Should I go 3-way?

[adam71 5,000+ posts]

lol BS!! to get what you claim you need 3 things exact or tuned (processed to be) exact (not easy to do). my smaller 2 way set puts a big hurting on my 3 way set not even close. besides that sub bass AND mid bass are the 2 most often OVER emphisized frequencies people put in their cars (meaning way past natural) . my 5.25 smacks it moves your pant leg and you can feel it on your face....only time i can EVER recall feeling that in real is actually playing a drum and loudly at that. im not saying a 3 way is bad at all but i do question what you are calling propper. read up some on superposistion i know it is theroey but its made up of alot of laws

I think I kind of got the jist of what you just posted but I'm having a hard time reading when there is NO fvcking punctuation to speak of. I don't know where one sentence ends and another begins.

But anyway, just because you probably know more of the technical aspects than I do doesn't make what I say BS and I don't appreciate that remark, but I'm a big boy and I'll move on.

What does a 5 1/4" driver moving your pant leg have to do with 2 ways and 3 ways.??? I fail to see how that pertains to the discussion. I mean if you turn the volume up far enough a sub will make your hair move but again this means nothing to me. Please explain.

I don't know what laws you're speaking of or what you call a PROPER setup but what I call PROPER is what sounds GOOD to the ear and looks good on an RTA which is how I always have and always will setup my systems. I will admit I don't know much about what causes phase problems or whatever. But I do know how my car sounded with a 2 way and how it now sounds with a 3 way and the sound has improved greatly. My mid and tweet in the kicks are aimed correctly with lots of trial and error.

Well, thats my 2 cents.........hope it wasn't too much BS for you.

P.S. Punctuation is our friend. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/cool.gif.3bcaf8f141236c00f8044d07150e34f7.gif//content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif

 

[adam71 5,000+ posts]

read up some on superposistion i know it is theroey but its made up of alot of laws

Where can I find this reading by the way??

 

[audiolife 5,000+ posts]

i did all this crap 10 years ago (dont mean this to sound like a smarty pants but i also had some VERY good teachers first hand without a doubt at least the best i could have within a 300 mile radious for sure). no im by no means a god but its far better to not jump from the frying pan into the fire. people love to play over sophisticated with their systems its not really needed. guaranteed if you knew me as an individual you wouldnt think what i said was an attack on you in any sorts. the basics of it can be googled (superposition). too me its important that you learn it/read it yourself as to me ranting about it suggests im playing preacher. im not thick headed enough to say there isnt more than 1 way to skin a cat so in YOUR learning you can pick it apart for yourself and take what you want from it and apply it to how you do things. its not a major read (maybe 30 minutes tops) but there is alot of info. over the basics of it it basically talks about how waves work with and against eachother. how this applies to your 3 way set up is unless the 3 things i brought up but didnt name are done you will have a hard time getting the system set up THAT good. EVEN if you did there are still problems with frequancy roll off at the crossover points then incoherant lines of dispersion of the speakers themselves (probably bad wording there but im tired as fook and will make sense when you apply what you already know to what it will be that you are reading.) its basically the reason behind using horns in a way but is transfered over as it still applies to sound waves. btw i hate typing and i hate teaching/telling people what it is to exactly do it makes me feel like im insulting ones right to do their own thing which is what im not really trying to do. im just trying to let people know what it is that they should consider dealing with before they make some of the same mistakes i already made.

 

[audiolife 5,000+ posts]

http://www.phy.ntnu.edu.tw/java/waveSuperposition/waveSuperposition.html here is a neat little item that umm should illistrate what i mean. just read it and follow along and play with the graph ill try to dig up more about it. autosound 2000 i believe used to have tech notes about it. pretty sure what i read along time ago(94-95ish) came from David Navone.

http://www.kettering.edu/~drussell/Demos/superposition/superposition.html

it can be seen in ways with rocks being dropped into mud puddles to graphs basic concept though is trying to absolutely control cancelations and gains. this effects everything from staging to even tonal charactoristics of the system. having more of anything in a system will effect clarity as no matter what you do it cant wont be perfect. yes there are trade offs back and forth as with anything but i would rather deal with frequancy responses over a incoherant phase/wave mess anyday.

also if i may ask what do you refference your system against?

