Search results matching tags 'JL Audio' and 'alpine'

Video: factory vs. aftermarket speakers

MLS — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:37:00 GMT

OK, so we finally got the video formatting worked out. It's very informal; Matt sat in the back seat with the Canon XSi camera capturing our back-to-front-and-back-again fading demo by moving the camera's built-in microphone forward and backward along with the fades. We're listening for sonic improvements (detail, tone quality, dimensionality) when we fade to the JL Audio components up front from the stock GM speakers in the back. Check it out and see if you can hear the difference.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

need a bass specific 6x8

jagdish — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:53:34 GMT

I recently purchased an Alpine IDA x200 from Crutchfield...

I want to change my factory 6x8 speakers. I cannot afford a sub at this time, but can somebody recommend a speaker that does some justice to bass??

I was thinking of the Infinity Kappa, but recently found from a review that it doesn't have good bass. I heard Polk, BA or JL is good for bass? Can somebody recommend a nice set? It would mean a lot..

Thanks...

Jag

Looking for expert "OK" so I can pull the trigger on this rig

Gesha — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:27:04 GMT

Alrighty, hi everyone.

Looking to improve my sound system with an amplifier. Not running stock at the moment - have an Alpine PLT-5 LAT powered subwoofer in the trunk which kicks out enough bass to please me. I don't need folks from 2 city blocks away being able to hear me coming - but maybe the guy blasting his cheapo stock stereo paired with terrible junk music - that guy needs to be drowned out and taught a lesson in car audio.

Anyway, the sub is good enough and I am happy with it. I have JL Audio TR-650's in both rear deck and front doors - front doors have the CSi variety with the tweeters and crossover separated from the woofer. These things are rated to take 50W RMS at 4 ohms. Unfortuantly, thats where we run into problems. Currently they are driven by my head unit, which is the Alpine IDA-X001 ipod controller. LOVE that head-unit btw. If you own an iPod, you have to get one of these, well not the X001, go for the newest version which is the X350. But I digress. The output is a measily 18Wx4 RMS and the amp quality is...well who am I kidding... its not quality at all.

The system sounds pretty darned good at lower volumes, but the amplifier distortion becomes very apparent just before the magical volume level that I desire - hence I am forced to listen to music at levels below what I prefer. Not to mention that it gets very boomy since the Sub is so much more powerful then the speakers - so I have to keep adjusting the level to match the music genre that happens to be playing at the time. Well, long story short, I figure putting in a dedicated amp with a high-pass filter (edited) to preserve the speaker woofers will rectify this last annoyance and get me some real premium sound.

The amp im looking at is the ALPINE MRP-F300. It's gotten excellent reviews and at 4ohms it seems to perfectly match my JL Audio TR650's. In addition I will also be upgrading all the stock wiring (speakers currently use stock speaker wire) at the same time. What do you guys think?

Thanks!

Installing the front door speakers

MLS — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:04:00 GMT

In keeping with our goal of achieving high-fidelity sound without springing for the “high end” (JL Audio ZR series, Polk Audio Signature Reference, the crazy-good Focal Utopia Be, etc) we chose to install a set of the brand-new JL Audio C2 650 components in the Yukon’s front doors. For now, we’ll be powering them with the Alpine CDA-9887’s 18 watts RMS per channel.

Scoping out the mounting locations
Matt and I started on the driver’s side and quickly discovered that installing the new speaker system would require a minimal amount of customization. Pulling off the door panel and looking at the factory speakers, we realized that the tweeter was part and parcel with its mount. Removing it just left a big hole – far too big to accommodate the flush-mount adaptor that comes with the C2s. The factory woofer was snapped in place via mounting tabs at the top and bottom of the speaker. This mounting configuration would, of course, hold true for the passenger side door, so we now had a better idea of the scope of this part of the project.

