Have a set of JL audio XR650CXi coaxials that I was planning on putting in the doors but now I think I may put a set of their components in the fronts and move the coaxials to the rear. I am probably going to put the tweeters from the components in the a pillars to bring the sound stage up.

If I do that how will the sound be from the rear. I've never had any tweeter sound comming from behind me and unsure if I would like it? Any opinions?

Thanx

 

I'm not a fan at all of rear speakers. I only run front mid and tweet and a sub in back. Rear speakers always tend to distort and smear the imaging of the front drivers and the fronts are the most important. If you want your music to sound realistic then don't use rear speakers. If you are used to listening to them in the rear, then you may not be confortable with just fronts, so it's up to you. If you do mount them in the rear you might try turning off the tweeters just to help keep the image up front.

Can those tweeters be removed from the coaxial?

I've got tweets in the A-pillars as well and they work great in that location.

 

With those speakers, you can use the crossover to knock down the tweeter level by up to 3db. Given that, you should be able to set up the coaxials to perform mostly as mid-bass fill.

To be honest, you may be able to leave the jumper off of the tweeter level adjustment pins and not power the tweeter at all if you dont like it. That is just a guess though...I will be getting my xr650 csi/cxi set next month sometime

 

The tweeters cannot be removed but as umrjmac said i can adjust their sound levels. I always liked sound from the rear (I tried not having it for a while and wasn't happy) so I know I would like it. Just unsure of the tweeter from the rear.

What if I put a set of JL component speakers in the back and moved thier tweeter and crossover to the front. Put the tweeters in the a pillar still and then mount the coaxial speakers in the doors. Overkill on the tweets up front?

That would leave just midbass in the rear and I think I could fit both crossovers under the kick panels...maybe?

 

i got the xr650 csi set up front, with my tweeters mounted right by the window controls on both sides, while my xr 650 cxi set is nestled in the sail panel holes, running off of the stock monsoon amp (alpine h/u), and the system sounds great as is - but i know the tweets on the coaxials arent working since they're still hooked up to the stock amp (due to the high-pass filter). waitin on the jl 4-channel to come in to install that an see how much better the speakers sound. right now, the mid-range is distorting in my front left driver's side, but i been told its because of the 2ohm power the amp is pushing to my 4ohm speaker.

as far as mounting the tweeters, i just mounted them by the window controls simply coz i didnt feel like tryin to make them fit in the a-pillar anywhere, not to mention the instructions that came with them suggested they dont be placed more than 8" away from the woofers for "maximum" sound quality...dunno if thats true or not, but whatever.

system sounds great now, just need to get clean power to them to make it sound better.

 

camaroguy_02 - That's exactly what I was planning on doing, just was going to wait until I got my amp before I hooked it all up. Keep me posted on how this sounds when your amp comes in! Please!

Anyone else have any opinions?

 

yea dude, wait for the amp.. every time i turn my car off, i hear a slight "pop" comin from the back, but like i stated before, its supposedly from unclean current loads since the amp pushes 2ohm an the speakers take 4ohm. after the amp install, my next big task is sound deadening the car. ill take some pics of my tweeters tommorrow when it's light out for ya.

oh yea, the crossovers will fit behind ur kickpanels.. just every time u wanna change ur jumpers, realize u gotta take that whole panel piece/door sill out to get to 'em but yea, they will fit snugly behind the plastic bracket - ur kick panels will stick out a wee bit tho, but it really aint that noticeable.

have fun running the wires thru the rubber hose that runs from the door to the car itself - my fingers hurt for a while tryin to push the wires all the way thru that hose

 

Just to comment on what you said, whoever told you the "2ohm power pushing a 4ohm speaker" thing doesn't know what he's talking about. It makes no sense and that's not how it works. I would be weary taking any advice from this person. The speakers impedance or resistance varies depending on the frequency it is reproducing. The nominal 4ohm rating you see on a speaker is simply the lowest amount of resistance the amp will actually see under normal use. For a 5 or 6 inch midrange the lowest amount of resistance will usually be around it's lowest frequencies, like 80hz-100hz. Above those frequencies the resistance of the voice coils increases. Most amplifiers are only made to put out a certain amount of power at a certain load. The monsoon channel you are refering to normally powers a 2 ohm speaker which is what the monsoon is designed for on that channel. By putting in a speaker that is 4 ohms the amp is not working as hard and you lose some of the power the amp is capable of delivering. That's all. The amp is not being hurt nor is the speaker. On the other side of the coin is that since less power is going to the speaker you have to turn up the volume more to compensate. If you run the volume too high there will not be enough amp power to control the moving speaker cone and the sound will be distorted. Running it at high enough levels to hear the distortion for too long a time can overheat the speakers voicecoils and basically fry them. Then the speaker is considered blown. That is really all that is happening.