 

[audiolife 5,000+ posts]

What does a 5 1/4" driver moving your pant leg have to do with 2 ways and 3 ways.??? I fail to see how that pertains to the discussion. I mean if you turn the volume up far enough a sub will make your hair move but again this means nothing to me. Please explain.

why do people go 3 way? to free up cone area for dedicated mid bass more times than not without hurting the true high mid range area. i havent rta'd my set up yet just got the staging down pat, but when you feel the smack generally it means you have a nice warm spot between 125-200 hz. my system doesnt get all that loud either (wasnt designed for it ) the place i learned alot of stuff from (custom audio concepts) used to make cars with the front stage by itself could run flat from (best 20-20k out of a set of coax) 45hz to 20k for the most part. none of which used 3 way set ups. closest to a 3 way set up was a dual 5.25" component set up front and those were playing the same thing (that was the perfect 40 car but when they went to all oz(after the perfect 40 the 5.25" components were pro tech) the only thing that played was a set of 6.5" components set up as a co ax. only sad part about it is lynn looks at me and says "why do you still piddle in car audio......" lol since kirk went into construction they have been alot more home audio oriented. those 2 guys have probably forgot more about car audio than i have ever known. although they will deny that i know better. he had 3 books i would kill for now he cant find them lol . 1 was an autosound 2000 book the other 2 were all marked up books on therums of acoustics (marked up meaning things were highlighted where relivent to a system) the last book was much the same but dealing with thielle-smalls and how to manipulate them many ways.

 

[adam71 5,000+ posts]

Thanx for the reads man. I'll have to read them later since I'm tired from reading your last 3 posts....LOL.

Oh and one more thing.........use some FVCKING punctuation.....j/k. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/wink.gif.608e3ea05f1a9f98611af0861652f8fb.gif

 

[audiolife 5,000+ posts]

basically all its about is constructive and destructive interfearences the more you have the more problems there will be. drop 2 stones 14" apart into water you will see a clash of waves. take the same two rocks side by side from the same hand at the same time you will see they work stronger together and they dont cancel eachother out....in stereo sound we already have this going on between right and left so we can easily adjust it so cancelations happen past the listeners ears. add more speakers from different locations you just added to how wide or narrow your "clean paths" are going to be if you even get clean paths with the added waves from adding more speakers.

 

[audioholic 5,000+ posts]

Ideally in a stereo situation, you would only use 2 speakers to reproduce the material. But we do not have the technology to produce a speaker that will give us the results we want between 20hz and 20khz. This is the reason for multiple drivers, the only reason. More point sources does add complexity as audiolife is talking about, but its a problem we have to live with. Even most high-end home speaker systems have multiple point sources, their advantagce being the ability to mount the drivers as close as physically possible, and the ability to align the voice coils laterally. In an automobile we usually do not have this luxury, but we do have some relatively crude tools to combat this (like time alignment, phase adjusting, etc). But, we also dont have a symmetrical listening environment in a car. Sound reflections are such a big issue in a car that I doubt all but the most trained ears would notice a point source issue in a properly set up 3-way system, especially in the midbass region.

3-ways really exel over 2-ways in terms of output (ignoring phasing issues mentioned above etc). At lower volume levels yes 2-ways can compete with 3-ways pretty well (some would even argue, better). But the higher you like cranking your volume knob, the more of a difference there will be between the two setups.

The guy above who said he only would consider a 3-way with a horn setup confuses me. I have horns (not currently installed) and have studied them for quite a few years (including the readings of Jason Winslow among others) and I still dont understand that reasoning. One of the big advatages of horns is their ability to extend so much lower than a traditional tweeter, closing the gap between it and the subbass region. This makes finding a driver that will handle that bandwidth aptly more easy. There are a few drivers out now that show that promise actually, such as the extremis, xxx and a few others. Setups using traditional tweeters have a larger freq band to fill which more lends itself to dividing itself between two drivers. If you want to mention Winslow, one of his main reasons for chosing a 3-way over a 2-way (even for hrons) is to allow for the seperation of midbass and midrange for purposes of phase adjustment (as was mentioned above). This is still the same issue with non-horn setups. IOW, if you believe in using a 3-way for horns, you should believe in them for tradition tweeter setups as well. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/wink.gif.608e3ea05f1a9f98611af0861652f8fb.gif

 

[audioholic 5,000+ posts]

audiolife's posts have always been extremely hard to read. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/tongue.gif.6130eb82179565f6db8d26d6001dcd24.gif I rarely make it thru an entire one. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/biggrin.gif.d71a5d36fcbab170f2364c9f2e3946cb.gif

 