Mounting the drivers
We marked the woofers’ mounting hole locations in the door frames and drilled through with an 1/8” drill bit. We would also be placing Boom Mat acoustic baffles in the opening, but they don't need mounting holes -- their foam construction allows for easy drilling anywhere on the baffle lip. The cavity behind the door frame was spacious – clearly enough to hold the woofer and the crossover network. The large opening for the factory tweeter/bracket, on the other hand, needed to be adapted down for the C2 dome. Before fabricating something, though, we worked with the factory bracket to make sure there wasn’t some sort of way to keep using it – either by cutting out the built-in tweeter and replacing it with the new one, or by surface mounting (2-side tape? Velcro™?) the tweeter on top of the factory tweeter, as it looked like it would still fit under the door grille easily. I thought the surface mounting idea was pretty clever until Matt astutely pointed out that there would be no easy way to route the wires back behind the door panel. Drilling into the plastic factory mount probably would not have been a successful experiment. Likewise, cutting out the plastic factory tweeter would have likely resulted in a mess. So fabricating a mounting bracket was beginning to look like the best solution. But how? Clearly, whatever material we used, we’d have to affix it to the door panel plastic somehow. Hmm. I looked around our installation bay, my eye catching the open box of Dynamat next to the truck. Eureka, the solution was apparent in my mind’s eye. Stretch a piece of it across the back of the opening, cut an “x” into it, push in the C2 tweeter’s surface mount cup, reinforce with more Dynamat if necessary, and violà: a secure mount.

Placing the crossover
Rather than simply tossing the crossover network into the bottom of the door cavity, we were inspired by our Dynamat tweeter mounting trick to do the essentially the same thing here. In this case it would be a simple matter of cutting into the Dynamat that we had already installed into the door many weeks previously, placing the crossover and reinforcing with some additional Dynamat. This would allow for a solid, easily accessible mount and minimize the lengths of speaker wire we’d need to add to the factory wiring.

Connecting and routing the wires
The Crutchfield-provided speaker wiring harness was helpful in giving us a snap-in connection to the Yukon’s speaker wiring system, but we were on our own making the rest of the connections. I cut off the harnesses’ speaker-side ends and crimp/soldered male spade connectors in their place. “Crimp/soldered,” you ask? Well, yeah. I don’t completely trust a crimp connection that’s going to live in an in-motion, difficult-to-access location; yet I certainly wasn’t about to solder connections directly into a crossover device or onto speaker terminals that I might want to remove in the future. So I crimped on the spade ends, but reinforced those connections with a little solder inside the metal sleeves that house the bare wire.

The C2s don’t come with any speaker wire, so I grabbed some from our installation bay and cut four pieces just long enough to reach the speaker locations without being taut or bunching up in the door cavities. Again, male spades on the crossover side, but females for the woofers and males for the tweeters. The tweeters had short lengths of wire already soldered onto contact points – rather than actual wire terminals – on the side of their housings. Unfortunately, one of those contacts had come loose in shipping, and we were faced with having to reconnect a wire with no actual terminal to use. We really didn’t want to take the time to send the tweeter back to JL Audio for an exchange, so Matt decided to join me at the soldering bench and solve the problem by soldering the wire directly back on to the lump of JL factory solder. The connection held.

Pet peeve: whoever’s making speaker wire without marking or color coding the strands so one can easily discern positive from negative at each end, this camper was not happy. ; )

The sound
Upon completing the driver’s side installation, we let the stereo play for a little while as we cleaned up the installation bay (we saved the passenger side door for another day). We had both front doors open and the difference in sound quality when we walked around the back of the truck was astounding. It was as if there were two different stereos playing. Walking left to right revealed a diminishing in presence, detail and tone. We knew we were definitely on the way to a major sonic upgrade. In the next couple of days, I will post a video a video demo to give you a sense of the overall improvement once we finished the passenger side.

