[Autophile]

In a 3-Way system the advantage is that you have a dedicated driver for midrange. And midrange is very crucial part of music reproduction. Car audio is a challenging environment for sound reproduction so you have to be very careful about choosing the components and mounting location of drivers which differs from car to car, not forgetting about difficult to deal with car acoustics.

I prefer 3-Ways over 2-Ways. I would like the sound to be coherent in upper midrange to tweeter with soundstage up in the dash level with transparency and speed. Mounting the tweeter and midrange driver closer together helps in achieving the seamless and coherent sound. This kind of sound is possible only in expensive 2-Ways with bigger tweeter having low Fs, but then bigger tweeters can have downside of not playing higher frequencies well, like bigger midbass drivers don’t have much to offer in upper midrange. In case of smaller tweeter the sound appears to be detached from midrange.

I don’t emphasis on using the drivers with wider dispersion. But the wider dispersion of driver helps in dealing cons of car audio environment. Sometimes it is not possible to mount the driver where we would ideally want to, and the location which is available is generally off-axis eg. Lower portion of door panel near midbass, kick panel (not so famous in India). In these mounting location you have to aim the driver with less dispersion towards the listening position (which can have issues of beaming) where as you don’t have to do much with wide dispersion drivers. As the midrange driver when mounted in door panel and kick panel there is not much of high reflective surface like glass around it. Other place to install midrange and tweeter is in A-pillars where also you can aim the drivers towards listening area and avoid the reflections off the windscreen glass.

Dash mounting has pros and cons, the pros are more alluring than cons so one has to be careful of driver aiming and mounting if done properly the results can be great. Windscreen glass reflection differs from car to car as each car has different dash design, height and windscreen angle.

B&T, I was not aware of Canton midrange with back can. But looking at it seems like it is impossible to mount Canton’s 5” midrange with back can in the door panel because of the mounting depth of the back can. It is only possible to install in some cars that too in the lower portion of door panel where it will not touch the window glass in which case it is low and closer to midbass and idea of achieving midrange height/presence in the soundstange goes for a six and there is no other location where one can accomodate the depth of midrange backcan.

In car audio phase and time plays very important role. Easiest way is to leave it on manufacturer and use passive crossovers.

When you go active it gives you lot of flexibility with crossovers, level, delay, equalizer with which you can virtually tailor the sound of each car as per the acoustics.

Since last 10 years I have been listening to Tannoy loudspeaker with Dual Concentric driver. Dual Concentric is a great driver; it is phase coherent point source driver with first order slopes. The only better thing I can think beyond it is a full range driver. It is good to have shallower slopes on good quality drivers nothing come close to the shallow slope crossovers but in car it is totally different from home.

The phase changes with the change in crossover points and slope. Mounting locations also affect the phase. The 0 / 180 Deg standard phase flip available does not always help. You need a frequency dependent phase shifter to align the phase or a variable phase the way it is available now in home audio subwoofers. But sadly they are not available in car audio electronics. Precision Power used to have it but now they have discontinued. The frequency dependent phase shifter is available as an optional module (PC36) in Audison VRx range amplifiers but then we are talking high end.

So in order to achieve the phase correct system you might have to use/experiment steeper slopes which will also reduce the overlap of the drivers as you are in the near field listening area. It is all placement dependent. I have seen cars winning SQ competition using expensive drivers and using steeper slopes, 3rd – 4th order in tweeters, midrange, midbass and 6th – 8th order in the subs. As no car audio electronics offer that much of flexibility (until recent Pioneeer / Carrozzeria Reference) they use professional processors like dBX, Behringer etc.

As far as the choice of midrange driver type is concerned among dome, cone, horn, ribbon it is ones own choice and sound preference along with budget.