Most car speakers are optimised for the small space available in a car, which reinforces bass frequencies.
They may sound bass light in the larger spaces within a home.
All great points brought up here, I'll add a few more here. First off, what brand & model of driver are you working with? Maybe someone else has already done experiments & has an optimized configuration?
I bring this up as I "had experienced" a five-inch car-door speaker in the late eighties...recalling it "sounded good". Fast forward to today & the specific driver had been experimented almost endlessly trying to optimize its performance...following others experiments, I recreated one such optimized version with an NOS driver & frankly my version sounds great. It was found out to work best in an aperiodic configuration, with an odd oversize enclosure.
It is too bad several manufacturers even have "faked" three-way drivers, what looking like a small dome tweeter is in fact, a fake driver. Noting just what components of coils and/or capacitors within your three-way can point you towards their thought processes with crossover points.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Rick...
I bring this up as I "had experienced" a five-inch car-door speaker in the late eighties...recalling it "sounded good". Fast forward to today & the specific driver had been experimented almost endlessly trying to optimize its performance...following others experiments, I recreated one such optimized version with an NOS driver & frankly my version sounds great. It was found out to work best in an aperiodic configuration, with an odd oversize enclosure.
It is too bad several manufacturers even have "faked" three-way drivers, what looking like a small dome tweeter is in fact, a fake driver. Noting just what components of coils and/or capacitors within your three-way can point you towards their thought processes with crossover points.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Rick...
Last edited by a moderator:
I bought a few <$30/pair drivers off amazon, going with Pyle PL63BL for the left/right speakers (they're the best overall were better than comparable Boss, JVC, Pioneer, Scoche).
.
Agreed, I'm thinking keeping these open and adding an underpowered sub is the better rout
My listening room it an approximate 8 foot cube, my currently speakers using the same sized car speakers give reasonable bass ( using a double chamber aperiodic ), my next speakers might use 6x9 in a WAW configuration with some tiny woven glass fiber drivers. I like the idea of a separate sub, it would alow for the volume of the sub bass to be matched to the room.
This seems like a good idea with my crappy speakers... is the tweeter and woofer in a coax. 2 way car speakers wired in parallel? The 4 pairs of speakers I'm messing around with have a wire from each terminal going through the woofer diaphragm to under the tweeter dome. IDK what is under the dome, but they all have a 3-5uf capacitor just visible under the dome. A few hours of Googling, and I haven't found any hints what the wires are doing. Any suggestions before I break off a tweeter to find out?
On all of the car speakers that I've had, all of the drivers ( bass/mid, treble and super tweeter if it has one ) are wired in parallel. If you want to remove a tweeter from a car coaxial, peal the sticker that's on the rear of the mid/bass driver, and there should be a screw, if you undo this, the tweeter assembly should come loose. I would recommend just listening to them as they are for a few weeks first, after a while to loosen up, they may sound quite decent.
Maybe because I know what's in there, but I found clues in Google quickly.
The "crossover" in <$99 car coaxes is a single series capacitor, the whole thing wired across the woofer. We have to keep low tones out of the tweeter or it will garble and slap. Fancy speakers filter highs out of the woofer but actually woofers do that naturally. The main problem in a car is that the ear is WAY off-axis from a lower-door speaker (maybe a rear deck speaker) so we need something to spread the cymbals all around.
Yes, 10KHz seems high. 3-inch speakers really do have good spread to 5kHz, and a weak octave is not a major sin in lo-fi. The tweeter may be a higher impedance, and will have a resonance-bump at its low-end, and a single cap is not a sharp cut-off.
99% of drivers are happy this way. If you want to put this in a living room and LISTEN, you may want to snip the tweet connections and filter the two drivers more severely. (This can be a bottomless pit...)
I'm still working at this. I don't feel comfortable modifying tweeters yet.
Is it a bad idea to use a pair of home audio midrange woofers (55hz-7500hz) with a brighter sounding pair of full range 2way car coax. speakers? No extra crossover no equalizer. Just a splitter going to one amp for the L/R Mifrange woofers, separate amp for the L/R full range.
I found a local shop that sells oem replacement midrange range woofers with published T/S and enclosure specs. It would be this project a lot simpler, Quick google search vaguely advises against mixing different model speakers, not sure why. either way this isn't quite the same thing... or is it?
Is it a bad idea to use a pair of home audio midrange woofers (55hz-7500hz) with a brighter sounding pair of full range 2way car coax. speakers? No extra crossover no equalizer. Just a splitter going to one amp for the L/R Mifrange woofers, separate amp for the L/R full range.
