tweeter placement and timing adjustment

[mrbadwrench 10+ year member]

I havent installed my tweeters/gone active yet. But just curious, in theory, If i install my tweeters directly right next to my 6.5s, in theory should I have to adjust timing at all?

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[keep_hope_alive Premium Member]

depends on the crossover point and placement. tweeter placement usually determines sound stage height, so locating tweeters low on the doors is usually a bad idea. you don't need to go active to have good results with tweeters separate from woofers. you can get nearly the same path length distance using a-pillars in some cars which combines the benefits of path length and stage height.

with crossover points above 4000Hz you don't need to worry about time alignment anyway because the wavelengths of sound are shorter than the distance between your ears. instead, we localize based on intensity so simply padding the nearest tweeter is sufficient in lieu of separate time alignment.

 

[gstokes]

I havent installed my tweeters/gone active yet. But just curious, in theory, If i install my tweeters directly right next to my 6.5s, in theory should I have to adjust timing at all?

don't mount the tweeters in the doors, high up on the dash staring you in the face, tweeters have a very narrow angle of dispersion (about 15 degrees) so try to minimize off-axial response. It will sound just fine and you won't have any timing issues..

 

[mrbadwrench 10+ year member]

Cool guys thanks for the responses. Just trying to set up so I don't have to time anything, as I'm planning on splitting my driver source to the front drivers and the rear fills. Thanks

 

[gstokes]

Cool guys thanks for the responses. Just trying to set up so I don't have to time anything, as I'm planning on splitting my driver source to the front drivers and the rear fills. Thanks

i was just like you when i first began this venture but the problems i thought i would have were avoided by careful speaker placement, if all the speakers are facing you then the sound from each speaker will reach your ears at the same time, just like home audio speakers. It is soooo important for the tweeter to be staring you in the face or at least close, the midrange are fine in the doors because they're in bandwidth mode and not having to reproduce anything above 3000Hz, the wavelength is starting to get stretched out at 3kHz and below so the midrange does not have to looking at you, but it helps. Remember that the rated power for the tweeter doesn't need to be as high as the wattage on that channel because the tweeter receives only a small portion of the spectral energy as compared to the midrange and then the subwoofer which consumes the majority. My amplifier pumps 75Wrms to a tweeter that's only rated for 50Wrms but it will never see 75Wrms because their's not enough spectral energy in the tweeters wavelength, same thing with the CL-5 midrange drivers that are rated for 60 watts continuous on a 75 watt channel, they will get more spectral energy than the tweeters so you need to bump up the power rating accordingly, good speakers like to be pushed and the harder you push them the better they sound so choose power ratings on your drivers appropriately..

 

[Jeffdachef 5,000+ posts]

i generally never have time alignment problems when i have my tweeters installed on axis at the sail panel.

 

[mrbadwrench 10+ year member]

I thought it would work the opposite, so im glad i asked!

 

[trumpet 5,000+ posts]

don't mount the tweeters in the doors, high up on the dash staring you in the face, tweeters have a very narrow angle of dispersion (about 15 degrees) so try to minimize off-axial response. It will sound just fine and you won't have any timing issues..

Speaker cones radiate sound in all directions equally until the wavelength of the sound approaches and becomes less than the diameter of the cone. A 1" dome style tweeter will begin beaming at roughly ~13,000 Hz. Google "speaker beaming frequency" for a list of articles/discussions about that. This is a great reason to point tweeters at our ears, although in the confined space of a car every point of reflected high frequency sound reaches our ears soon enough after the incident sound that our brain hears it as another "virtual tweeter".

It's been over a year since I had a traditional speaker setup, but for a time I had 3-way speakers up front with all of the drivers in and on the doors. 6.5" mids low and forward in the factory speaker locations, midrange and tweeter in the forward part of the door in on-axis pods. Time alignment and EQ was provided by JBL MS-8. I had imaging that was mostly above and centered on the dash. Only with hard panned left and right instruments did the stage pull downward on the edges.

Without processing you should at least temporarily try your tweeters mounted up high and aimed at your ears. It might sound best to you.