The Dayton’s are a different world. They likely won’t hit the same DBs that your AB subs would, but they would kick your chest with their sound. It’s just a different sound when doing high power to SQ subs. That’s why I can’t afford the 1000$ to buy them just to feel their sound. High powered expensive SQ systems are more for just the experience. There is no bragging rights.
They’re 135$ for a 300 watt sub, so they’re a tad expensive when comparing dollar to watts. When you hear their accuracy though, you know where the money went. They are super accurate even at high excursion. I could probably burn the coils and never hear any distortion if the amps weren’t set right. I’m getting a fairly flat signal way down below 30hz in a sealed box. I’d love to experience a 25 hz test tone with 8 of these on 2500 watts.
Explorers are known to like to get loud. That said you both probably have room to find gains by experimenting with seat positions, box location/aiming, gorilla tape, etc. It's relatively easy to find gains in the low to mid 140s. 142 and a bit is fine for most people to enjoy music but on 5K that is far from competitive. I was doing 148.6-148.8 in my old Jeep with single 12 on around that much power and only MIGHT have picked up first place in our local shows if the serious guys who competed with that cone area didn't show up. At some point if you plan to play music whatsoever you're simply not going to hang with the guys that are just trying to mark the best score.
Port on the driver's side should help, gorilla tape around where the subs mount usually helps, if the box is carpeted that will hurt. Anything you can move should be moved and tested, and make sure you don't have a bunch of stuff in the car like a cooler, your gym bag or tools or whatever. I'd also expect subs and port to the rear would work better in that vehicle but it may or may not be audible and you'd need to make sure you don't crowd out the port.
Who said it isn't? If you're happy you did it right. Just throwing out small gains you could find for little to no cost if you wanted to get a little friendly head to head going with someone neck in neck with you at shows.
American Bass has a pretty good reputation. The XFL/TNT/DX are often recommened budget SPL subs and the RX/XR which lean more towars SQ are highly reviewed. There HD/VFL for higher-end competitors and korean VFL amps are popular also.
I'm referring to both of them. The Yellow ones where the ones AB was pushing until about 2 years ago when they made the transition to the new ones (was the same time they transitioned the VFL amplifiers lineup as well).
