Upgrading my rear speakers *pics*

[GAP]

I'm upgrading my rear speakers to improve lowend extention. I decided to try a pair of Tangband 1138SM's. Unless you're into home diy speakers, Tangband is probably a name you've never heard. Anyway, it's a small 5 1/4" subwoofer. Its +/- 9.5mm of excursion will help compensate for it's lack of cone area. I'm not trying to make license plate rattling bass, just improve over the factory produced bass. My main concern with these speakers is that they are terribly inefficient. With the small factory enclosure, I wasn't able to port them either. Also, the rear deck enclosure has both drivers sharing the same volme! Why the hell do they have stereo speakers, sharing the same volume.

Another thing I did was put a 100uF cap on the front door speakers. Strong bass sometimes causes my inside door panels to resonate with some songs at even a medium volume. The capacitor does a decent job of attenuating some of the bass below 60hz. Although I wish I had an 80uF cap around. I would like to attenuation point to be a little higher.

Tomorrow I will probably make the adaptor rings to mate the new drivers to the deck enclosure. I'll use 1/4" MDF.

And damn it's hot outside

[Mach1Nut]

The Mach 460 system is not stereo for the lower frequencies. You have 1 amp for the front speakers (6ohm each) which are paired together in mono, running at 3 ohm's and then the same for the rear deck speakers. The convertible obviously has 2 separate enclosures but yes, the coupe enclosure is 1 common area. Are you still going to use the factory head unit and amp? If so, it will now be seeing 2ohms which will probably overheat the amp. I'm curious how this turns out for you. Good luck!

[GAP]

I considered the slightly lower impedance. Not sure what will happen. No way to tell except test the impedance curve for both drivers and see how different the resultant impedance is. For example my home line array speakers, the mids and tweets are 8 and 6ohm respectively. However the impedance curve on the mids spends all of it's time around 10ohms, and the tweets at 5ohms. We'll see for sure tomorrow :)

[GAP]

Adaptor plates made, and drivers affixed to the enclosure.

[KOZMO]

That looks good man.

[Mach1Nut]

So, how do they sound?????

[GAP]

They're quite dissappointing thus far. I'm not sure exactly where to point the blame just yet. The day after they were installed I got sick, and the weather has been hotter then I care to deal with. I believe the enclosure is resonating a lot, and possibly the rear deck as well. This makes for a big loss in output and unwanted noise.

On the upside, efficiency doesn't seem to be a problem. I guess the factory Mach speakers are just as inefficient. The slightly hotter 2ohm load also doesn't seem to be a problem so far. With the cooler weather coming tomorrow, I might do some investigating.