Car audio, ideas?

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I got some car audio questions that maybe some people here could answer.

In my Supra, I had a Rockford 6.5" speaker under the dash where the 80s woofer was, and I replaced the 3.5 inch speakers with some Polk speakers I found in the trash from a home set, and that worked out perfect. However, in back, things didn't work out so perfect. The car stock had 6x8 speakers in back, BUT, the problem was, the dimensions Toyota used were a tad off compared to 6x8 speakers on the market, so you'd never get the speaker mounted in well. It ended up being a ziptie job, and the speakers just never were mounted right. Most people on the CelicaSupra board to get around the problem use 5.5s in back. My 6x8s I had were Sony X-Plodes, used Pioneer 2 ways, and then used Bazooka speakers that were total garbage. I think the Pioneers sounded a bit cleaner, but they'd distort quicker.

Anyway, that Supra is gone, and I have my other one. That one there is more or less a blank slate. For front speakers, I'm thinking of modding the enclosures in the dash for 4 inch speakers, and it seems people have been reasonably successful doing that. So I need a set of 4 inch speakers, and 5.5s.

For my head unit, I was running a Walmart Jensen head unit. It was 160 watt max output, and honestly it wasn't too loud, especially coming out of relatively tiny speakers in the Supra. It did have a lot of features, though. SD card input, USB flash drive input, mp3 CD playback, and most importantly to me at the time, HD Radio tuner built in. I still have the head unit and it still works, so I'm leaning on keeping it, but I realize it'd have been more ideal to spend a bit more money on a Pioneer or JVC head unit. I like Pioneer and JVC head units, as they seem to have the best radio reception. Even a Pioneer cassette deck I got from the junkyard for $5 from 2000 had better reception by a large margin than the Jensen does. The Jensen I can't get my favorite regular FM station on it, but I can get some HD stations I do like listening to, but again, it's got a weak tuner, so they cut out under bridges and the like. But, a Pioneer or JVC unit won't come with built in HD capacity, I'd have to drop another $30ish on a HD radio tuner. So yeah, that's a predicament in itself, whether to keep my head unit I'm currently running or get another one.

Now for the last question, I have a nice big JBL box for a 10" subwoofer, I think it'd be a 20 inch or so box. Not ported. My neighbor also gave me an amp, I think it's an 800 watt max amp. Unsure if it works. I'd like to pursue a subwoofer in the car, too. So assuming the amp works, what type of subwoofer should I get for a box like that? What brands do you like? Also, my headunit does have separate subwoofer out, but the amp only has the standard 4 RCA out, so should I just ignore the head unit's subwoofer out and wire it up like normal?

Any opinions should be helpful. This isn't a "money is no object" sorta thing, and I'd like to stay on the cheaper side, too. My budget for speakers per set is probably about $50-70 per set max, and for a sub, about $100 or so. I'm willing to buy used, and am generally good at shopping around, so if you got suggestions for higher, suggest anyway. Feel free to talk about your own car audio stuff or car audio in general in this thread, too.

i used to drive a '04 toyota avalon, it had a huge trunk which was large enough to support a large subwoofer tuned down low enough to put out usable output all the way down to 8 cycles per second [i'm a pipe organ bass freak and the lowest 64' pipe organ stops are pitched that low]. part of the reason i wanted it as large as it was [filled 1/3 of the trunk] was so it would be efficient enough to get loud and low on just 150 watts bridged output from a subwoofer amp [anything more powerful and i woulda had to do expensive alternator and battery work on the car]. had to sell it all when i had to move to another place in a hurry. it was the best deep bass i'd ever heard my pipe organ CDs played on. it would make my lungs feel like quivering jello on a dinner plate during an earthquake, and make my teeth rattle. 64' organ pipes sound/feel like a helicopter hovering over your roof.

my advice for anybody who wants to stay on low-budget is to avoid having to make any major electrical mods to the car to enable it to deliver more current. that means sticking to high efficiency speaker designs especially for the bass bins as bass can use up to 1/3 of all the power. that means using good ol' bass reflex designs based on classic thiele/small parameters [NO isobariks or compact acoustic suspension designs], and minimizing the use of power-sucking crossovers above 2nd order, and going fullrange wherever possible, supplementing with supertweeters on the high end and subs on the low end. use passive crossovers [1st order] wherever possible. keep it as electrically simple as possible.

Last edited by auntblabby on 11 May 2012, 2:42 am, edited 1 time in total.

160 watts Max output. Is that per channel, or total power output of all channels combined? What you will want for an amp is something that has it's wattage rated RMS per channel.

That 160 watts total output amp is probably rated about 5W/ channel RMS @ 8 Ohms. Alot of the car audio stuff that's out there is rated this way because big numbers look good, but that big number is summed from all of the channels pushing maybe a 1 Ohm load with a completely clipped signal.

No, it's 160 max, 20 totally clipped, and then like 12 or 14 per channel actual max. So it sucks. But it has a lot of features and I already own it.