I finally have good tunes.

My Alpine deck and Boston plates have been in since summer, but I had no bass. As some of you may have gathered from my other posts, I drilled through my clutch master cylinder in my attempts to put a hole in the firewall for the 4 AWG wire. Well, that's all fixed and I went on with my project. I think I'm going to be writing a tech article on low-buck audio installs soon. I took a different approach with this install than I usually take. I did it on the cheap, but without half-assing anything.

I have to admit that having a head unit with a built-in crossover rocks! I've never used one before, and I love it. It allows me to take advantage of the meager internal deck amp by filtering all of the bass out of it, as well as having adjustable level & frequency control of the subwoofer.

So far I love the performance of the Rockford 360a2, but that's the ONLY thing I like about it. Whoever designed the layout of that amp needs a swift kick to the nuts. Having a separate gain control for individual channels on a 2 channel amp sucks. They're insanely hard to turn, and fairly difficult to see what level they're at without a microscope. I also think that only having 8 AWG power inputs sucks. I never run less than 4 AWG in my cars because I want the expandability without running new wires, so in times like this, I've got to peel back half of the cable so that it'll fit into the tiny terminals. It's also now impossible for me to fit the endcap onto the amp because the wire won't bend that much.

I'm also a tad miffed that I had to tweak the gain on the amp and still had to crank the sub output level on the deck to level match it to my deck-powered dash speakers.

Overall though, it's real nice to have good tunes again.

 

Bah. I turned it up on the way home and my dash speaker started bottoming out. I'm glad I didn't waste money on an amp.. it can't even handle the deck power. I've got that sunufabitch running 120 & up.

Looks like I need to fool around and see if that crossover is really doing its job, and if so, I might have to bump it to 150hz.

 

Hey Jim! Glad to hear you've got the lower end filled in. And yeah I know what you mean about the Built-in crossovers. On my 7863 the Sub output seems to drop in volume quite a bit when it's turned on. So I left it turned off(using it as rear preout) and used the crossover on the amp. I don't understand why that is. But it's alot louder.

 

Yeah, even on my cheap Sony that 7-channel EQ really helps fine tune the weak spots in your system. I found that since I've installed my Memphis' that it sounds best "off" though. Jim, what sub(s) are you running again?

-Matt

 

Hmm. My deck is a 7863 and I noticed the same thing too. Problem is, I don't think I can run the fronts high-pass unless the subwoofer output is turned on.

Flash, I'm running a pair of 10" Rockford HE2s. They're pretty thick sounding, but they pound like hell. :rockon:

 

LOL yeah I love mine except for the BBE light, Damn it's bright at night! I think you can run the Hi-Pass crossover on the Headunit with the Subs turned on or off. Pretty sure but wouldn't bet on it. The built in crossovers in the Headunit are very handy but I personally didn't like them. I tried every adjustment I could think of and wound up using the crossovers on my amps and a Clarion EQ with a built in Line Driver. I found the EQ to be a must in my setup inorder to get the sound I wanted as flash stated. There was a serious overload in the 120hz area. It sounds great now! There was just too much Midbass coming from the Subs and it pulled all of my Midbass away from the Component Set even tho both the Amps(Hi-pass and Low-pass) were crossed at 80hz. I wanted the subs to extend the lower end not carry all of the lower end. Sounds like an EQ/Crossover might be what you need.

 

My problem is that I can't use an eq or external crossover unless I amp all of my speakers. Since this is a low budget install, I've got to take advantage of the Alpine's deck power for the front speakers.