Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Dumb car audio question

HMMMM...... I think that WOULD make me change my forum mood from sad to very happy... Although I am not sure that it would fit in the trunk...

Oh, heck, I'll just strap it in the front passenger seat!

Nick, I had a '96 SE Sport. It was surprisingly entertaining to drive - zippy motor and quick reflexes in the corners. Way better than most of the numb sedans out there. Too bad the thing was plagued with gremlins. Near the end, it needed about $4K in repairs, but was only worth $2K. Ended up giving it to my brother inlaw. He dumped the money into it and then proceeded to wrap it around a tree. Nice going.

So what year is the Cutlass in your Avatar? My first car was a '68.....

It's a '68 as well. Not mine, but I love the pre '70's Cutlass's. (where's grammar bot?) My Dad had a '67 and I had an '81 in high school.

My wife is fully aware that once the kids are through school, I'm buying a 442.

I cut out those vertical "fins" in the front grill and installed driving lights. It had a 350 with a 4 bbl carb. I can still smell the sun-dried-out fabric...

New question.
Two 10" subs or one 12" sub?

Two 10" subs would cost 40% more than the singel 12" sub.
The 12" sub has 20% more RMS wattage than one 10" sub, but two 10" subs have 38% more watts than the single 12".

10" subs are 2.85 watts per dollar, and the 12" is 3 watts per dollar.

So keeping in mind that I want to supliment my low end car audio and not create a thumping monster, which should I go with? Or should I just put in a single 10" sub?

I know that this is a personal opinion question, but I've never had a car sub before.

Hi,

One sub is plenty. The volume of car interiors is tiny compared to rooms in a house. It's been years since I've written on car audio, but I have a sealed-box (acoustic suspension) sub, about one cubic foot or maybe a bit larger, with a 10-inch driver (Pioneer) and it's excellent. It was driven by a separate 185-watt bridged mono amp, which got intermittent. So I bridged the sub output from the other stereo amp. Some car audio amplifiers let you do that.

It works fine, but I'm out of touch about newer car amps. These are 15 years old.

Regards,

Alan

Nick,

I forgot to add that if you have the windows up, you can get amazing subwoofer performance in a car interior and for relatively little money compared to home subwoofers.

There are no standing wave problems because the sub pressurizes the entire interior, so any passenger hears the same powerful bass that you do. Subs for cars are all 4 ohms, so you can get more power efficiently from the amplifier. Sealed-box subs are inefficient so you want lots of real watts to drive them, but you get very smooth, tight deep bass to below 20 Hz from a well-designed sealed box car sub.

Alan

Thanks Alan. So that eliminates the thought of a dual sub for what I need. Now to figure out if 10" is enough, or if I should go for 12". The 12" will take up more space, but only cost about $15 more than the 10" I am looking at.

Oh, I was thinking that a sealed box was the way to go. More tight bass like you said, and the amp I am looking at is rated at 52% more (as is just more than 2x) RMS wattage than the 10" and 40% more than the RSM of the 12"... I have enough amp power anyway.

Wow that is so odd. I had a 68 HO.