67 Corvair Custom System

[67corvair]

Hello Everyone, Just posted a little bit about myself in the new member introductions. Thought I'd go ahead and writeup a post for my current project. Like I said in my otherpost, I'm a bit new to car audio but not to audio in general. I'm kind of going about this in an unconventional way but I've got an idea in my head of what I want and think its worth giving it a shot. Worst case scenario I end up having to buy some more equipment.

So the car! It's a 1967 Chevy corvair 2 door. Originally It had an AM tube radio and a single speaker under the dash. Which means I have both a lot of work to do, but also a blank canvas that I get to build whatever I'd like. I have 4 rolls of 1/4" super dense rubber similar to dynamat that doesn't have an adhesive already on it that I'm using to treat the floorboards, doors, and above the headliner.

I want a very clean crisp sound but there has to be some pretty serious low end to keep me happy

I have an older pair of arc audio KAR12 Subwoofers. They're dual 4ohm Speakers, 700w peak, 350w rms. Would Like to wire them in parallel and end up with a 1ohm load and a pretty beefy amp.

I'm taking the backseat out of the car, not enough room for any shenanigans anyway, so the subs are going behind the seats, i'm building a 3/4 mdf box (optimum airspace is 1.1 cubic ft per speaker) for them but it will all be covered with a fiberglass shell that wraps up to the bottom edge of the window where i'll be placing my mid range drivers.

this is where I may have some people who tell me I'm crazy. For the Mid's I'm not planning on using a typical car speaker. I'm going to use the AuraSound NS3-193-8A. They are a 20w RMS 80w Peak 7.6ohm speaker (requires .1 cubic ft sealed airspace per speaker) I've used 64 of these wired together in a matroxed system and absolutely fell in love with these speakers! they have an incredible response 80-15kHz. I generally cross them over somewhere between 150 and 180 depending upon my low end. I have 6 of them, 4 are going directly below the rear window facing forward, and one in each door panel along with a tweeter.

My big concern is that I've found a few DSP's on the market for car audio but nothing that I think looks that impressive. Shoot I'm just about ready to use a FOH xilica DSP haha. I need a controller that has a crossover, full parametric eq, pan controls, timing controls, and maybe a mixer, I'd like to have a channel for every speaker, but honestly an 8 channel would suffice. I plan on running my RTA when finished and doing an impulse study to adjust each individual speaker and on the back 4 speakers would like to pan the middle left and right speakers only slightly off center while the outsides would be fully left and right.

Sorry for the long winded post have big plans and am very excited about the project.

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[hispls 5,000+ posts]

Cool old car and lofty goals. Also a nice start.

I'd like to suggest that crossing subs up to 180 if they are behind you will be rough. It'll definitely pull your sound back. Then again with such a big array of the Aura drivers I'm certain that at low enough power to run them down to 80 they'll keep up fine.

Also these days outboard DSP has fallen out of favor with the Pioneer dex-p99rs being a great source unit with all that built in. I believe there's another brand that makes premium head unit with built in 30 band EQ and time alignment but I haven't had my morning coffee yet and can't think what else people use. They're pricey, but no more than you'd pay for the stuff separately. Of course there's nothing holding you back from using a 110V sound processor. Very early on in competitive car audio people used home audio EQs for lack of good 12V options. Inverters aren't expensive so the only thing you'll need to worry about is the space to mount such a unit.

That all said, I'm sure you know how dramatically your room can effect your sound. A car will be the absolute worst room you could imagine without the flexibility if a normal size room as far as what can be done to overcome peaks, nulls, and bad reflections. Also if you want true reference quality sound in a car, less is more. big arrays of mids and tweets in such a small and awkwardly shaped space is a recipe for trouble. Of course this really depends on your expectations, but from the sounds of it whatever is in your listening room in the house must be really nice and you had better LOVE tweaking and tinkering if you want to recreate that sound in a car.

Anyway tuned in to see how this comes along. Very impressive for a first foray into 12V audio.

 

[mahc 10+ year member]

Any sound proofing?

 

[67corvair]

Thanks for the info! Like I said I'm still not that informed in the 12v world, so it's good to know that most of that is handled at the headunit now days. I didn't realize they where that powerful. I'll have to do some reading and get myself up to speed.

I think that trying this in a car instead of a large room should be a fun challenge. My last study I did I ended up having to do a lot of time alingmdnt to compensate for some pretty serious phasing and Comb filtering going on. I would think that in a smaller environment it should be a bit easier to compensate for but we'll see.

For Soundproofing I'll be using the rubber mat under the carpet, door panels, headlined, and anything that makes some sort of a noise. My biggest obstical will be trying to get my engine quite enough to hear what's going on hahaha. Time for some new mufflers.

I am not set in stone on any of these plans so I'm always open to advice the biggest reason why I'm going about it this way is I already have this equipment and I figured it'd be worth a shot.