[audiolife 5,000+ posts]

just because i dont care to get all detailed, really makes no difference to me. i already been through it and i tell people where to look. if they care to read so be it if not they keep asking about "problems" when the answer to alot of those problems still exists in the readings they wont want to read because its easier to be told rather than learn it. most of the cars that had 3 ways back in the day as i mentioned sometime ago often unhooked the midbass speakers in a comp. one person in particular was jerry zeigler. (he had an all pioneer odr set up with all image dynamics speakers (horns)in a black honda crx) he even back then had the ability with the odr to tune in or out about anything he wanted but couldnt ever get the kicks and doors to sound right together. very few cars i have heard pulled it off with out a hitch. larry chehsneir (i know im spelling this wrong) pulled it off with his caddy it had some non symetrical speaker placements to offset some of the "confusion" he used usd horns pioneer odr and a host of other speakers. its claim to fame (at least to me) was where he had his sub (passenger side almost up into the kick but on the floor/firewall). i talked to him and jerry quite a bit as they used to judge my car often and we talked about how to compensate back and forth but clarity WAS always an issue. you never want anything clouded or pulling back and forth to not have an exact location (which is what happens when you add speakers) between the 2 of those guys i know they have won at least 4 world championships and jerry was his own installer and larry had probabably without a dout one of the top five installers in the world working on his car (i forget his name but not his face he won a grandmaster world championship in his own right) to me about the only guy i know of that tackles these types of issues and does it extremely well is scott bawalda. his "way" of doing it isnt how shall we say the norm because he basically developed his own scheme and i know he does lectures over it as well. case in point though 99.9% of the people who read through here arent and dont want to go to that extreme but when building a PROPPER set up i think superpositioning should be learned and used as a tool as it will effect the system. as with your horns it follows along those VERY SAME LINES as do the speakers i run.

i just went to ft wayne with a friend of mine and he heard my new set up as well as the last set up with my 3 ways. he knew all my sound comes from up front but absolutely couldnt believe my only speakers were mounted low in the kicks. he kept looking at my dash saying "there is something in there" fact of the matter is there isnt. i then played the seven drum track material from my cd 102 track 6. it travels at the corners past both pillars of my truck it also has a definate center and 2 very definate mid center locations that doesnt "drop" in height as the track flows from left to right (something my 3 way set up couldnt do reguardless of were i put the mid tweet and putting the mid in the door). maybe even better than my horns did. you go adding speakers to that that arent aimed exact and tuned exact it will pull the stage either farther left right up or down. reason it would do this is because its FIGHTING with what is there and also working with what is there at intervals that arent consistant. now tell me what would you rather work with a frequency response problem that is by far easier to remody or a phase shift, time and location problem with still somewhat of a frequency response issue? that really effects clarity as much as a singer singing out of time in a chorus or a drum section playing out of sync with a symphony. most peple want something that they know they can get put in and have a fairly easy time of getting it set up well and adding speakers isnt an easy way to improve a system at all. my first installer took the more is better approach in his comp system. he had 40 (not a typo) mid bass, midrange and tweeter speakers in his reagal with 2 12 or 15" subs (had all 4 subs going before he started tweeking). took him 3 years to get it right and it netted him a third place in usac finals. it sounded really good by that time too but you ever think really how many people are going to want to mess with a set up for literially hundreds and thousands of hours? most people would get pissed if it took more than a day. i know this seems extreme but if you look at it for what it really is and know about how speakers themselves work and how to mess with responses (getting them to play deeper or higher) i think it becomes rather obvious which road to pursue doesnt it? there is how many different cars trucks and suvs out now? all of them are totally different so each one posses its own issues with doing the right set up but can you argue against doing the things that are more easily obtained to get a better or as good of end result? a 3 way speaker set up front stage in an easy open set up on paper 9 times out of ten looks alot better than a 2 way set up but reality says you arent going to be installing the said speaker sets in or on any kind of paper. i sold quiet a few 3 way sets in my day especially in bmw's and benzs and i can about draw a line right down the middle to the satisfaction of the customer ( not that it was bad) vs a 2 way kick panel set up but the end result being worth the cost and time into the actual set up. im also not cutting down on the guys that do get good/great results with going the 3 way route but rather saying its not as simple as most people think. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif

 

[adam71 5,000+ posts]

If I said I had time to read that last post I would be lying. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif

 

[audiolife 5,000+ posts]

and if i said that i thought you knew alot i would be lying as well. back way back when this stuff was fundamental stuff.

 

[audioholic 5,000+ posts]

and if i said that i thought you knew alot i would be lying as well. back way back when this stuff was fundamental stuff.

Don't be an ***. Your posts are exceedingly hard to read, you know it. Frankly, I think you do it on purpose alot.

 

[audiolife 5,000+ posts]

Don't be an ***. Your posts are exceedingly hard to read, you know it. Frankly, I think you do it on purpose alot.

maybe but i will never tell

 

[audioholic 5,000+ posts]

But if you ever do, it will be very long and contain very little punctuation. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/wink.gif.608e3ea05f1a9f98611af0861652f8fb.gif

Just messin with ya. Just like adam was.