Best 8" speakers for a loud car?

[silver00spike]

I currently have a pioneer head, some polk audio 6.5" speakers in the doors, tweeters, and two 8" tang band subs in the trunk powered by a jl 300/2. this is inside a dodge viper gts, which has fairly high road and exhaust noise even with some insulation in the trunk

my 8" subs sound fantastic, but their box takes up half of the trunk, and adds 50lbs. the doors in the speakers are usually overpowered, and have weak midbass.

so!... I'd like to replace my whole setup with two 8" speakers that will have some subwoofer like kick to them, play down to a reasonable frequency (50hz?) and up to about tweeter level (2khz?). I'm keeping my tweeters. I'd have to mount them in a custom enclosure along the transmission tunnel, next to my legs, since they wouldn't fit in the doors since there's no room. Basically, they'll be in a sealed enclosure with very little space (maybe .10 or .25 cu feet). I'd like to keep them around $100 per driver, and power them with my existing jl 300/2 amp. low mounting depth is a plus

any recommendation? I was looking at something along the lines of this:

Parts-Express.comayton RS225S-8 8" Reference Shielded Woofer 8 Ohm | rs225s-8 8" woofer midbass sheilded woofer dayton dayton audio dayton loudspeaker reference reference series shielded RS aluminum reference-22008 cone RS220 reference DARSW110508

[Bob_345]

Originally Posted by silver00spike

I currently have a pioneer head, some polk audio 6.5" speakers in the doors, tweeters, and two 8" tang band subs in the trunk powered by a jl 300/2. this is inside a dodge viper gts, which has fairly high road and exhaust noise even with some insulation in the trunk

my 8" subs sound fantastic, but their box takes up half of the trunk, and adds 50lbs. the doors in the speakers are usually overpowered, and have weak midbass.

so!... I'd like to replace my whole setup with two 8" speakers that will have some subwoofer like kick to them, play down to a reasonable frequency (50hz?) and up to about tweeter level (2khz?). I'm keeping my tweeters. I'd have to mount them in a custom enclosure along the transmission tunnel, next to my legs, since they wouldn't fit in the doors since there's no room. Basically, they'll be in a sealed enclosure with very little space (maybe .10 or .25 cu feet). I'd like to keep them around $100 per driver, and power them with my existing jl 300/2 amp. low mounting depth is a plus

any recommendation? I was looking at something along the lines of this:

Parts-Express.comayton RS225S-8 8" Reference Shielded Woofer 8 Ohm | rs225s-8 8" woofer midbass sheilded woofer dayton dayton audio dayton loudspeaker reference reference series shielded RS aluminum reference-22008 cone RS220 reference DARSW110508

those dayton speakers are good but will fail miserably in a car with changing tempetures. here is a nice kenwood 8. its ment to be a sub but its a shalow mount and has the response of a tipical mid. my friend actualy has some in his doors and they sound fantastic!

Kenwood KFC-XW800F (kfcxw800f) - 8" Subwoofers - Sonic Electronix

[luka]

any PA speaker I guess

[Pallas]

Originally Posted by Bob_345

those dayton speakers are good but will fail miserably in a car with changing tempetures.[/url]

What makes you say that?

Lots of people run them in cars, and there's no theoretical reason to expect a metal cone/rubber surround driver to not hold up just fine.

[Glowbug]

Agreed, those Daytons are very popular, and I've yet to hear of anyone having reliability issues with them. Sonically, I've heard better ones at that price point depending on where the crossover points were, but that's another issue

It's going to be hard to find an 8" that works well in a 2-way, at least without some work to get them extremely on-axis. A good quality 6.5" midbass in a kickpanel pod will do exactly what you specified - get down to 50Hz with usable output, and have no problem going up to 2K. Some brands to check out would be Hybrid Audio Technologies, Scan Speak, Seas, etc.

If you didn't want to keep your tweets, another option might be 8's in the kicks, and a small full range driver on top - I've heard that done before with good results.

You might want to look into another amp, and going active if your head unit can support it...to get the best results out of this, I see a need for at least five channels...2 for the tweets, 2 for the midbasses, one for the subs...

[ppia600]

I have four kicker cvt 6.5" subs, they handle a lot of rms power but my doors don't have much room for cutting so that's going to be a challenge. The rears will fit the deck with a little cutting though. I plan on running them high passed around 40hz when the subs are in the back and full range when the subs are out.

[jol50]

They do make 8" coax for cars now, many Euro and Asian new cars are converting to those. But they would be no replacement for subs....more like a 6x9 replacement. You can't really get a sub and play it high, they will sound ugly. About the best you can do 2 way is a 7" woofer like a seas/etc. They can reach up to a very low playing tweeter. Or you could run a small mid or dome mid and still use your existing tweeters in a 3 way with a 7 or 8. I don't know what room you have, but a tube sub enclosure is about the lightest you might investigate one of those or sonotube some call them made from a concrete form tube.