winkychevelle 10+ year member
CarAudio.com Veteran
Looking at the vibe audio black death speaker I posted again and comparing them to the sundowns they are built in a similar fashion, monster magnets, rear vent, and ask for lots of power 100watt minimum they just have a shallower mounting depth. I'm guessing the vex 8 has a larger magnet and it does say it has a 3" voice coil vs a 1.7" on the vibe unit, these probably contribute to the higher rms rating on the sundowns.
Isnt a 3 db gain a doubling in volume?
You also said you wouldnt run a pa style component setup, could you please explain why.
The vibe does have a large motor structure but the suspension is designed to me low xmax meaning low excursion. It also doesn't help that they don't produce tsp parameters for them at least not to be easily found.
3db is considered the smallest amount of volume gain a person can notice. 6db is easily notice and considered a fairly large change, 10db is considered doubling the output.
And pro audio midranges are made to play mid range frequencies. That's obvious, our ears pick up midrange frequencies much better than any other frequency range. That's why it's naturally easier to understand a man talking over a small child or even a feminine woman.
Since our ears are really sensitive to that frequency range it is not uncommon for us to cut the mid range down in volume or boost the high end and low end to make everything sound level in volume.
This often equates to an equalizer looking like a smiling face.
For me with my tinnitus extra loud midrange is even more so offensive to my ears. And while I know I can cut it down with an eq it's just easier to use speakers that don't spike the offending speaker range.
You can also look at frequency response graphs and see than most midrange speakers don't exactly play very smoothly, with a frequency response looking like jagged teeth. This isn't exact good for a sq build.
But at the end of the day it's more about your specific preferences than anything else. To me pa style speakers are just for getting loud in the vocal range and pa style tweeters I don't like personally.