all that gave input. I love the info the comes out in posts like this.