[Mi10]

Originally Posted by Invinsible

Mi10 your simply running to many things in your head
First thing first, you already have the speakers i.e. 3 way component for front and 2 way component for rear. You also want to run the 3 way active in which case you need 3 way active xover that could be either from the HU or the amp or from a sound processor. Than you need to run your 2 way component as passive followed by the sub. All together you heading 8+1 or 2 (for sub)channel.
That's a lot. In process of getting everything right you may also want to consider make the sound too muddy with the all the speakers. There would be quite a bit of frequencies clashing in a size of an small hatchback, in your case I suppose you plan to use it in the i10 if am not wrong. With careful planning and right tuning one could avoid this. But if not done correctly it could have adverse effect on your sound stage.

Let's talk about the front stage. This would be your 3 way component in which you plan to run the midbass active and the midrange and tweeter through the passive xover. Which means you need 2 ch. for the midbass and 2 ch. to power the mids and tweeter through passive. Provided you do the modification to the passive xover as mentioned by Navin.
This also means that you would need to have TA for both the Active midbass and the passive system.
In short you would need 4 channel amp here.

Going to rear stage. This should be fine if you using it as filler balancing it with the front stage. In which case it is preferred to have this bandlimited which would be from 200hz to 3.15khz/4khz. Having too much of high freq. would pull the stage to the rear even if the gains are set at low level.
This means you need a 2 channel amp with either active xover for bandlimiting or choosing an amp that would give this possibility.
I would like to add something here, if using the rear setup without time delay could make one feel that all the sound is coming from front center but with more presence on the left side behind the driver. Having the rear set with gain set in a way where it would add little more presence is fine but without TA it would just not be that useful.
Am using the Clarion DXZ785 with front stage as 2 way passive and rear coax along with the sub with TA on all of them. I have bandlimited the rear coax with running the setup under "3 way active" and added TA to it. Have tried both with TA and without TA and can tell you, one can never enjoy the rear setup without adding TA to it. My rear acts just as fillers and after using Time alignment it adds to the center stage at the same time giving a feeling of sitting and listening to music in larger environment.
Which boils down to having 2 channel amp for rear, bandlimited and having a TA.

This leaves us with SUB section.
There is not much to do here accept for the placement of the sub and having TA on it would not make any sense.
HOW? Well in car the Sub is at the furthest listening point. Lets say you tune the system considering the driving position. In this case lets say sub is at 140cm, FR midbass is at 90cm, FR mid & tweet is at 85, FL midbass is at 130cm, FL mid & tweet is at 125cm, RL components is at 100cm and RR component is 135cm. In a given situation one would need to add time delay is such a way where by adding the difference all the speakers fall to 140cm similar to distance of the sub.
Which means one would add time delay of 50cm for the FR midbass, 55cm to FR mid & tweet, 10cm to FL midbass, 15cm to FL mid & tweet and same way to the rear setup.
That you are adding time delay to all the speakers leaving the sub so that you could have all the sound travelling in equal distance as per the driver's seat.

All this comes down to that you would need 4 active xover. where under "HIGH" setting you could use HPF of lets say around 500hz at 18db or 24db slope which means your front midrange and tweeter will be getting freq. above 500hz further getting separated by the passive xover.

Rear components can be set to "MID" setting where its getting bandlimited from 160/200hz to 3.15/4khz. or you could cross it higher as per your liking.

Front Midbass will be running active under "MIDBASS" setting as per your desire may be from HPF 60/80/100hz to 500hz LPF.

and in the end the Sub running under "SUB" setting LP under 100hz as per you desire.

In a given situation as this you need 8channel of amplification, 4 way active xoer or with TA atleast on 6channel.
The HU that you have mentioned comes with 3 way active xover. In which case you could you use MID & tweeter through passive under "high" setting, Midbass under "Mid" setting, the sub under "Sub" setting. That leaves with the rear components, which can used be if the sub amplifier is receiving signal from the HU where the HPF is at "through" and LPF is at 4khz, at which you could use LPF on the sub amplifier anything below 100hz, you could take the line output from the sub amp that is receiving the signal upto 4khz and feed it to the rear component's amplifier. since you would need to band-limit the rear components you could use HPF on it from 200hz. This way you could get band-limited output to the rear setup but you won't be able to have any TA on it.