A bigger amp that can deliver a lot more power into a 4ohm speaker is going to give you a lot more volume before it starts to distort and the speaker will last longer and sound better.

As for the tweeters, that 8" thing is a very generalized guide. Let me explain. Due to the way humans percieve sound (having a left ear and a right ear) our brains are very sensitive to the left right differences between two sound sources. Since we want the tweeter to blend in perfectly with the mid for a seamless sound you need to keep them lined up vertically as much as possible. Although we can tell left and right sounds apart very easily we have a hard time determining how high up or low down a sound is coming from. We are not good at that. So you can mount a tweeter much higher than 8 inches so long as it is very close to the same vertical plane as the mid.

If you think about most home speakers you always see the tweet above the mid and not next to it. Competition vehicles often mount mids in the kickpanels and tweets in the A-pillar and the sound can be amazing and realistic, why, becuase they are lined up vertically.

Back to Camarokidd24, if you know you like rear fill then definately go with it. That's why I asked. There's no point in being disatisfied. I would recommend mounting your coaxes in the back and get a nice component set for the front. If the coax x-over has seperate wires for the tweet then you can simply unhook them to turn off the tweeter, but I would try and lower their output first. Pretty simple decision to me.

On word of advice. I would run new wires, 4 pair, to the fronts from the rear and use them to wire up your front stage. Mount the x-overs in the back by the amp. Use some good wire of 12 or 14 guage at least. Then you don't have to worry about loses from the factory wires. Plus you have peace of mind.

 

oh wow...that makes so much more sense now so i shuld still hear little-to-no distortion when i get my 4-channel amp from jl audio, correct? since i wont have to push the volume up as loud. question is, why am i only hearing the distortion at mid-range levels? why wuldnt i hear them when the bass/low-levels of a song hit, since i only have the tweeter as a separate component, whereas the woofer/mid is the same cone? the bass hits beautifully...almost turns me on. but sometimes, when i listen to country, it just sounds like its mid-range levels that distort. any help on that?

 

camaroguy_02, I'll see if I can figure out your problem. I'm not familiar with these speakers so I'm Googling them to figure out what they are. So bear with me.
So the coaxials are in the sail panel behind your head, right? Do you think the tweeters are not working because the amp is not sending high frequencies to that location? If so, that would be due to a low pass filter, not a high pass. Meaning the amp allows low freq. to pass but not the higher ones. Anyway, I just wanted to clarify that.
Does it make sense? I'm trying to simplify things and not be so technical, but I don't know what your level of experience is, so I may lose some people while explaining. If there's a part you didn't understand, let me know, I'll try again. I've been doing this for 14 years so it can be tricky for me to explain stuff to non-stereo people.
Any speaker can be overdriven (to distort). With more power you will acheive higher volume before the distortion sets in. Hopefully it will be loud enough for your tastes. Certainly much louder than the monsoon junk.
OK, it could be a few things. Your saying your hearing distortion of some type on the top end of the door mounted midrange and not from the tweeter and not from the low freq bass part of the mid. One thing to keep in mind is that the human ear is more sensitive to certain freq than others, particularly the 2k-5k range with is the upper limit of the typical midrange speaker (Fletcher Munson curves, psychoacoustic stuff). So you may be getting a distortion due to a lack of power at the lower freqs and it's harmonics are making themselves heard to you at the higher freqs you mentioned. It's pretty common. Human hearing is not as sensitive to distortion at lower freq. For instance a 50hz bass note can contain 10% distortion and you may not hear it while only 1% distortion at 4K can be clearly heard.

Now assuming that the speaker is working as it should, you may want to verify it's playing within it's limits. It has a passive x-over that will roll it off at the upper registers to let the tweet come into play, but almost no passives x-overs will limit the low freq bass going to that mid. If you didn't add some type of choke to the mid it may be trying to play notes below it's usefull range. A lot of aftermarket amps will have a high pass filter built in and typically you would set it for around 90-120hz to protect the mid. That could be your problem right there.

Another possible reason you are hearing those problems could be due to a resonance in the door. Something my be vibrating at a harmonic (multiple of a fundamental tone) of a lower note. For instance, think of how a big subwoofer can play in a car and certain plastic panels will vibrate and give off a much higher freq than the original bass note. Sometimes people can confuse this resonance with a distortion coming from the subwoofer. In your case the mid may be trying to play too low a freq and it's causing the door panel, speaker grill, lock rod or something in the door to vibrate and sound like speaker distortion. Since we are more sensitive to the upper mid range of freqs this is what we are most likely to hear. Not the orignal bass note causing it.

