Building up a car audio system is an engineering design process. Randomly put together parts yields random results. When you view the system holistically, everything makes a lot more sense, and the guess work goes away. Know the hardware you run. Know how it fits.
Speaking of subs alone, when you look at them scientifically, you'll realize that vastly overshadow the other hardware in the system. You can buy a plain jane 12" sub, say 12mm x-max. You put it in a box, and it goes down to 40Hz (within 3dB). It has a relatively generic sensitivity, 87dB-90dB, and you feed it 300-400w of power. This ho-hum sub will outpace EVERY speaker set on the market you can buy with the common x-over points we pick. Now we can get louder then the sub, but it requires us to have a a speaker set that has the sensitivity and thermal handling capability to compete AND (big and here) we must cross the woofer high, 125Hz minimum and more typically towards 150Hz in order to keep excursion low enough to not reach the mechanical limits. No 6.5" woofer, not even one with 12mm x-max is capable of a lower x-over point and still competing with a plain, low powered sub without reaching mechanical limits before the sub tops out. For the intended frequency response, 6.5" woofers are just too small for that kind of output.
So, all these monster sub setups, high wattage, yada yada behemoths are simply excessive in terms of correctly reproducing the entire frequency spectrum (20Hz to 20kHz) evenly. There is simply no point other then to artificially accent the low end frequencies beyond what the artist originally intended.
Speaking of subs alone, when you look at them scientifically, you'll realize that vastly overshadow the other hardware in the system. You can buy a plain jane 12" sub, say 12mm x-max. You put it in a box, and it goes down to 40Hz (within 3dB). It has a relatively generic sensitivity, 87dB-90dB, and you feed it 300-400w of power. This ho-hum sub will outpace EVERY speaker set on the market you can buy with the common x-over points we pick. Now we can get louder then the sub, but it requires us to have a a speaker set that has the sensitivity and thermal handling capability to compete AND (big and here) we must cross the woofer high, 125Hz minimum and more typically towards 150Hz in order to keep excursion low enough to not reach the mechanical limits. No 6.5" woofer, not even one with 12mm x-max is capable of a lower x-over point and still competing with a plain, low powered sub without reaching mechanical limits before the sub tops out. For the intended frequency response, 6.5" woofers are just too small for that kind of output.
So, all these monster sub setups, high wattage, yada yada behemoths are simply excessive in terms of correctly reproducing the entire frequency spectrum (20Hz to 20kHz) evenly. There is simply no point other then to artificially accent the low end frequencies beyond what the artist originally intended.
