Installed components - need gain help

[jcraft 10+ year member]

Hi all,

SO I installed a set of INfinity reference 6030cs in the car. I fed both channels from a 50x4 RF, one to each crossover and then wired the woofer and tweet back to the crossover. Now, I wanted to make sure my gains are properly set with the amp and I have never had component speakers before. I am doing this by ear so I installed a 1Khz test tone from a cd in HU. Right now my gain is about halfway maybe a bit less. This sounded good out of the coaxials I had. Now, I notice when my HU volume ( goes from 0-50 on display) is 0 to about 35 the test tone is only coming out the woofer and not the tweeter, Once I go above about 35 the tweeter comes on and you here the test tone very well up to 50 on HU is this normal?. I am reluctant to turn the gain up very far as I don't want to blow the tweeter or woofer. They are rated to 90wrms. I did smell a funny smell in the car after doing this but it may be because they are so new and only have been used about a half hour or so. I played music through them and they sound fine. With the test tone and doing by ear will you be able to hear distortion or not. And which will distort first the tweet or woofer. Also, would this be the best test tone to use for this. MAybe it would be best to play the tone and keep only one of them connected to the crossover at a time and see where each distort and use the lower setting. Just a thought as I am new to this. Thanks

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[sjv13 10+ year member]

Setting gains by hear is a bad idea. A worse idea would be setting gains by ear with a test tone. A test tone is only really useful for setting the gains with a DMM. If you're going to set it by ear, I would use a song that gets pretty loud (not acoustic only etc, try some rock something) and then keep turning it up until you think it's loud enough or you hear distortion.

EDIT: As for your tweeter problem, I'm not sure why that would be happening. Also, when you set your gains, you should have your head unit volume number around 37 or 38. Above 75% volume, many head units begin to clip the signal they send out, so you should set your gain with your head unit around that volume, then only ever turn it up to that volume (unless it's a song that was recorded at a lower volume, which in that case you can turn it up more because you have the extra head room). Sorry, I had forgotten to mention that very important step.

 

[trumpet 5,000+ posts]

Your crossovers should be blocking the sound of a 1 kHz test tone from the tweeters. They use a 3.5 kHz crossover frequency with an 18 dB/octave slope. This means at 1 kHz the sound is attenuated more than double the loudness. You may have the gain set incorrectly as I suspect you're hearing distortion created by the head unit and possibly from the amplifier as well.

You'll need to listen to music recorded with live instruments to judge your settings by ear. If you're setting the gains with some dubstep playing that isn't going to help one bit to tune for natural sound. It would help you judge where to set the high pass filter for the mids.

 

[calebkhill 10+ year member]

IMO.

You can safely set the gains by ear using a test tone. The clipping of 1k will be completely obvious when it happens.

But don't do this for the tweeter, set it by ear with woofers unplugged.

using a 0 to -5 DB tone , with all boosts of and eq flat, slowly turn you hu up and carefully listen, when you hear it distort back off. If you can't determiner at 80-90% hu volume then stop and use another method, dmm or oscope. But you should hear it clearly at 1khz.

After you test and you find the max hu volume, go up on gains until you hear the distortion. This is your Max settings.

Edit. Set your tweets separately, its not safe to wait for distortion because you could feed them too much power. Set those by ear with the woofers disconnected using normal music.

How are you r hu pre outs ran to the amp? What does front and rear go to.