Installing a 3 way front stage audio system

Hi I’m new here. I got this old 01 standard cab from a friend and just getting it back on the road.
I’m a musician so a great sounding audio system is totally mandatory! I spent this weekend working on it and got it almost completed, should be able to finish it up and tune it tomorrow. I just wanted to share a couple pics of what I have done so far.

 

I built these speaker pods for a pair of 8” Morel woofers, I wanted some door speakers with really good bass response as there’s really no room for an easy sub solution
I installed a pair of soft dome mids and tweeters in the kick panels and the system is biamped with a 500 watt alpine amp for the woofers and a 500 watt arc audio amp for the midranges and tweeters. I have an old school alpine head unit that goes in tomorrow.

 

Most impressive single cab any gen speaker installation I've ever seen.

 

Thanks! It should be very easy to tune because all the drivers are nice and close together, so there shouldn’t be any need for any time alignment. The door pods were the hardest part. With the very small cabin it should sound really good. I still need to tighten up the install of the amps tomorrow

 

Man what a coincidence I’m about to start an installation of 8 inch Morels are yours installed in the door using the whole door as an enclosure or did you built a separarate sealed box within the door.
I hear a lot,of cons as being too boomy and excessive rattles out of the door -what is your opinion
I wanted to leave my 6.5 Audison voces,in the doors and make enclosures and fit them under the doors. Based in your exèroience should I stay away from the 6.5 mid range? I will have 3.0 inch in the dashboard and already have the tweeters mounted on the door a late mouldings

 

This would be the three way set up if I take out the 6.5 midranges out of the doors

 

The 8” morels are infinite baffle, so the inside of the door is somewhat of an enclosure, but obviously not a proper sealed box. I put a lot of sound deadening on the doors behind the interior panels as well as inside the doors so hopefully there won’t be too much rattling, I’ll find out tomorrow. That is some nice gear that you have, the 6.5” Audison look to be a shallow mount design which is good for this application because the window tracks are very close. I had to mount the 8”s inside the pods with 2 layers of 3/4” plywood, so there’s 1-1/2” between the speakers and the door to get enough clearance so the windows wouldn’t hit the magnets.
It all depends on if the Audison mids have enough bass response for your taste. Are you going to use a subwoofer?

 

Having a closer look at your pics, are those the morel integra 8” coaxials? Mine are just the just the msw 265 shallow mount woofers.

Edit: Ah ok I see what you have there, they’re under seat bmw 2 ohm subwoofers. Not sure if they’re designed to be in a sealed or ported enclosure without looking at the TS parameters. I would research what enclosure bmw uses for them and try to copy it the best I could. It’s most likely a tiny sealed box with a lot of polyfill or possibly an aperiodic membrane enclosure. An aperiodic enclosure is a very accurate design once you get it turned properly. What it is, is a very small enclosure with a vent that is stuffed with fiberglass to tune it, so the woofer will perform like it’s in a much larger enclosure. Looking at the frequency response of these, they play all the way down to 20hz so I would try to figure out a way to use them strictly for a sub and try crossing them over to the Audison mids around 60 to 90 hz depending on how close to the mids you can get them installed, the closer they are to the mids the better and you can cross them over at a higher frequency which will help the midrange sound much better without trying to play the lower bass frequencies. I’ve never seen those, pretty cool! https://www.ebay.com/itm/1450203197...72J4wUFRk-&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
An Aperiodic membrane would probably be the best solution for your application because you could make a tiny enclosure and vent it to the inside of the door stuffing the vent to tune it, then also stuffing the door to keep it from interfering with the midrange.
http://www.diyaudioprojects.com/Technical/Aperiodic/

 

Interesting concept here putting everything down low. I'd think you'd definitely still want some T/A abilities as these aren't coax/triax. Using any DSP?

 

Just a 31 band eq and parametric eq. I’m very old school I was heavily into car audio in the 90s before there was much to offer in digital processing, so we had to figure out how to get good a good imaging system strictly with physical acoustics where these days they have lots of digital processors that can accomplish good results electronically. But for me, it’s still easiest to keep things as simple as possible so there are less things that need to be tweaked. It’s a lot easier to tune a simple design with all the drivers located close together, then there’s not much phasing or time alignment issues. You would think that the sound stage would be too low with the tweeters in the kick panels but if you close your eyes and listen it sounds like it’s right in front of you. I’ve done systems with mids in the front of the dash and tweeters in the A pillars too with great results, but those usually do need time alignment with some drivers closer to your ears that sound will hit you before the others down in the doors… its what we used to call a “point source” speaker configuration

 

Aah, the good ol days with relatively low power, efficient drivers, and great looking head units. That's where I got in as well. Did some comps for a few years, but just for fun. Wish I'd known then how much I now wanted my old gear back.

While I do miss some of it, the lack of DSP was definitely a crutch. It's also WAY cheaper to build a nice system these days. Quality power density is so much more affordable in small packages. I needed an extra job in the 90s to keep my car audio habit fed.