Best I suggest is you choose a head unit that has 4 way Active xover capabilities, get Decent Two 4 channel amplifer in which case you get the desired 8 channel requirement, where you choose CH 1 & 2 for the mid&tweeter, Ch3 & CH4 for rear components and from the 2nd amplifier you choose Ch1 & Ch2 for the midbass and Ch3&Ch4 could be bridged to power the sub.
In your stated diagram you are using y connector to split signal from two channel to get 4 channel out of it, this cannot be further split by another Y cable as shown in your diagram.

The Amp I would suggest could be from Alpine MRP-F600, MBquart DSC 4125, SoundStream Reference series, Infinity amps.
MBquart DSC4125 is quite a capable amp does 125RMS x 4 and has more like a dual mono design where under bridged output gives out 500RMSx1 channel.

ANOTHER OPTION: You could also do with Clarion DXZ785 + RF3sixty.2 + Two 4 channel amps.
You could take front output from clarion feed it to RF3sixty.2 which can do 3 way active along with TA. Than use the rear output from Clarion on your rear components, this again give you the flexibility of having TA on rear, and than sub can run under SUB output.

Both these setup could push you budget by atleast 200-300$ or more depending on the choice of amplifiers you pick.

This sounds as an interesting proposition but budget will exceed; But the best part is, teh RF3 sixty.2's crossovers are fully variable between 5HZ -10KHZ . Any cheaper option in Sound processors

[Mi10]

Originally Posted by Mi10

This sounds as an interesting proposition but budget will exceed; But the best part is, teh RF3 sixty.2's crossovers are fully variable between 5HZ -10KHZ . Any cheaper option in Sound processors

Also, if i am to use this sound processor, is it necessary that i change my current HU (pio 5050UB) too?. Is'nt it like sound processors enhance SQ for OEM and low/medium end HU's ?

[Invinsible]

Originally Posted by Mi10

Also, if i am to use this sound processor, is it necessary that i change my current HU (pio 5050UB) too?. Is'nt it like sound processors enhance SQ for OEM and low/medium end HU's ?

Am not too sure whether Pioneer HU that you comes with 3 set of preouts and TA. As I mentioned you would need a TA for rear stage too. Plus sound processor like 3sixty2 can give you the option of 3 way active for your front stage and with new HU like Clarion dXz785 you can also manage to have TA for your rear setup.
3sixty can not only active with TA but it also comes with Graphic Equaliser which can be used to alter the freq. if there is any peak or dip in particular freq. As per the placement of speaker and cabin gain, to give out much more cleaner sound. Since your rear comps are going to act as filler, this EQ feature will be more imp for you front stage than thE rear and the sub.
You can also look at Audison bit one, Alpine h701, audiocontrol dqx/dqxe.
Search on ebay.com or other sites you should get this between 300-400$ plus 200$ +/- for the clarion, and the balance can be put in to get the amp and the wiring.
You would also need damping in which case you could get a good deal with online sellers on dyn.extreme bulk pack.

[Mi10]

Originally Posted by Invinsible

Am not too sure whether Pioneer HU that you comes with 3 set of preouts and TA. As I mentioned you would need a TA for rear stage too. Plus sound processor like 3sixty2 can give you the option of 3 way active for your front stage and with new HU like Clarion dXz785 you can also manage to have TA for your rear setup.
3sixty can not only active with TA but it also comes with Graphic Equaliser which can be used to alter the freq. if there is any peak or dip in particular freq. As per the placement of speaker and cabin gain, to give out much more cleaner sound. Since your rear comps are going to act as filler, this EQ feature will be more imp for you front stage than thE rear and the sub.
You can also look at Audison bit one, Alpine h701, audiocontrol dqx/dqxe.
Search on ebay.com or other sites you should get this between 300-400$ plus 200$ +/- for the clarion, and the balance can be put in to get the amp and the wiring.
You would also need damping in which case you could get a good deal with online sellers on dyn.extreme bulk pack.

My HU has a 3 set preouts, but doesn't have TA. I think getting DXZ785USB makes sense Also, the clarion and the RF3sixty will be a better option(read cheaper) than going in for Eclipse or X991 with other sound processors.

NOw just clear my one big question:
Considering a get a DXZ785 and the RF 3sixty, can i have the freedom of choosing any amp irrespetive of their XO frequencies (simply b'cos, i ll be driving the XO frequencies from the RF's processing unit)

Originally Posted by Mi10

My HU has a 3 set preouts, but doesn't have TA. I think getting DXZ785USB makes sense Also, the clarion and the RF3sixty will be a better option(read cheaper) than going in for Eclipse or X991 with other sound processors.

