Getting back into car audio

[woody70]

I stumbled upon the forum in doing some research on subs. I'm dating myself, but it has been the late 80's/early 90's since I was into car audio. Loved it and help build a lot of systems. Of course at first I was into the heavy bass and spl, but I changed over to more neutral and clean sounding systems. I used to run fosgate punch pro's, linear power amps (if I remember correctly their tagline was "ear candy", audio control eq's, mb quart mids/highs, yada, yada. It has been so long since I've even fiddled with car audio I've forgotten a lot of it, lol.

Well, now my 16 year old son is just realizing there is a car audio world out there and knows that I used to install systems and such and wants us to put one together in his 2003 Chevy silverado extended cab truck that he got as his first vehicle a few months ago. I figured it would be a good father/son project and I could teach him how to install all the components and shoot for a nice balanced sounding audio system.

I figured I would be able to quickly put together a nice little package and I think I did for the most part. We are trying to keep it at the 1200-1500 price range. I was thinking of one (possibly two, but for now one) Sundown Audio SA-8 v3 under the rear seat in the extended cab, Sundown Audio SAE 1000D v2 amp for sub. Looking at some Polk Audio MM6501's for front doors. I don't know if we'll even put anything in the rear doors, kinda depends on how our budget is I guess. Looking at a fosgate or sundown audio four channel amp for the Polk's. I not married to any of this equipment, but it is just what I came up with. Being that my son is 16 I know he is going to crank it up at times, especially around friends and such showing off his system. But hopefully after the newness wears off he won't be going around trying to listen to it at ear splitting levels.

So, some of my main concerns are head unit and eq/crossovers. In my day the HU that had built in eq's/crossovers were crap. If you were serious about your car audio, you invested in an Audio Control 1/3 octave eq and became best friends with any shop that had a rta. let me tell you that was a lot of money for someone making minimum wage back then. Now a days, it seems like every HU has DSP, eq and crossover built-in. So are all these items that come standard with today's HU any good? Or do we still need to run something like a Clarion EQS746 and Clarion MCD360. These would fit our budget and allow me to teach him how to properly tune a system. I would love to get Audio Control again, but that would blow our budget. And this is only if it is really even needed? And what would you suggest for a good HU? All he wants to do is stream from his iPhone. I would like something that has at least 4 volt outputs.

Sorry to be writing a book, lol, but I guess this kinda sums up what we are trying to do. Suggestions?

Thanks

Click to read more...

 

[The Camry]

Because im lazy. Break down how much you have spent already.

Sundown amps are great. i run the 150.4 and its total bliss. so no SQ worries in that department. As for whats a good head unit for Eq and whatnot. Go with the 80prs. 16 band L/R eq. Full time alignment control. 3 way crossover control. 6-48 db x-overs. its friggin awesome and a DAC thats ungodly clean.

Also explain to him the difference in compressed mp3s vs 320kps clean songs. if your going for SQ, you dont want to stream anything. Bluetooth is another form of compression. It will very noticeably reduce your sound quality. If you connect the 80prs by usb to the iphone, it bypasses any DAC that the iphone/ipod may have(which usually ****) and uses its own, which is very high grade. Or, talk him into putting all his music on a USB and plugging that into the headunit.

 

[woody70]

Hey Camry, thanks for the reply. Right now I've spend $0, lol. I currently have about 50 tabs open in Google Chrome doing research. I'm starting to go down the rabbit hole of no return reading reviews and such, but I kinda like the research phase of it, hence my 50 open chrome tabs. And believe it or not, one of those tabs is the Pioneer DEH-80PRS. Here's my only issue with it though, being that I'm trying to teach a 16 year old with the attention span of a gnat, he will never spend the time to delve deep off into the menus. I can hear it now, "It's OK, it sounds good enough, now let me go show my friends".

While people are raving about the units features, one that seems to have some issues is Bluetooth. While I stress sound quality there will be times when he is going to use the bluetooth streaming feature to play music. My music library is at a bare minimum 320kps. I'm explaining to him how compression and other items affect the sound. He gets it when I play a song that is 56kbs vs 320, but has a harder time picking up the differences as the kps increases, which makes sense, but he just doesn't have the ear yet to pick up subtle differences because he isn't actually listening for them or even knows they exist in the music due to the way most young ones listen to their music.

So, I'm still giving the Pioneer DEH-80PRS heavy consideration, I was thinking it would be a lot easier to teach him how to tune a system with a decent external eq from clarion or audio control instead of having to go through 15-20 different menu options on the Pioneer DEH-80PRS to get to something and he's looking at me with that "you're kidding, right?" look! Also, trying to explain to him that spending money on sound deadening his truck is worth it. A quieter truck equals not having to turn the sound up as loud to drown out road noise. He gets it, but doesn't want to spend the money to do it (he wants me to).

Like I said I'm still considering the Pioneer DEH-80PRS, but would you have a recommendation for a nice head unit that would work with external crossover and external eq?

Thanks a million

 

[Jeffdachef 5,000+ posts]

I stumbled upon the forum in doing some research on subs. I'm dating myself, but it has been the late 80's/early 90's since I was into car audio. Loved it and help build a lot of systems. Of course at first I was into the heavy bass and spl, but I changed over to more neutral and clean sounding systems. I used to run fosgate punch pro's, linear power amps (if I remember correctly their tagline was "ear candy", audio control eq's, mb quart mids/highs, yada, yada. It has been so long since I've even fiddled with car audio I've forgotten a lot of it, lol.
Well, now my 16 year old son is just realizing there is a car audio world out there and knows that I used to install systems and such and wants us to put one together in his 2003 Chevy silverado extended cab truck that he got as his first vehicle a few months ago. I figured it would be a good father/son project and I could teach him how to install all the components and shoot for a nice balanced sounding audio system.