 

Wow man!! thanks for the info it totally makes sense, I’ll look in to that I was thinking about somewhat replicating the woofer seating space in the bmw vehicles just to give myself an idea.
A local shop gave me the idea and they seamed to know what they were talking about so I think I’m going to give it a shot using the membrane you recommended in a vented enclosure under the seat. I really like the way the three way audison sound like so don’t want to discard but I may start with the 8 inch and see how it works if I’m not able to make it sound they way I expect I’ll figure a way to build the enclosures
Either way I’ll keep you posted.
Let me know how yours sound.
I was also reading about your lower front stage it is interesting how we evolved to a higher front stage (location wise) only to rely on the DSP’s I’m an old fashion car audio person and like to keep things simple as a matter of fact I’m trying to stay away from utilizing a dsp n my truck and been looking for amplifiers with decent crossovers only to build my system.
Any how is the evolution in car audio I’ll keep you posted I’m not sure where are you located but it would me nice if you can post few videos of your system once you’re done.
Lastly I do have 3 options for a sub behind my seats in my tacoma
I currently have a 10 inch Audison enclosure currently in the truck
I just bought a custom box with two 8 inch kenwood excelon woofers and surprisingly they hit some really nice low notes like a tw3 12 inch Jl audio enclosure obviously not as deep but very accurate specially listening to jazz and acoustic bands these tiny woofers shine quite nice.
And the last option is the tw3 10 inch or the 12 for which I need to build a custom box once I’m done playing with the Morels project

 

i did some digging, and have some model info from the bmw subs, but i'll post that in the relevant thread to keep from mucking yours up too much!

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads...nder-the-seats-and-audison-voce-3-way.828991/

it's not too often i hear about aperiodic venting! it's one of many rabbit holes i've gone down to try to eliminate 'chuffing' of ports, as well as the phase changes of passive radiator designs, while getting the 'best of all worlds' with a small box size and big sound. i think the biggest fear of the design is the potential for airborne fiberglass strands. though most development seems to have died out around 2000 or earlier. very similar to the concept of "variable Q" woofers, using a potentiometer on one coil of a DVC sub to alter it's system Q...


i would highly recommend a DSP, if nothing else, but for playing with.

personally, the biggest thing i use it for is the infinite crossover settings-- frequency and slope type. with the parametric eq being very friendly to tune out non-optimal environmental response that most every vehicle has, but is a very distant second place. i honestly never got into the whole time-delay portion of it. the majority of the time, i'm only doing crossover tweaks, adjusting the frequency, or abruptness of the change between drivers. every driver and installation has it's quirks, and i've never been happy with most radio's preset crossover positions.

 

Maybe it's time. Pardon the pun . Time alignment makes a huge difference. Generally, all drivers in a car are different distances from the listener's head & correcting that timing is a game changer. There's really no reason not to try it if you're already using a DSP. It's really easy too - most let you use a tape to quickly input distance. IME auto-tune never works very well - use a tape .

Discreet left and right EQ is huge too. All the drivers are usually at some angle to the listener (not on axis) & that location will experience a different frequency response. Being able to correct for that for each channel also isn't trivial. And even passives can benefit.

The even cooler thing is that there are lots of inexpensive head units with great DSP features built-in. Not that folks swap head units on new vehicles like they used to, but new vehicles kinda suck. One thing a lot of them get right though is decent audio so that not so many feel the need to mess with the sounds.

 

@rob feature @Alex69
If either of you guys started off audio "tuning" with a Zapco Zap Board..... then we're all cut from the same feather.

Oh how I miss my old car audio equipment.

@Alex69 I'm not that familiar with 1st Gens, but I'm guessing with that 8" door pod you made... did you staple/glue two pieces of 3/4" mdf and just start shaping and sanding? And then using a router to countersink mount the speaker and have it flush?

If so, damn good job!

 

Some newer decks have a mic input to auto tune the dsp. Mine did & I was amazed at how close I got before I auto tuned it to listener positions. Worked pretty good.

 

I believe this MSI Monolithic was my 1st EQ. Also a pre-amp.



Then on to an AC EQX.

Had that funky Clarion stalk EQ

Had a couple Sony in-dash graphics

Now just get DSP set, leave it alone, and use bass knob as needed

 

Yeah I made them out of 3/4” plywood and fiberglass. I made 2 rings of 3/4 wood large enough for the speakers to fit inside of them made 1/2” piece with a slightly smaller smaller hole and rear mounted the speakers inside. Then I cut a hole in the door panel just big enough for the wood parts to fit. Then I put the door panels back on the truck and taped them up around the hole and put fiberglass on the wood slightly overlapping the door panels to cover where I cut them. To remove the door panels you have to remove the speaker pods first.
I never had the pleasure of playing with any zapco gear but I know they made awesome amps! I used mostly xtant amps, eclipse head unit and subs morel speakers and audio control 31 band EQ. I worked for metra/tsunami building demo show cars for about a year and we did a lot of demo vehicles for mostly the major mainstream companies like alpine pioneer kenwood sony … it was a lot of fun but didn’t pay squat. I lived like a poor college student eating mostly ramen noodles lol

wooops I meant to quote the question about the door panels.
Hahaha I still have my audio control RTA (real time analyzer) that’s how we used to do it back in the day before they had everything built into the head unit.

 

my pioneer 80-prs does do time alignment. problem is, i tried it around 5-8 years ago. i painstakingly measured and re-measured every single driver distance. in at the end, i kept getting headaches, and my FLAC files were sounding like low-rate MP3's.

it is nice, but the reality is if i'm fussing with the eq too much, it means the speaker/enclosure sucks. that's generally the time i make a revision on the speakers being used. none of my vehicles use an eq adjustment more than 4-5 bands, and never more than 6-9db adjustment.

 

I'm using the DSP in an 80PRS in my Taco - works great!

I didn't think the 80PRS would play FLAC files. If you're streaming FLAC over BT, that would be why. BT on that head unit is not great. It does a lot of stuff really well, but music over BT is not one of them. I use WAV files on USB drives for lossless...sounds amazing.