Tonight was a monumental evening! I started out by completing the wiring on the subwoofer amp. It was half done from last Sunday night. All I needed to do tonight to complete the wiring was to hook up the turn on lead, power, and ground to the amp. Those wires were already run, just sitting behind the amp ready to be hooked up. I'm a bit disappointed with this 60 amp breaker I have on the bass amp. It's an "absolute" brand in-line breaker. What I don't like about it is that I had to strip the end of my 4 gauge wire down to about 8 gauge in order to fit in into the breaker. This thing was advertised online that it would accept either 4 or 8 gauge wire. If anyone has suggestions on good breakers to get, let me know. I want to use something better.
After completing the sub amp wiring, I ran the speaker wire to the sub enclosure still sitting on my bench to give it a listen. It was like night and day hearing this enclosure through the proper amp. The bass hits hard and low, just like I wanted it. The debate is settled. Ported enclosure it is. After hearing the box, I couldn't wait to get it in the trunk. But first I really needed to sand down around some of the edges. I got some 60 grit stuff at Fred Meyer and went at it. This box is a really tight fit but it does go in. It also fits nicely around the edges of the amp rack panels as I had hoped. Once it has vinyl on it, it should look pretty trick. Really happy with the way this bass sounds. It got late so I only had a bit of time to play with the gains and bass boost on the amp. Right now I'm not using any bass boost at all. I have the bass set flat on the head unit and the subwoofer level set to 0 on the head unit. The gain is set to around 1 or 2 O'Clock on the amp. I used my ear and set it really conservative at this point.
One cool thing with the Kenwood x994 head unit is that you can save a few favorite setups. So I can have a setting for SQ, boomin', rock, etc. Crossover points and slope are also adjustable. I have the fronts at 60Hz high pass with a 12db slope and the sub at 80Hz with a 24db slope. Again, this is all a really quick setting which I'll be tweaking over the next few days.
I'll post a video of this system in a few days, too. There are a number of items to complete first. I want to clean up my wiring a bit behind the sub amp, fashion some fasteners to hold the panels and sub box in place, and vinyl the sub box so it blends in with the panels.
Sound wise, though, I'm really impressed with this Zed Deuce/Image Dynamics sub combo. It feels like I am barely pushing these right now and the bass is really low, clean, and hits hard. It will be fun to see what kind of numbers I get out of this thing when I pull out all the stops. More to come!