NOw just clear my one big question:
Considering a get a DXZ785 and the RF 3sixty, can i have the freedom of choosing any amp irrespetive of their XO frequencies (simply b'cos, i ll be driving the XO frequencies from the RF's processing unit)

yes, if you get the rockford 360.2 and use it on the front input as invinsible suggests then you will just use the 360.2 for all the crossover duties for the front stage. all you need is the amplification regardless of whatever features the amp possesses. Between the clarion headunit and 360.2 you will have all the necessary crossover functionality for the entire system in active mode to the extent of not even needing to do those modifications to the passive crossover as discussed before. All you need to do is to ensure that you have three channels of amplification for your front stage and the two for your rear coaxials/components and as many as you need for the sub

you will even prevent yourself from needing your favorite bit of equipment ie Y-splitters

[Invinsible]

There may be no need to use the amp xover since you may be using the active xover. But you would an amp for the rear speakers that could band-limit which means you need an amp with bandpass feature. Or you could run the set up in 3 way active mode from HU where the output from highs could be feed to 3sixty2 and under 'mid' setting you can make use of the xover on the HU and feed to rear speakers, same way sub can run under sub setting.

[Mi10]

Originally Posted by naughty001

yes, if you get the rockford 360.2 and use it on the front input as invinsible suggests then you will just use the 360.2 for all the crossover duties for the front stage. all you need is the amplification regardless of whatever features the amp possesses. Between the clarion headunit and 360.2 you will have all the necessary crossover functionality for the entire system in active mode to the extent of not even needing to do those modifications to the passive crossover as discussed before. All you need to do is to ensure that you have three channels of amplification for your front stage and the two for your rear coaxials/components and as many as you need for the sub

you will even prevent yourself from needing your favorite bit of equipment ie Y-splitters

Thanks a lot Gurus, now i feel bit clear as what to do and how to proceed (or i think so now, beware - you may be facing another list of stupid questions )

..and ya, too bad i couldnt use my fav equipment,I hope i find some use for them when ICE'ing my Swift(Take some time off guys, that wont happen for now)

[navin]

Originally Posted by Mi10

I am reluctant with the Eclipse as it has 8V preout,

dont worry about that.

Originally Posted by Invinsible

3 way component for front and 2 way component for rear.
All together you heading 8+1 or 2 (for sub)channel.

Let's talk about the front stage. This would be your 3 way component in which you plan to run the midbass active and the midrange and tweeter through the passive xover.

Going to rear stage. This should be fine if you using it as filler balancing it with the front stage. In which case it is preferred to have this bandlimited which would be from 200hz to 3.15khz/4khz.

Rear components can be set to "MID" setting where its getting bandlimited from 160/200hz to 3.15/4khz. or you could cross it higher as per your liking..

Originally Posted by Invinsible

Also it's better to have time delay function on the drivers.

Originally Posted by Mi10

Any cheaper option in Sound processors

Originally Posted by Mi10

My HU has a 3 set preouts, but doesn't have TA.

Mi10 just so there is not corss connection I wont repeat what Invisible has said. I find that limiting my rear to 125-5K works nicely.

[Invinsible]

Originally Posted by navin

Mi10 just so there is not corss connection I wont repeat what Invisible has said. I find that limiting my rear to 125-5K works nicely.

Navinji I have tried these points on my Morel Coax along TA and right amount of gain. I found that going lower on midbass at rear disrupts the front midbass a bit once the midbass is applied also crossing it higher can pull the stage at rear. Since idea is to add more ambience to the front best would to have the rear HP at 200hz at 18 or 24db slope and LP at 3.15khz or 4khz at 12db slope. This works best with my setup also having them set out of phase is useful.

Mi10@ anyways all this can be tried out once you have all the gear in hand.
By the way, what sub are planning. One more thing to note here would be if you could figure what is the rms rating of every individual driver according to which you could decide the amps and sub setup. Creating a right between the drivers is equally imp. This could be determined to some extent knowing the basic as to what their ratings are, after which the gains can be set as per your taste.

