All About Car Audio brands and box tuning.

[szekan]

hi guys,
i have been into car audio for the longest time that i can remember... it all started as an interest, then hobby, then work, then passing my knowledge to others etc... i still remember my first audio system was an alpine cassette player with a 2 channel amp and 12" cerwin vega stealth. after that i lost count on what gears i have used ... lets just say that i am more of a daily driver tester and not into competition or extreme spl/sq systems... however, i can play all type of songs without blowing my gears and can go fairly loud!!.

first part of this thread is about car audio brands... i can see that there are many rebrands/low budget brands being sold here in the Philippines.. nothing wrong in using them .. infact i have used many rebrands myself which include Solid Audio, Boschmann, Soundstorm, Lanzer, MegaVox, soungmagus, vtrek etc ... but i have never seem rebrands/LB brands market so strongly as it is being in Philippines. Infact i see alot of cars using them even for car shows... some of them are lightning labs, c7 , v12 and sound magus etc.

the concept here is that these products are not developed from scratch... which is not a bad thing ... alot of bigger companies do the same thing as well. for example. the motherboard inside the amplifier is shared by many different manufactures.. and then they mount their own stuffs onto that motherboard and do their testings... now with the Rebrands/LB, there is no real authority looking into these products therefore they are free to write whatever they want on their products hence you see an amp rated 3000 watts but in real it not even 50 watts.

i am sure most of you guys know what is RMS and i will not waste my time explaining that however Rms is not the only thing you look into when buy a certain product. as to my experience, rebrands/LB brands do produce the rated watts but at the expense of high distrotion (THD) level and also their crossover points are not accurate. Now does this matter? yes and no. if your car is noisy and you looking into just blasting your sound system or you use prefab boxes, then it doesnt matter to you. you can just go with Rebrands/LB brands and get good results (to your taste).
But if you car is very quiet, you listen to wide variety of music and want clarity then using bigger brands will matter to you.

along with this comes the concept of Box tuning.i am not going to talk about sealed box here, just ported.... usually bass consist of 2 notes. High notes which your ears can feel. the best example to this is the bass note in Young Dumb and Broke.. the constant hummm is high note bass.
and then there is low bass notes which your body can feel and flexes air.. its more like a rumble .. most subwoofer end up blowing while playing these notes... why ? i will explain it later
so if you want super loud bass or want to hit DB, then you tune your box higher.. and if you want low bass which your body can feel, then you go for low bass box tuning.
now this is all theory, but in real, you can never eliminate the two types of bass.. therefore when you tune your box higher, your woofer would actually blow while playing the lower end bass notes and vice versa.
now depending on the subwoofer parameters, one can determine the port tuning of a specfic box. the biggest problem with Rebrands/L brands is that their parameters are not correct or they dont even know what it is... (c7, lightning labs etc) dont know the parameters at all.. all they know is that its a 1000rms subwoofer.. i am not sure how they got those figures...

Hence Box tuning is the most imp part of a sound system. and as i can see, those using these rebrands/L brands usually try to go as loud as possible... but i am yet to see one which plays very low ..

BTW

i have already tested Lightning labs CL1000.1 and CL4100 They both are good amps but the THD is high and the crossover points are all over the place.. interms of watts, they produce their rms rating (again not in theory but as to my ears).
they just amps and nothing much to review about however somethings which i want to point out is

CL1000.1 has a "remote gain control" this means that you can actually adjust the gain with the remote.. unlike some amp which use it for "bass boost"
CL4100 has a very bad crossover choice... the high pass starts from 120hz... it just too high..

any questions please ask..
thanks for reading

[szekan]

Something i want to add up is the difference between DVC and SVC.
DVC speakers have two voice coils and SVC has one single coil. This configuration is only for wiring flexibility. It no where means that DVC has two coils or woofer inside one and is better than the single coil. Similar woofers will give same output regardless of it being SVC or DVC.