Advice for rear speakers.

[dooski 10+ year member]

atm i own focal components for the front and was wondering should i replace it with the same size speaker (6x9's) or get an adapter. also should i buy focals or go for something different, i want good midbass rear's

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[zako 10+ year member]

The standard recommendation for rear speakers is that they should be playing attenuated most of the time in order not to confuse the sound stage. Therefore they don't need to be as good as the front ones. A more convoluted recommendation states is that they should be bandpassed and time delayed by about 20ms if you have this capability, to be mostly for ambiance sound effect. In either case, there is no need for a strong amplifier or top of line speakers to go in the rear.

If you want to use rear speakers as midbass, this conflicts with the goal of not confusing the sound stage. If you do need that midbass capability, I would have used 6x9 speakers and bandpassed them. Since most stereos and amplifiers do not have low pass capability that works for midbass, I'd insert an inductor into the speaker wire circuit with a value corresponding to 6dB low pass filter at around 200Hz. One really good 6x9 speaker is Hybrid Audio Imagine component set, the 6x9 version. It's actually kind of waste to use them as midbass only because a great overall set of speakers to run active, that happen to have very good midbass. I have 6.5 version running active in fully sound proofed doors and it feels like I have all midbass I could ask for.

 

[i2ain2thunder 10+ year member]

slope is personal preference 6db 12db whatever depends on the other components and personal taste for blending. as for midbass I thought that was any frequency between 80 and 800, cut frequency wherever sounds best for your setup however 200 could work will if you only want them to handle the lower midbass frequencies. Inserting inductors straight into the speaker wire is not something everyone can do right....they have premade LPF xovers for a reason. As for midbass itself it generally requires sealed chambers for optimal bass and least cancellation

 

[dooski 10+ year member]

thanks for the input thunder