So if you have the lows being filtered out of the mids and you know there's nothing around the speaker or the door panel vibrating, then you may have another problem.
Let me ask, does the level of distortion go up with the volume?
Is it only on one side of the car?
See if you can isolate it by unplugging all other speakers including the front tweets and rear coaxs and opposite side mid. Is it still there?
If so you may have to put your ear up aginst the door to see if the distortion is really coming from the speaker. Like I said earlier, it may be coming from next to it. You may have to pull the door panel off and put your ear up close and listen to the whole panel while you play that country music.

If it is for sure the speaker, pull it out and move the suspension in and out in a quiet room. Listen and feel for any scraping. Sometimes a speaker will get it's voicecoils out of alignment and they will scrape against the pole piece or front plate. I've even seen the windings become unglued and get tangled up and not let the cone move smoothly. That will show up as a upper mid range distortion.

Ideally your problem is something that needs to be investigated first hand. It's hard to diagnose over a computer, but hopefully I gave you enough stuff to check that you will find the problem.

Jason

 

Jason you are amazing...
I am definatly running new wires for the install and taking all the old stuff out. I think I know what I am going to do now. I will put a set of JL XR650 compontents up front, midbass in the doors and tweeters in the a pillar. Put my JL XR650 coaxials in the sails and tune the rear tweeters down or off accourding to my sound preference when I get them installed.

I never thought of putting the crossovers in the back. I am tucking the amps in the passenger side cubby and there will be plenty of room left (I hope). I was planning on putting the front crossovers behind the kick panels and dropping the rear fill down into the sail panel cavity. This would save a lot of wire but not allow for easy tunning. Damn, once I think I'm alset I get into something else...

 

yea dude, u really did help me out. thats alot of info an its pretty easy to understand - for the most part. an yea, i meant that the tweets for my coaxials arent working due to the lpf, not the hpf. i stand corrected...again lol

i know its only the front left woofer that distorts, just by tuning out the highs and cuttin off the rest of the speakers. the distortion doesnt necessarily get louder with an increased volume..i guess it just gets more...noticeable? i know when i blew the **** outta my stock speaker, the tweeter cone was halfway ripped off the woofer. every time i turned the music up louder, the distortion got louder. but thats not the case with this speaker. im gonna order my new amp/amp rack an hook it up to see wut it sounds like afterwards, an probably end up tweakin the hpf to about 90hz, like u suggested...just hopefully my speaker aint completely blown by then.

once again, thanks for the info...really did help out alot!

 

Camarokidd24, more wire is good. It means you have less resistance over all. Plus, if you need to test polarity, tweak the tweeter levels or turn one off to diagnose a problem you will have easy acces to the x-overs. You don't want to have to pull out the kick panels more than you have to. Speaker wire is fairly cheap. No sense in compromising there.

camaroguy_02, after all that typing I still forgot to mention something. In order to help find that distortion your hearing, instead of using music, try using test tones. If you don't have a CD for that purpose then go to Realm of Excursion / Downloads and download all the sine waves from about 20 to 123hz and burn them to a CD. You may hear the distortion at those frequencies or it may be higher up. Also try these sweeps: 20Hz to 250Hz sweep, 25Hz to 600Hz sweep, 35Hz to 1KHz sweep and 20Hz to 20KHz sweep. Basically you want a realiable way to create the distortion your hearing so that you can better pinpoint the source. Someone turned me on to this site just recently, their test tones are pretty good although they don't go higher than 123Hz.
http://realmofexcursion.com/
If you can narrow the problem to a particular freq you can play it over and over while you move your ear around and also press on the door parts to find the source.

Oh, and the same basic process can be used to find rattles from your sub as well. Certain freqs will cause interior panels to resonate/vibrate. Just play the particular tone on a loop while you try and find the offending panel. If 2 panels are rattling against each other, apply some adhesive backed felt between them. If it's a big panel by itself, try stuffing some foam padding behind it. Just don't play the pure tones for too long at too high a level as you'll be heating up the voicecoils more than regular music would.

Here is another source for test tones , their lower freqs are not very good, but higher ones are OK.Just in case any of you guys wondered about PC's in your F-body (what I moved to) check out this thread I started over at MP3car.com. There's a lot of cool F-bodies there.
http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=63949