I found a local shop that sells oem replacement midrange range woofers with published T/S and enclosure specs. It would be this project a lot simpler, Quick google search vaguely advises against mixing different model speakers, not sure why. either way this isn't quite the same thing... or is it?
I see no reason to complicate matters in the way you suggest. In fact, the acoustic result would not be predictable.
I suggest you install your car speakers (unmodified) in suitable enclosures as per the early advice given in the thread, then sit back and enjoy the music.
I suggest you install your car speakers (unmodified) in suitable enclosures as per the early advice given in the thread, then sit back and enjoy the music.
The midrange woofers sound much better than any of the car speakers (they should, they cost much more) but can't be used enough alone. And I know exactly what size to make a sealed and ported enclosure for it.
The midrange has rich deep lows and mids, cheap full range car speakers are too bright even in an enclosure. I tried adding a small subwoofer, that doesn't fix the low to mid range.
Since most sub $100 speakers don't use a crossover for the woofers, just a capacitor filter on the tweeter AND lots of passive speakers have 2 woofers to 1 tweeter. I'm sure its flawed logic, but my thinking is to recreate the same thing... instead of fiddling with enclosure to get super bright sounding coax speakers to sound bassy, just run them with open baffles and used with separate woofers to enhance/fill in the bass and mid frequencies.
(use sound dampening foam around the sides and back of the coax to keep it "open baffle" but minimize cancelation).
...If i want to get really crazy, I can make ported enclosure to the woofers, go down to 53hz. never need for a subwoofer...
It's a lot simpler than fiddling with crossovers and tweeter frequencies, trial/error enclosure.
I don't see that having to use two amplifiers instead of one is a lot simpler.
I would connect the car speaker directly to the "midrange woofer" via a suitable series capacitor in order to limit the bass frequencies going to the car speaker.
I would connect the car speaker directly to the "midrange woofer" via a suitable series capacitor in order to limit the bass frequencies going to the car speaker.
Yes, your enclosure is the first thing to look at, but I'm not sure open baffle is what you are looking for in this instance. The reason is that there is a thing called 'baffle step' which affects your bass according to the cabinet size. You can help it a little by bringing down the upper midrange and treble and this is worth trying first.
Which brings me to the treble. The tweeters on a pod in some car coaxes can be too much. Using a resistor may help it a little.
If all this is more than you want to do then get yourself an equaliser.
Which brings me to the treble. The tweeters on a pod in some car coaxes can be too much. Using a resistor may help it a little.
If all this is more than you want to do then get yourself an equaliser.
Would running the coax. speakers with an amp that has bass and treble knobs do the same thing and using a capacitor?
If you were to use two integrated amps, one for the car speakers and another for the home woofers, consider how fiddly it would be when it came to changing the volume, while at the same time maintaining the sound level balance between the two sets of speakers.
You would need a volume control in front of the two amplifiers in order to control the volume of the two amps simultaneously.
Then your idea would work, but it seems unduly complicated.
Then your idea would work, but it seems unduly complicated.
computer, phone, tv would control the master volume. But I don't see a simpler way of balancing the volume between the 2 pairs of speakers than using 2 amps.
Plus using an amp with treble and bass control is cheaper and less complicated than ordering capacitors, plus time and effort soldering them.
Plus two 50w/chan. amps plus power supplies are much cheaper than 100w/ch amp and 200watt psu. With what I have and can get its $38 vs $119. If I combine them Id have to run them at 8ohm instead of 4ohm. If I run the speakers simultaneously both speakers on separate amps get less power on 100w/ch 8ohm than they would on separate 50w speakers at 4ohm, To match the power output Id in theory need 200w/channel 400watt psu.
Id really love to get both pairs of speakers working together. I tried testing them with too small leaky cardboard test enclosure, which is no way to test, they don't sound bad, but they don't sound 'right'. The woofers in ported enclosures have an resonant frequency of 52hz (supposedy) .
Last edited:
If you feel that crossovers are too complicated/expensive, there's nothing to stop you from going ahead with your experiments.
I, for one, will be interested in receiving a report on your final setup.
I, for one, will be interested in receiving a report on your final setup.
Have the original cheep coaxial speakers been tried ( after about a week of blasting music through them to loosen them up ) ? I imagine ( with a bit of stuffing behind them ) they'd at least sound decent, and an easy improvement would be to replace them with similar sized component speakers. If the original speakers sound really bad they could be cannibalised, and re-used with a mid-range driver ( I've tuned speakers by ear, and it's taken me 10 years to get the hang of it, and results are still hit and miss ), perhaps this would be a cheap way to learn a lot.