Photo Gallery (Taken with Canon's hot EOS Digital Rebel XSi SLR camera)

Passenger side door woofer opening. Note our wiring harness (connected to factory wiring plug) with new spade ends, ready for connection to the crossover:

Matt (well, arms & torso, anyway) with baffle and JL Audio C2 650 woofer:

Matt drilling holes into door frame after using the speaker to mark hole positions:

Back of door panel view of tweeter mounting hole covered by a piece of Dynamat:

C2 650 tweeter with equipped wire connected via spade connectors to extra speaker wire (soon to be attached to the crossover):

Front of door panel view of tweeter mounted into the Dynamat strip:

The spot directly behind the dangling black connector is where we would cut through the Dynamat to mount the crossover:

Crossover mounted into Dynamat below the woofer:

Securing the woofer in place:

Closeup of the mounting area:

Amp Clearification, Need Help...

T 1000 — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 05:38:17 GMT

I have 2 Alpine SWR-1242D subwoofers. And I've been told that I should get two amplifiers, one for each sub. Now, is this really necessary? If I do need 2 amps, I'm planning on getting the Alpine PDX-1.600. If not, I would like to get the JL Audio Slash v2 1000/1v2 to power both subs. If anyone could help me out, it would be greatly appreciated.

I Need An Amp For JL Audio 12" W3

Alskie — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:55:07 GMT

I Have Two JL Audio 12W3v3-4 And Im Kinda Confused On Which Amp To Match These Up With I Wanted The Kicker 750.1 And Then The VPower 1000 From Alpine But Not Sure Any Suggestions?

Re: jl audio amp

Paul — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:31:53 GMT

The JL Audio Slash V2 500/1v2 amp would be a good match for one of the Rockford Fosgate P3 12" subwoofers, but not for two of them. That amp would output 250 watts for each subwoofer if you connect two of them and that is only 50% of the RMS power they handle. So, while it would technically work, it would not sound good. You should look for an amp that outputs at least 800 watts RMS power and up to 1000 watts RMS power. JL Audio offers the Slash V2 1000/1v2 amp that will work and Alpine offers the PDX-1.1000 amp that will work with two of those subwoofers. HTH!

Re: Subwoofer Choice Delima

Paul — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:34:35 GMT

I know that the Alpine Type-R 12" subwoofers usually play well when they are properly powered. I know that there is no way you would hook up two of them to a 2000 watt amp unless the 2000 watts was the peak power rating. You may want to go back and find out what amp they connected to them and then the RMS power of that amp. It should be like 800 to 1000 watts (2 channel if they are using the dual 4 ohm versions and mono at 2 ohms if they are using the dual 2 ohm versions).

I know that for a little bit more you can get the JL Audio 12W3v3 subwoofers and they will definitely perform better than the Alpine subwoofers in both spl and sq.

Anyone have other suggestions?

Wiring Alpine MRP-M1000 to a JL-Audio 12W6v2 w/Dual 4 Ohm Voice Coils

waldojeffershead — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 04:32:08 GMT

The Alpine MRP-M1000 is 1000 watts at 2 Ohms & 600 watts at 4 Ohms.

The JL-Audio 12W6 DVC is 600 watts.

Would there be any advantage in running my amplifier with a 4 Ohm load?

How many watts would the speaker be subjected to under the 2 Ohm load, keep in mind the sub is 600 watts RMS @ 4 Ohms...

Thank you for any advice...

Do 1000 watt subs sound good at low volume?

quisp — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 03:19:17 GMT

I'm considering the purchase of a single 12" sub for a sealed enclosure that is going into my trunk. I had originally planned on getting an Alpine SWX 1243D and powering it with an Alpine PDX 1.1000. Much to the dismay of many people on this forum I don not plan on blasting the windows out where ever I go and will want to play it at lower volumes at least 50 % of the time. I do however want the power to be there when I want it. I have been told that high wattage subs like the 1243D will sound crappy unless they are cranked up due to the heavy-duty construction that is required for high wattages. Therefor, unless they are powered by at least 500 watts or so the4y will sound like crap.

My question is: Is this true? If not I was planning on getting a JL Audio 12W6v2 rated at 500 watts RMS.