JBL car woofer for home use

[Vaughan]

Hi guys,

How would you rate this woofer for home use ? http://www.jbl.com/resources/Brands/...Tech051908.pdf

It is a car audio woofer with a relatively high Fs and a low Xmax but I would be interested to know if you guys would recommend it for home use or if there would be better alternatives that are in the same/similar price bracket.

Thanks.

[Arty]

car woofers are generaly not a good choice for room use.
Car woofers are designd to preform in a car, and even the low fs will not help it.
Car's have a different "room gain" in this case " cabinet gain" and therefore drivers are designed to account that. For this reason they are mostly unable to produce meaningful SPL lvl under 60 hz.
This is what fits cars, so this is what they do

Usualy chepoo, badly engineerd car woofers can work surprisingly well in a room.
The reason is simple, they fail in a car.

so generaly it is not adviced to use a car sub in a room.
Anyways, looking at the link You provided the vented box might work.
But it will be still more of an extra bass unit, rather than a subwoofer.
Same, or even deeper bass can be obtained from 6.5" proper bass drivers.
The manufcturer was semi-honest, if You look at the graphs they do show how it sounds out of the car, and in the car.
You can see the difference, i gues.
While the datasheet says the unit can be used from 25 hz, well..
yes, if You do account the "cabinet gain" but for home use that figure is absolute meaningless.

Same like.. publishing the performance of a car, with data mesured on the moon. Surely it willbe running good, 1/6 the gravity, far less problems relatted to aerodynamics. But.. You wana use it on earth, so those are things You absolute not need to know.

This particular JBL driver is a verry decent one for car use, that is for absolute sure btw.
Good price/value.

If i was You i would not attempt to ruin it by using it indoors.

[NEO Dan]

QTS is a bit high. How much is it?

[Homeboydeluxe]

QTS is 0.67

If you have room for a 10 cubic foot ported box, with a 22Hz tune and a 20Hz HPF, 400 watt input this subwoofer will give you around 110db-115db between 20Hz-80Hz, that's pretty good as far as i am concerned.

I run twelve of the 12" version, in my 1900 cubic foot room, and get amazing bass!

[tb46]

Hi Vaughan,

The high Qts calls for use as a sealed box. You could try 227 litres (8ft^3) sealed, and also add 2ea. 4"Dia. x 11"long ports for experimental purposes. It's big, but it should work, and for less than $90.-- (for the driver) it's definitely worth trying.

Regards,

[Vaughan]

Thanks for the response guys. So you think it would be pretty decent for the money. Are there better drivers available for room use in a similar price bracket ?

[wingman]

It will work as an IB sub.

[johnr66]

You can find better drivers for about the same money. It will work in a 4 cu/ft, box, but with Qtc of around 1 it will have some peak (nothing awful though).

A larger box will remove the peak (boominess), lower the F3 point a bit and better the extension by a few db.

For me, I'd look for a driver that will work in a smaller box.

[art64]

This is one of my questions too. So I took it upon myself and removed my truck subwoofer. It's a Sony 12" Xplod slim box. Lo and behold it sounded great. The amp that's powering it it a Sony Compact Disc Deck Reciever with a subwoofer setting. Can't even tell from the sound that the subwoofer is a compact one. Of course if your area is huge, you'll need a lot of these. The woofer is entirely different. Not paper and very stiff. Lots of pics are available via google. The enclosure is NOT ported. Tight bass. I may get one more for the living room. Testing it out right now with hip hop music, pop, and rock, classic rock. So far sounds great.

[fudplayers]

I agree. I built a powered sub for the home using the old faithfull brand JL Audio car audio sub. Built a ported box with the 10w0v2 10" sub with a dayton audio SA200 plate amp and man it sounds good. For about $200 the sub sounds great. I've used home sub drivers in powered boxes but to be truthfull, car subs sound better to me. They play louder,deeper and are generally more durable due to the materials used for the driver,spider,basket etc...