Why do my speakers sound like sh!t?

[foreman 10+ year member]

Ok, i need a hand here. I'm running 6.5's in my doors, 5.25's and tweets in my kicks, and i have a 4 channel Soundstream ref414s amp for power. I have an incredible set of 3 way passives i bought from a friend, but they are not biampable. I want more control over my midbass, but when i run the 5.25 comps of the passives, and the 6.5's off the amp, i lose all my midbass...With the passives, the midbass is great....Oh, i'm using one set of rca's to the amp and running the parallel switch for the rca's(soundstream, remember?)

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[kappa546 10+ year member]

im not sure if i understand this correctly, but... why not use two channels for the 5 /14 and tweets (with 2 way x-over)high passed at whatever, and use the midbasses off the other two channels. thats just how i understood your problem

 

[kappa546 10+ year member]

wait nvm i still dont understand what the problem is... disregard the post

 

[Pete 10+ year member]

check the phase relationship between the 6.5 and the 5.25 when you try running the 6.5 straight off the amp... you may need to add some time correction.

Another thing you may want to consider is putting an eq in the chain before the amp and then not worry about biamping at all.

 

[helotaxi 5,000+ posts]

Don't run a passive network without all the drivers it was meant to have connected. You could damage your amp as that portion of the passive will appear to the amp to be a dead short.

That aside, did you have the amp bridged to the whole shebang before when you were using the whole passive setup? If so that is why you don't have the midbass performance that you had before, you have maybe a 1/3 of the power going to the midbasses.

If I were you, I would just run the passive network and the extra power of the bridged channels.

 

[foreman 10+ year member]

Right, i had it bridged into 2 channels...I'm feeding the 6.5's a solid 75-80 watts by themselves, but i guess that's not enough. Now i'm using a low pass filter from the amp, and the mids can't take the subbass.... Is there an electronic crossover out there that can do what i'd like it to do? Run the midbass bandpass around 40-250hz, then the mids from 250-2500, then the tweet up?