[Mi10]

Not yet deicided on sub and its Amp.
These are the ratings of the 3-way compos (Hertz ESK 163L)

Woofer:

Power Handling - continuous 70 Watt
Frequency Hz 50-8k

Midrange

Power Handling - continuous 75 Watt

FrequencyHz 400 - 14,5k

Tweeter:

Power Handling - continuous 100W@3,5kHz
Frequency Hz 2k - 23k

My ideal plan here is to give 75W RMS each per channel for the Midrange and Tweeter. (For this i can use my Blaupunkt GTA-480 - 75W RMS x 4)
and give out 100W RMS per channel to the Woofer (For this i may need a new 4Channel - 2 Ch of this would go to my rear setup)
Then i ll have to decide on a Sub and preferbly a mono

[navin]

Mi10. The specs you have quoted dont tell the full story. I would suspect that using XO poits of 600Hz and 4kHz will work best with that combo.

[Mi10]

Originally Posted by navin

Mi10. The specs you have quoted dont tell the full story. I would suspect that using XO poits of 600Hz and 4kHz will work best with that combo.

So this is what is called "one Octave above the starting frequency"?

What about the power rating these drivers? Common sense suggests that woofers need more power than the tweeters; But then Common sense is not science is'nt it?

Apart from the frequency, please let me know the ideal power(RMS) to run each driver. This will determine the Amp selcetion

Originally Posted by Mi10

So this is what is called "one Octave above the starting frequency"?

What about the power rating these drivers? Common sense suggests that woofers need more power than the tweeters; But then Common sense is not science is'nt it?

Apart from the frequency, please let me know the ideal power(RMS) to run each driver. This will determine the Amp selcetion

no, what he suggested there is band limiting.

an octave is a doubling or halving of a frequency. to further understand this lets take a frequency for example 100hz, an octave above 100hz would be 200hz and an octave below would be 50hz

normally you dont refer to a starting frequency. every physical thing that exists has a resonant frequency ie a frequency at which it begins to vibrate naturally and even a speaker driver will begin to vibrate at a certain frequency. at that frequency it will create peaks in the frequency response hence you dont really want the speaker to be playing this frequency which is why we limit those frequencies with a crossover and try to keep the frequency response curve of the speaker as close to flat (linear) as possible. If you look at the T/S parameters of a speaker driver you will get the Fs of a speaker driver, this is the resonant frequency of the speaker driver in free air ie when it isnt in an enclosure but for example in a woofer the resonant frequency will change as you place the driver in an enclosure .... if you have a tweeter for example that has an Fs of 900hz you should try to limit the frequencies it plays by crossing it over at a MINIMUM of one octave above its Fs so for the tweeter we have as an example you could use a crossover point of 1800HZ. If you used a second order filter (12db/oct) then this means that the speaker wont just stop playing the frequencies blow that crossover point but it will be 12db of SPL lower at the frequency which is one octave below the example frequency so it allows for these peaks to become less audible

the band limiting for the rear is for a different reason. i could point you to a thread over at DIYMA which explains "rear fill" but instead i will just quote a summary i made over at another forum where i am a member. Note most of this information is basically gleaned from many sources over a period of time, but most of it was from werewolf over at DIYMA

how many people really understand the concept of centre channels and what proper rear fill is in terms of sound quality. Many of us just install some speakers in the back - the bassheads do it to temper the bass and add some high frequency sound - and the SQ addict will just add some speakers as an afterthought that can be faded out if no-one is sitting at the back but when someone is there then you fade these cheap speakers in so that they also get some sound and this is usually powered by the headunit's built in amplifier

but there is a purpose behind getting rear fill in SQ terms - ambient sounds are basically any sounds that actually are not part of the fundamental sounds created by the artists eg echoes and reflections around the venue which can help you pinpoint the location of the artists as well determine the size of the venue. The other effect of properly processed ambient sound is that the sound seems more three dimensional and it seems more like as if you are listening to something real which you can reach out and touch rather than making it seem like a painted two dimensional wall of sound in front of you

so in order for us to understand most of the concepts i want to discuss here we need to examine the Haas effect (sometimes known as the precedence effect) - in laymans terms in a nutshell the precedence effect states that (taken from wikipedia)

"When two identical sounds (i.e., identical sound waves of the same perceived intensity) originate from two sources at different distances from the listener, the sound created at the closest location is heard (arrives) first. To the listener, this creates the impression that the sound comes from that location alone due to a phenomenon that might be described as "involuntary sensory inhibition" in that one's perception of later arrivals is suppressed."


