please help "tuning" my sub??

I have 1 10" kicker behind my bench right now.. and lookin for a 2nd one while im at it. but i keep getting a "Popping" noise when a certain song will get to loud, as well as distortion. my amp has 2 adjustable nobs also. anyone got some help or suggestions? im still kinda new with my sound systems

 

I'm not an expert at systems by no means but are you sure you have enough air space or that speaker? I know the beam you have your box sitting under is 16" or so i believe but to me you don't have enough air space. As far as the popping i'm not for sure but i'd say your putting to much power to your speaker which could cause it to blow.

 

I agree that you may be lacking the correct cu.ft. of air space. You can stuff some poly fill inside to help out.
Is the box sealed tight with no air leaks??

 

I'm not much of an audio master but the box is on an angle, and the top of the sub in the back is just barely touching the back of the box. and i put about a 1 inch hole in on the other side. But other than that i gorilla glued and nailed the wood together so no leaks. could not enough room cause it to be not as loud?

 

The popping noise you hear is the sub reaching it's physical limits. This is from playing the sub too loud. You can help protect the sub in a few ways.

1. Decreasing the size of the box will yield better power handling but will also decrease the sub's ability to play low.
2. The best way to protect the sub is to set a subsonic crossover on the amp to protect it from playing frequencies that are too low for it.

Depending on what amp and headunit you have you might not even have this capability. What you're looking for is a HP (high pass) filter that you can set extremely low right around 25hz or so. This will keep the sub from playing stuff that's too low and takes too much excursion (cone movement) to play.

 

YOU put a 1" hole in a sealed box? Its not a port? You cut a hole in a sealed box... is that correct? Seal the box. Make sure NO part of the sub is contacting the box inside. Dont play louder once you hear distortion caused from clipping your amp.

Id start by building a sealed thats SEALED box of the reccomended volume. Then set the crossover to 80hz. Set the gain to between 1/4 and half way up.

Before you do a second sub realise that depending on your sub and amp it is possible that a second sub will yeild exactly ZERO additional output... or it could double, or quadruple.

 

Thank you so much guys... i had both my adjustment nobs on my amp turned all the way up and thats why i was gettin gthe distortion and pops. I just glued in a small square of the same wood i used on the inside where i drilled my hole, turned my knobs to about 60 Db's and 3/4 of the way on my other, and man my ipod fell off the dash! thanks guys i was missin a lot of power haha

 

I have a few things to add in here, I am no expert.
As a metric for you: my alpine pdx gain is no where near 100% looks like you noticed that already...

an "easy/basic/first pass" strategy to get a little more precise with your subwoofer / amp relationship. Isolate your sub. This works for me, I just don't have the ear for the test tune. probably damaged from playing my shit so loud.

• Go to your amp and unplug everything but your subwoofer..
• Turn Sub Gain all the way down.
• turn the head unit EQ to FLAT,
• grab a playlist and crank the Head Unit to the max volume that you ever play it at. I do this once with Rock and once with heavy rap. I call this the "Floss volume"
• then go to the amp with your shit cranked, and turn the gain up till it sounds awesome.
• Done with sub, or at least let's you know what that thing can do safely.

Basically I tune to my max desired volume. On my JVC that level is 30/40 volume.

This is what I do when I want to do a quick re calibration of my tuning. I did this for an initial gain sanity check, but I also used this basic method for frequency tuning.

One hypothesis/rule/theory that I do follow is that I give less power to my rear surround speakers in the back seat. My focus is on my nice front component speakers and they get more juice.

 

Missed the part where there was a random hole cut in the box. Yes, that should have obviously been the problem.