Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Better Car Audio

The base audio in my new car leaves something to be desired. In fact, in terms of clarity, its a step back from my '97 escort.

While the drivers extend lower than those in my old car, its all soft and mushy and turns into boom boom for anything with any amount of bass.

I expect what I currently have for speakers is 4 el chee, er inexpensive-o full range drivers.

So, any suggestions on a low cost upgrade to clean things up? Maybe I should just velcro a pair of M0s to my dash...

Well, BigWyREs would be proud of that last suggestion.

Yeah, but he's gonna be pissed that you keep misspelling his name.

You guys are so helpful. Sigh, I guess I might as well go shopping for duct tape now ...

But misspelling is part of his modus operandi. I try to misspell it every time to catch his attention. So far, it has failed to annoy him into a response or perhaps he just can't tell the difference.

Tryin' to smoke him out, eh Murph? Mission not accomplished!

U cannot smokout BBigwyres, you no tru audiopile!

JP, you forgot to log-off/log-in again!

I wish I were bbigwyres. He's more interesting than me.

Not sure what size speakers you have in your car but I recently added an audio system into my wife's car. For the front door speakers we went with these:
http://www.hertzaudiovideo.com/Doc/pdf_ecx165.pdf

A local car audio place here in town is an authorized retailer for hertz audio. They cost me about $190 installed (for 2 speakers). I have them amped with an external amp pushing about 75 watts into each speaker and they sound pretty darn good for car speakers.

She has a sub added to the system so I am not sure how well these do on the low end by themselves.

MBquart was another car audio speaker that was highly recommended by my audio installer, but I never gave them a listen.

Look at David being all "helpful". Nice!

But, yeah, Fred. I think you're on to something. There must be an instructable out there to convert duct tape and zip ties (the bailing wire of the 21st century) into auto speakers.

Or just, you know, go to Crutchfield and order some stuff.

I actually had good luck with http://www.sonicelectronix.com/ but I don't buy enough different cars or care enough about car audio to be of much use to you.

Thanks for the recommendation and link David. As excited as I am to become part of the Moose Lodge, I was wondering about co-axial drivers. They seem ideal for audio applications where space is at a premium.

I have no idea how much space I have to work with. I know there are 4 speakers, 2 in front and 2 in the back.

It looks like this driver comes with a built in x-over so it might just be a drop in option. Sensitivity is 93db and woofer fs is 72Hz so thats not bad at all!

Do you know if the driver is self contained or if they installed some sort of box for the woofer?

I have all Hertz Audio in my truck and it is great, I do not think that it is a cost effective solution but you will very much enjoy the gear. I am running the HSK 165 in the front and the HCX165 in the rear doors off of an HP4 rated at at total of 920W RMS....sweet and the HX300D with a HP2 rated at 1200W RMS at 4ohms. There isn't a Duramax 2500 around that sounds like this truck LOL.

Later
Phil

My advise is to forget the rear speakers and put your cash into better front speakers and a quality amp. You may or may not find you need a sub.

The Hertz speakers were just mounted directly into the door, no enclosure of any kind. We went with a Zapco 500W 4 channel amp. The front two channels are driving the Hertz speakers and the back 2 channels are bridged to power the Image dynamic sub (the sub was placed in a custom built box in the trunk of her car which was carpeted to match) The rear spears are Treo speakers which are just powered from the Pioneer Head unit. I suspect that you could power the ECX speakers directly from a head unit with no problem but An amp probably does help bring them to life.

One cool thing about these speakers is that the tweeters can be rotated to "aim" the highs in various directions for optimum sound quality. Of course once the door panel is on you can't rotate them any more, but you can tweak the positioning as much as you want before the door panel is installed. I think the HSX speakers that PHil D mentioned are the step up from the ECX speakers I purchased. I believe the HCX speakers have tweeters that rotate AND tilt for even more tweeter fine tuning.

PhilD, out of curiosity how much did you pay for a pair of the HCX165's. They appear to be the step up from the ECX165' coax speakers we put in my wifes car. As I mentioned we were charged $190 for the pair (installed). I think the installation cost was about $40 so I guess we paid about $150 for the speakers. As good as the ECX speakers sound (for car speakers) I did wonder what the HCX line sounded like.

However, the speakers my dealer carried that were supposedly better (and more expensive) then the ECX speakers were not Hertz but were MBQuart (I think). I didn't listen to them or any other speakers that were over $150 per pair because that was already $50 more than I was hoping to spend.

OK, spent several hours reading about car audio. Yikes!! You can spend a lot of $$ very easily.

So it looks like I don't need to upgrade all 4 at once, or even upgrade the rears.

I'm with you David, $100 is about what I was looking to spend, but that will probably stretch... I don't listen loud, so I am hoping that I can stick with the existing head unit.

The only issue with the Hertz unit is depth. I think my front panel will only accommodate 2 5/16" deep speakers unless I carve up the door panel and install custom grills.

