Subwoofers - Range

dirtychinchilla

dirtychinchilla

dirtychinchilla

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Hey guys,

Just been looking at putting a 6.5" sub in my A3 to get a bit more bass. I've been looking at the cheap sort on eBay, because all the shops I've seen online they're £70 minimum. Is there anything wrong with the £30 ones? Also, they say mid-range...is this normal? I would have thought you wanted low range.

Thanks,

dc
 
Why 6.5"? That's not going to go very low. A 6.5" subs are really mid-range speakers to be honest.

I've got two 10" subs in the S2000 and to be honest, even they don't go very low even when driven by 400W RMS.
 
6.5" is a standard woofer size to be honest. You're not going to get much low frequency bass with something at 6.5"

Generally speaking the bigger the driver the bigger the bass (more air moved) but likewise it's not going to be the tightest bass in the world.

If looking at a sub though i wouldnt want anything smaller than 10" although it depends on your music. A 10" will be good for dance music where its fast paced and you need something fairly tight to handle the pace but not the lowest notes and a 15" sub will be good for something where you have more big rumbly bass.

The above is all pretty generic though. The enclosure will also make a pretty massive difference.
 
Hello, sir

I plan on building an enclosure to go with the speaker. If I can fit a 10" sub I will go with one. Is it unreasonable to be spending £30 on one. I think I'm right in saying that low frequencies, particularly when it's a sub, don't require the kind of quality excepted from a speaker with a larger range.

I listen primarily to rock music of all different kinds, blues, anything from the 60s etc.

If I don't hide it in the wheel arch, I could buy a larger sub and make a false floor to the boot, but I don't really want to disrupt the internals like that.

I'm guessing I'll also have to buy an amp?!
 
If you want 6.5", get a JBL GTO604 - I think mine was £45-ish on Ebay. I used it for a custom rear quarter sealed .3cuft enclosure and it sounds good.

Edit - sorry forgot it was 8"
 
Rilot said:
Why 6.5"? That's not going to go very low. A 6.5" subs are really mid-range speakers to be honest.

I've got two 10" subs in the S2000 and to be honest, even they don't go very low even when driven by 400W RMS.
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Complete BS I am afraid. Cone size and frequency is a MYTH. Just like people say 18" subwoofers are too big for fast dance music: another myth.

Example, digital designs 6.5. All about the box!
 
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dirtychinchilla said:
Hello, sir

I plan on building an enclosure to go with the speaker. If I can fit a 10" sub I will go with one. Is it unreasonable to be spending £30 on one. I think I'm right in saying that low frequencies, particularly when it's a sub, don't require the kind of quality excepted from a speaker with a larger range.

I listen primarily to rock music of all different kinds, blues, anything from the 60s etc.

If I don't hide it in the wheel arch, I could buy a larger sub and make a false floor to the boot, but I don't really want to disrupt the internals like that.

I'm guessing I'll also have to buy an amp?!
Click to expand...

I get your point but a cheap subwoofer won't sound good.

It is mostly about the enclosure you put it in.

Which A3 is it, 8L or 8V or 8P? If it is an 8P there are designs to put it where the standard Bose subwoofer is.

Yes you will have to buy an amp, you can actually run a sub from a headunit if its output is at the right ohms, and you wire in a Low Pass Filter (LPF) to stop it playing notes above around 80hz. I ran a 12" subwoofer in a 3.5cuft ported box tuned to 32hz off a Pioneer P77MP for about a year when I was a poor student, it would make the headunit move put it that way... at around 5wrms.

P77MP's have a feature called Direct Sub Drive which is a 4ohm output with LPF filters. This would work in an 8L a3 but not in an 8P or above A3 because everything is integrated.

A sealed enclosure will generally sound better but you sacrifice volume (loudness), it depends do you want boy racer, number plate, annoy everyone bass or do you just want the bass to sound better inside the car?

You really are better off asking this at http://talkaudio.co.uk because half the people in this thread have no clue what they are talking about!
 
Marvt74 said:
A 10" will be good for dance music where its fast paced and you need something fairly tight to handle the pace but not the lowest notes and a 15" sub will be good for something where you have more big rumbly bass.
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WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Please do some research before spewing advice like that!
 
86JR said:
WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Please do some research before spewing advice like that!
Click to expand...

Indeed. 4" woofers in the right box can chuck out ridiculous bass and that's even before transmission lines are involved.
 
I had a 6.5" Morel in a transmission line once. The box took up the whole boot floor which is why it had to go unfortunatly. Never heard anything quite like it, it dropped all the way down to around 10hz with supreme cone control and hence SQ yet was nearly as loud as the aforementioned 12". I was running it off a Genesis Dual Mono, bridged.

One of my favorite set ups was a DLS RW15 in a sealed box, around 0.8cuft, so incredibly small for the woofer which made it incredibly punchy! At the time I listened to a lot of Akon etc so it was quite good for that :)

I think I have had about 30 different configs over the years :) Amp choice is important for good sound too, try to get a class AB or a class G if you can get your hands on a genesis profile ultra amp (around £200 second hand). I still have a 200x2wrms class ab amp in my garage along with its smaller 100x2 and its even smaller 50x2 brothers, but I never get round to using them!
 
86JR said:
WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Please do some research before spewing advice like that!
Click to expand...

Perhaps you should enlighten everybody with your research then instead of sounding like a knowitall? Its generally accepted wisdom and the reason you don't find many 6 inch subs. People don't want to faff with building transmission line boxes just so they can demo their 6 inch sub, so the trade off is larger cone area.

I have to agree with 18s and dance music, they are fine. I fitted 4 into a smart car back in 2002. Anyway, I digress. The original question is related to confusion, where the op is looking at speakers not subs.
 
I doubt a 6.5" driver will go as low as 30Hz, probably 45 at best. OP you can grab an enclosure online or build one if you fancy a DIY job
 
dacads said:
I doubt a 6.5" driver will go as low as 30Hz, probably 45 at best. OP you can grab an enclosure online or build one if you fancy a DIY job
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why not? and i'll 2nd talkaudio.co.uk

edit: if you want it to fit in / around wheel arch of boot, then your best of with a diy job using fibreglass and going sealed as it will be better over a wider variety of music
 
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Hey guys,

Thanks for all the posts! Very interesting stuff - seems the enclosure is the key from what oyu're telling me. I can't reply to all your posts though, so apologies!!

I'll take a look at talkaudio.co.uk. Meanwhile, I've discovered that my A3 came with a sub (who knew?!) but that it's just not connected. When I replaced the original stereo with an aftermarket one, I did feel like I'd lost some sort of sound, but never knew exactly what. Turns out it's the sub! So I need to work out how to reconnect it and then I'll be good to go, although I may still replace the sub and the enclosure, as it's a terrible plastic enclosure and the sub is apparently not great. May just replace the enclosure actually, thinking about it.

I think there's also an amp in the opposite side (in the boot over the wheel arches), so I'm going to investigate that.

Cheers guys, and if you know anything about audio wiring please tell me why my sub isn't working :P
 
probably a wire thats no longer connected through the iso plug. check the amp for rca inputs or high level input which uses the rear speaker signal for example.
 
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