hello everyone i would like some opinions on the pros and cons of building a decent pair of home 3 way speakers using car audio raw drivers and building my own enclosures and crossovers .here in cancun theres lots of quality car stuff but hardly no good home audio drivers . i was wondering basically for the mids and tweeters i can use 12s or 15s which are available here.thanks for the help..
Run the winISD simulations, figure out what's going to give a decent bass response in a home - this will be the largest difference between home and car drivers. Car drivers may rely on car cabin gain to extend the LF response. In the home, you get a similar effect, but not as much gain. As a result, a subwoofer that sounds great in a car may sound thin and anaemic in a house.
Chris
Chris
quite so, while many of the larger subs are engineered to handle stupid amounts of abuse, and could probably handle the power required to EQ for reasonable in-room response - they're not particularly efficient, and could easily gobble up a few hundred watts to achieve reasonable dynamic headroom
As well, the mid-bass drivers tend to be designed for "leaky" enclosures (doors, kick panels, rear decks, etc and might not work as well as you'd hope in small sealed or even conventionally ported boxes
thanks for the input guys will be conventional professional bass drivers im looking at a brand made and sold here in mexico named KRACK audio. they seem to be very well made and specs read well ! they have various lines, car audio ,professional ,and lots of goodies as well .they have pro grade 12 inch subs for sound reinforcement use.also some nice silk dome mids and tweeters ,the subs and low frequency drivers they have in 8 ohms but the mids and tweeters are 6.5 and 4 ohms respectivelyhas anyone ever used these drivers! once again thanks for the help i think youre right about the car subwoofers ive heard other peoples projects with these and they sound .....well.........off!some muddy and most really boomy. i need tight accurate base and thats what im shooting for!
well i think if the biggest drawback is that car 4ohm mids and highs are designed for leaky enclosures i m sure that falls well within my cabinet making skillset!! just kiddin around!!i would think some experimenting with different porting-venting configurations should yield some good results.if the other aspects of a purpose designed CAR audio driver are similar or equal to its 8ohm brethren please someone fill me in on the reasons why i shouldnt use CAR audio drivers .are they less sonically pure, do they sound ....not as good ...or accurate. why dont people do it more often.....thanks for the insight
in my sorted past i used a Kicker 12" in my home for some time. i called Kicker and asked for the largest bandpass enclosure they had on file. I ended up with a 130liter cabinet that i stuck in the corner of the room behind a couch.
worked well for parties and angering the neighbors...not so much for bass quality but the quantity was definitely there.
worked well for parties and angering the neighbors...not so much for bass quality but the quantity was definitely there.
car audio drivers vary in quality and design parameters at least as much as those intended for home use, so any generalizations will be just that, but:
- 4ohm (or even less for subs) is often the case for the drivers due to the chicken / egg scenario with power amps designed to deliver higher power into lower impedance loads - by and of itself, that's no metric of their "sonic purity", or lack thereof
- the acoustic and physical environments in which they (car drivers) operate are much more extreme and constrained than most home situations, and much of the engineering of the better quality components is ( not always successfully) intended to enhance their durability, not so much their "finesse" or refinement of low level detail etc - you know, all that tweaky audiophile stuff
They'll certainly "work" well enough, but may start to show some of their deficiencies when not operating in an environment with substantial cabin gain, and just as significant, background noise floor that can easily exceed 70dB SPL at speed.
nice response chris b .i really appreciate youre insight heres the plan ....i have two altec 1590e amps i will build two custom sub enclosures with jbl or krack 12s one for each amp then build two 3way enclosures housing nice ,quality 8 ohm woofers and utilize car audio mids and tweeters. i will power the main speakers with a kenwood krv8080 reciever. when i get done it will be highly unconventional ,kinda pretty ,and very good sounding! thanks again for youre help!
well the easy answer is .can i actually buy something from parts express and ....and that something whatever it may be actually arrive in cancun in one piece in a reasonable amount of time ..................highly doubtful .......but if anyone has had success in ordering parts from mexico from parts express and everything going smoothly i would appreciate the heads up!i would certainly go that route!!!! the postal service is abyssmal at best here. a regular letter takes 3 weeks to arrive from south carolina!if you know of a company that successfully ships to cancun i would appreciate hearing about them! thanks
I would have to say that the biggest reason most people don't do it more often is that typically you get a lot less for your money with car audio drivers because the market caters more to LOUD than to quality. Other than the impedance difference there is no standard across the board difference between car and home drivers, so if you can get better quality car drivers for your money then go for it, just make sure you match the imedance requirements of your amplifiers with your speakers. The most redily visible difference between high quality drivers and low quality drivers is the strengh of the magnet and this can be more or less determined by it's size. For midrange and tweeter drivers the diaphram should be light and stiff. Exotic materials and showy designs tend to be a sign of low quality when it comes to car audio drivers, so always check the magnets.
wow brsanko really nice...concise comments .....that was the information i was going for !!! thanks alot ...that was what i was wondering if car drivers were inherently sonically impure or BAD sounding! and i assumed that the best quality car audio drivers would or should sound excellent in their properly designed enclosures! the thing is shipping is shoddy at best here and car stuff is available. various quality brands .so i think i will try using some high quality car audio components.i really dislike the sound of most horn mids or highs.and prefer diaghram speakers .also lots of crossover kits are available for the car stuff . i will report on my progress .thanks again for your help.
