New System Advice

[juiceweazel]

New to the forum. Looking for advice.

I bought an 07 Ridgeline several months ago & I'm in the begining stages of designing my audio system. I've installed several daily driver spl stereos in the past, but this is my first truck install. I'm looking for SQ as I'm done w/ the boom. I just want something decent, nothing highend. The first question is tweeter location. I'm trying to keep this as stock as possible due to having my stereo jacked in the past so building pods on the pillars is out of the question. In your experience, is installing new tweeters in the dash an ok solution, or would it be better to put them in the a-pillar facing each other, or the doors? Tenacious had me looking at the silver flute & vifa combo in a previous post, but I'm afraid the tweeter protrusion would nix the idea of appearing stock. The 2nd question is that I've never bi-amped my front stage. At first I thought of just doing a 5 channel amp for simplicity, but after reading this I am considering just deck power on the rear & bi-amp the front. Do you believe this will give me a much better stage & quality. The 3rd question is woofer direction. I am looking at doing two 10s under the seat. I am considering JL & Alpine right now. It seems most people fire them into the floor. In your experience, is it better to fire them into the seat or the floor & why?

Thanks in advance for any input.

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[trumpet 5,000+ posts]

If you're concerned about tweeter placement you can always temporarily test them in different locations. A lot of people put tweeters in dash locations facing up into the windshield for a stock appearance. We can't tell you what you'll like better between those locations or the A-pillars. If you want good staging and imaging your other equipment's capabilities and the tuning will make a large difference on the outcome.

You can still use a 5-channel amplifier to bi-amp the front speakers, and if you want a simple system that's what I recommend. A lot of 5-channel amps are going to want no less than a 2 ohm load on the subwoofer channel, but you can still get plenty of output from this kind of setup. Out of the amps I can offer my top recommendation is the JBL GTO-5EZ, although JL Audio, Alpine, and Kenwood have strong contenders as well.

Under-seat prefab sub boxes almost always downfire the subs. It's an easy way to get more output as it uses what we call boundary loading to give you a free boost to the bass. Even with a sound quality oriented setup we take advantage of easy gains in output. Not every truck can or should have an enclosure designed that way, but it's very common. Do you plan to build the enclosure?

 

[FUKAZ28]

Subscribing.

 

[juiceweazel]

Thanks for the advice. Yes I am planning on building this. I want to put the amp and subs under the rear seat so I have easy access to adjust the amps. It's my first enclosure in awhile, but I've built many in the past. This one however does have more size limitations than I'm used to. I considered doing 8s as it would satisfy the size requirements & have better response, but I moved away from that quickly as I would lose a lot of low end.