I figured I would be able to quickly put together a nice little package and I think I did for the most part. We are trying to keep it at the 1200-1500 price range. I was thinking of one (possibly two, but for now one) Sundown Audio SA-8 v3 under the rear seat in the extended cab, Sundown Audio SAE 1000D v2 amp for sub. Looking at some Polk Audio MM6501's for front doors. I don't know if we'll even put anything in the rear doors, kinda depends on how our budget is I guess. Looking at a fosgate or sundown audio four channel amp for the Polk's. I not married to any of this equipment, but it is just what I came up with. Being that my son is 16 I know he is going to crank it up at times, especially around friends and such showing off his system. But hopefully after the newness wears off he won't be going around trying to listen to it at ear splitting levels.

So, some of my main concerns are head unit and eq/crossovers. In my day the HU that had built in eq's/crossovers were crap. If you were serious about your car audio, you invested in an Audio Control 1/3 octave eq and became best friends with any shop that had a rta. let me tell you that was a lot of money for someone making minimum wage back then. Now a days, it seems like every HU has DSP, eq and crossover built-in. So are all these items that come standard with today's HU any good? Or do we still need to run something like a Clarion EQS746 and Clarion MCD360. These would fit our budget and allow me to teach him how to properly tune a system. I would love to get Audio Control again, but that would blow our budget. And this is only if it is really even needed? And what would you suggest for a good HU? All he wants to do is stream from his iPhone. I would like something that has at least 4 volt outputs.

Sorry to be writing a book, lol, but I guess this kinda sums up what we are trying to do. Suggestions?

Thanks

never use those clarion EQs they do more harm then good SQ wise. Graphical EQs are always inferior to parametric EQs. The thing about owning a better head unit is the digital audio convertors inside. Junk head units (150$ and under) will have bad/vieled sound compared to head units that have a quality 24 bit burr brown/wolfson DAC built in. Nowadays you go with real full on digital sound processors(DSPs) instead of using audiocontrol, they are severely outdated in comparison.

However i'd say for a 16 year old. Get him something budget as hell. He doesnt deserve a fully decked out system yet if he doesnt have the attention span to learn all that and fully take it in and love the hobby. It might even take some guy on the street sounding louder and better than his for him to really want to improve his setup and actually absorb things in. Hell, It might even be just a phase for him. So do yourself and your wallet a favor and just get him sounding thats cheap, gets loud and sound decent without pouring too much money out. UNLESS you want to enjoy it yourself then by all means go ahead. I'd make him earn a real setup first.

 

[woody70]

Gentlemen, thanks for the input. We decided to go semi-budget. Got him a Pioneer 2800 double din HU. I'm thinking the 80PRS would have been a little overwhelming for him to tune. The 2800 has an auto eq that can get him in the ballpark and then do a little fine tuning from there. I know the 80PRS has auto tuning features but it would have a little much for him with seperate L/R. Going to sound deaden the doors with some b stock from second skin and put HSK 165.4 in the doors with a 4 channel amp (rockford, sundown or jl - haven't decided yet). One SA-8 sub with a sundown 1K watt amp. But maybe two sa-8's if we can squeeze the budget somewhere. Disconnect the stock rear speakers and call it a day. This will give him a basic system that he can help install, setup and tune. We'll see how it goes. OMG, I was just proud of him for asking "If you are in the drivers seat, you are way left of the center stage. How do you get the sound centered? And then if you have a passenger how will that affect everything?" Welcome to car audio son, welcome to car audio.

 

[woody70]

Just now starting to work on my son's truck install. Got stuff for Christmas and I'm just now really getting some time to work on it. He has been patiently waiting. I will start a build log really soon as I've been taking some pics as I go along. Nothing groundbreaking but maybe it will help someone in the future. Been so long since I've done this stuff that I'm having to relearn some things that I've forgotten, but thanks to all the people on here for their knowledge I've have been able to learn alot. CSCStang built us a T-line center console box. This was right around the time he got hurt. Hope he is doing better now. He wasn't able to carpet/vinlyl top the box, so I had a local shop finish it. I was going to do it, but just don't have the time. Probably would have messed up and had to start over, but hey that's how I learn. Anyway, the shop did a **** poor job and took some liberties with the box. Now I gotta take apart some of their work and fix it. CSCStang would have been appalled at what they did lol.

Ok, now for some more input from you guys. I'm going with active setup. Pioneer 2800BS HU, Hertz HSK 165 mid/tweet components and Sundown SA-10 sub. RF T600-4 for mids/highs and Sundown SAE1000D for sub. Now, since i will be using the 2800 HU for the crossover in the active setup (I think Pioneer calls it "Network Mode") I need some ballpark starting points for the speakers. Mainly I don't want to fry the Hertz HT-25 tweeter by having the high pass xover point to low. The passive network that it comes with is set around 3300 hz with 12 db slope. Is that what I should start with on the 2800 HU? Forgive me if that is a stupid question. Been reading through a lot of posts and sometimes I just get to the point of info overload. There were some guys on youtube (5star) that gave a good in-depth review of how to work all the features of the unit and they suggested starting the tweeter at around 8k, which seemed on the high side to me, but hey what do I know. So, should I just look up the spec sheets for each speaker and use those as starting points for all xover settings or are there some ballpark settings that someone could give me? Just in case the info is needed the 2800 HU has the following xover settings in active/network setup: HP, MHP, MLP, and sub. Each one has several freq to choose from and slopes of 6-24db. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Build log coming ASAP.