The reason most people don't like the sound of horns on mids or tweeters is because their sensitivity makes for imbalanced sound when paired with less sensitive (non-horn loaded) woofers. They may use attenuation to match the levels at a given volume, but because music is dynamic when the volume goes up the horns over power the unloaded woofer creating a resonse peak at the crossover point giving it that "shouty" sound. If the woofer is horn loaded it actually gives the speaker a warm sound, almost the opposite of the negative effects of speakers with just high frequency horns. If the whole frequency range is horn loaded (with multiple horns) the entire sonic spectrum can be balanced and the only "horn effect" is clear, ultra low distortion, smooth, dynamicly lifelike music. Once I heard a horn loaded subwoofer I don't like listening to anything else. The only drawback is the size, but a tapped horn is a fantastic comprimise between smaller size and amazing dynamics and high SPLs at lower power.
You could always go the route of active crossover (like pa or some car audio) but that requires separate amp channel per driver. I run a simple 2-way now (I don't want a multitude of amplifiers, I did have an active crossed 4-way). I cannot tolerate less bass now (like crossing an 8" to a subwoofer, yucky). Most horns are junk, but some are awesome once you get their hf boost network tweaked in.
For a subwoofer, I'd steer clear of the pa stuff. Instead look for drivers that would go fairly low in a ported box (f3 around 27hz, run the equations). If it is a 15", I'd expect 8ft3 per driver to get that low of an F3 anechoic. You could run two of the 15" hf dayton subs in a 10ft3 sealed box. That'd give you qtc .707 with an F3 around 28hz. I'll probably get a cheap pair of high xmax 12" car audio drivers and then boost the schmoo out of them for F3 anechoic around 20hz (linkwitz transform).
Norman
For a subwoofer, I'd steer clear of the pa stuff. Instead look for drivers that would go fairly low in a ported box (f3 around 27hz, run the equations). If it is a 15", I'd expect 8ft3 per driver to get that low of an F3 anechoic. You could run two of the 15" hf dayton subs in a 10ft3 sealed box. That'd give you qtc .707 with an F3 around 28hz. I'll probably get a cheap pair of high xmax 12" car audio drivers and then boost the schmoo out of them for F3 anechoic around 20hz (linkwitz transform).
Norman
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also of interest could be the car transducers from Eminence - ask there:
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perhaps good available in your aera.
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thanks guys for the really good input i will take all this stuff into consideration.i have no experience with horn loaded subwoofers but had a pair of klipsch heresy loudspeakers at home in north carolina and they were really extremely loud crispy and shouty! i will look into horn loaded subs! as for the enclosures the subs will be seperate in a custum vented concrete space below the stairs of the house!!! its big .....and well.....very tightly sealed!
This is actually a multi-way being discussed, going to move this thread to that forum.i know this is an old thread but i thought i would comment:
while i dont have any technical details, i'll say that i've been using car audio speakers in my house for many years now without any problems. i use my computer for everything, including watching programs, using a 40" samsung lcd for a monitor. my set up is 1/3 home audio speakers (a set of phillips bookshelf speakers mounted on pedestal on the wall) and 2/3 car audio speakers: a Boston Acoustics g5 10 running at 2ohms to a home audio amp from parts express; and a pair of speaker pods i built with each containing a Sony 6.5 coax from the late 1990's and a pair of OEM Bose 4" speakers out of a 91 and 92 Cadillac!
Technically, it may sound like balls but generally speaking, it's nice and loud and rocks the house.
while i dont have any technical details, i'll say that i've been using car audio speakers in my house for many years now without any problems. i use my computer for everything, including watching programs, using a 40" samsung lcd for a monitor. my set up is 1/3 home audio speakers (a set of phillips bookshelf speakers mounted on pedestal on the wall) and 2/3 car audio speakers: a Boston Acoustics g5 10 running at 2ohms to a home audio amp from parts express; and a pair of speaker pods i built with each containing a Sony 6.5 coax from the late 1990's and a pair of OEM Bose 4" speakers out of a 91 and 92 Cadillac!
Technically, it may sound like balls but generally speaking, it's nice and loud and rocks the house.
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