I might just pop in to a couple of dealers and play dumb to see what they recommend.

Most car speaker manufacturers are aware that mouting depth is an important design factor to consider. As a result, I think you will find a lot of speakers are built for mounting in tight spaces.

Around here we have several local car audio stores, (audio advice, boomers audio, car toys, ect) Each one is pretty much an authorized dealer for a different kind of speaker (none of them really carry the same speakers as best buy (pioneer, infinity, ect.) ) I'd suggest you find some similar places and go have a listen. Tell them you are just looking for some good quality speakers for your car and don't want a huge sub and amp and all that good stuff.

Keep in mind that if you are going to install the speakers yourself, even if you get the same size of speaker that is currently in your car there is a good chance that the mounting holes won't match up and you will have to drills some new ones or build some brackets. For this reason I just paid the extra cost for installation (plus in my case I was already having the amp, sub, head unit, ect. all installed, plus the sub box built so adding the speaker installation was not a big deal)

Thats good advice, thanks. Like I wrote earlier, I'll go out and play dumb. Thats usually a good way to separate the good guys from the flakes.

Sounds like a plan. There is nothing wrong with listening to some "big name" speakers such as pioneer, infinity, alpine, ect. at a big box store as well.

good luck, and let us know what you end up with !

Well, that was fun.

The first shop I visited was a small outfit that, by the looks of it, does a lot of installs. Told the guy that I had bought a new Matrix and the sound sucked, asking what I could do about the speakers.

He proceeded to tell me it was the head unit, not the speakers. It didn't have enough oompf for the speakers. He gave me a story about his gf's corolla and how he changed out the head unit and presto, better sound. Right...

Coulda sworn that the Matrix brochure said the unit had all the oompf plus extra more ® Scratch these guys from the list.

Next up was Future Shop (a folksy version of BB for all you Yanks). I started off the same and the guy actually asked some questions. He thought it might be the head unit, but was not sure and went to get somebody who could answer my questions: Not bad for big box.

The expert asked a few more questions including what my goals were. He thought I could get away with upgrading the front speakers, but that my unit only put out in the range of 20-30W so I would be volume limited. He talked about separates so I asked about a crossover being included since my head unit probably only had amp outs: blank look. Sigh...

I sure hope this city has more to offer.

On the way over to the two stores visited I tried to quantify what I didn't like a little more. I think its all in the upper bass. I listen to a lot of talk radio and even on female voices I notice that boomy/muddy quality creeping in.

A quick search shows that the vocal range is 80Hz to 1000Hz and that the female voice fundamental is somewhere in the 150Hz - 250Hz range.

From that I gather my primary issue is in the sub 500Hz region. I am willing to bet that the speakers in my Escort had a fairly high roll off that eliminated this region so I perceived better quality. I was getting all my bass information from the harmonics.

I think that stock head units are notorious for crappy power output, but I am not sure how much is gained with a replacement head unit

Out of curiosity, have any of you sat in the drivers seat, played tones, and metered the response?

I haven't been "into" car audio for many years, but I've owned SPL meters forever and never attempted to plot a cars' system...

I remember when a 20 watt car amp was considered quite healthy. Of course that was 30 years ago.AACK!
He's right about deck power- depending on speaker sensitivity, a stock deck can sound good, it just wont be loud. I feel this is an exception to my "front stage only" prefrence. If you only have deck power you're gonna need all 4 speakers running for volume reinforcement. I've read that a decent stock deck is equivilent to a mid-line aftermarket. There was a guy on a car audio forum I used to frequent who built a competition winning system using a stock deck and a small 20 watt amp on eack channel. It wasn't loud, but played within it's limits the sq was fantastic.
If you get component speakers they will come with crossovers which will need to be mounted somewhere dry.

Thats the point. What I was describing was not the amps being driven to distortion.

Mark. I've been wondering how I can get my computer next to my car so I can run REW sweeps.

I actually started to do this with my wifes car but gave up when I had a hard time getting the real traps tones to play through the usb drive I was using.

They were in the $400 dollar range but that was Canadian and some of it was install. I had alot of gear put in I think I got a good deal.

Any secondary amp should make a huge differance over the stock head unit. I put a 70W x4Ch sony xplode into a friends work truck with some Alpin speakers I had and he thinks is absoultly rocks.

Later
Phil

cool. Id be interested to hear how they compare with the energy line. They must sound great because I am more than happy with our speakers (they are no m80's but sound pretty stinkin' good)

Yeah they are very nice sounding, my objective was quality not quanity. But to get quality at a high volume range you need huge wattage increases hence the HP4. The single sub in the custom box sounds good too. I think I will go get a meter this weekend and see the db on them LOL now I am currious. I do know I can flex my door pannles

Later
Phil

Oh I am running a Kenwood KDC-X792 with a 24 bit D/A converter and 8 times over sampling. 0.008 THD at 1KHz it sounds pretty good with a good recording.