when the sound that is further away arrives at a delay of more than 40 milliseconds it is heard as an echo. Many echoes will form a reverberation which is a continuous sequence of echos which will begin to fade away if they are absorbed or will actually bounce back (reflect) from an obstruction

so the idea is that when you listen to live music in a particular venue you will get the direct sound in front of you and then you will also get back reflected sound which should aid you in perceiving the size of the venue - more-or-less what we are saying is that more echoes and reverberations means that the venue is larger - and definitely when you are in a large auditorium or a large church or cathedral (enclosed spaces) you do get loads of echoes if any sound is made

i must note here that for the purposes of direct sound the idea is that any reflections that occur very close to the speaker will depend upon the intensity of the reflection since the other effect that the Haas effect tells you is that your brain will ignore the sound thats lower in intensity and perceive only the loudest sound as the actual sound whilst it will ignore the reflected sound (only if that reflected sound is softer and when the reflected sound is substantially lower than 40ms apart) - so if the reflection comes from a very hard non absorbent surface like glass or the plastic of the dash it could create peaks in those reflected frequencies because the reflected sound reinforces the direct sound at those frequencies kind of like two speakers playing at those frequencies and one playing at all the others - this is why we can hear incorrectly installed speakers as harsh or tinny or bright or sometimes in the case of lower frequencies bloated or fat

but anyways we are more concerned about rear fill and centre channels and how these can come about - so lets look at the concept of rear fill first. You can achieve these rear fill effects using processing because for that sound to be ambient it needs a few conditions to be fulfilled

1) Attenuation

any ambient sound cannot be louder (higher in intensity or amplitude) than the direct sound because what we are saying in effect is that the ambient sound is a reflection of the direct sound from when it hits the obstruction eg the wall at the back of the auditorium

2) Delay

the sound will be delayed because it will travel in the air until it hits the obstruction and is reflected back to the point where you are sitting by which time you have already heard and processed the direct sound and are already busy perceiving newer direct sounds - so this delayed echo is just about more or less in the background

3) band limited

not every frequency will get echoed back - so you need to limit the frequencies you hear from the rear speaker to what you would reasonably expect to be echoed back to you - i prefer to use from around 300hz up to around 4000hz

now if all these conditions are met then we also realize that rear fill would need to be a difference signal because those midrange frequencies is smack bang where mostly vocals are present - and if too much vocal occurs in the rear fill it will tend to draw that perceived direct sound soundstage toward the rear - so you need to process the signals and anything that is common or identical in both left and right stereo channels will actually be thrown out (via signal processing) and only signals that are dedicated to each individual channel will be played back so that it seems like a realistic echo - this processing creates what we call a difference L-R (left minus right) signal

for the centre channel you want no delay nor do you need any attenuation or band limitation but you do need a difference signal - you use a mono speaker that is a difference signal of L+R (left plus right) which means the processor will accept only signals that are common to both channels and leave out the signals that are dedicated to the individual channels

with rear fill the band limiting is easily done with the aid of a crossover but you need further processing to be able to time delay the signals as well as attenuate SPL levels of the speaker - for the centre channel you only need the ability to steer the common signals to the centre speaker with not much further processing possibly though some form of attenuation can be useful here because you dont want the centre channel to dominate your front stage because it will draw attention away from the ends of the soundstage and narrow your width

so the concept of centre channel processing and rear fill is not as mysterious as you can imagine - its pretty simple once you understand the concepts but if you do it incorrectly it can cause a huge mess - rear fill is not simply just putting in speakers at the rear and stating "hey ive got ambient rear fill so i deserve a few points in a competiton" - its hard work to set it up to perfection and it will cost loads of money to have the processing to be able to correctly do it and it will sound brilliant if done correctly mainly because a car is a nearfield situation but you can create the illusion that its a bigger space than it actually is

the other argument is whether it is technically necessary and to answer this it depends - if you only listen to music on the move with your car system then it is a huge waste of time, money and effort ...... but if you are building a showstopping competition vehicle then it will be money, time and effort well spent to create an outstanding sounding system that can potentially sound better than most rivalling home setups when it comes to ambient sound (note at this point in terms of the direct sound a vehicle can never match the scale or presence of a home system but the additional processing possible due to the nearfield nature of a mobile setup can surpass anything a home system is capable off including good surround systems because those use different steering mechanisms/algorithms to the processing in a car setup) ..... so whether any of this is of use to you only you can decide - for me though i really feel that if your system is mainly for use while you are driving then i wouldnt bother cos you will be too busy concentrating on driving instead of spending time analyzing your music or your system

[Mi10]

Excellent readup, my knowldege in sounds and frequencies is getting better day by day

[Mi10]

So here goes you fs for the 3-way compos

Woofer:
fs(HZ) - 62

Midrange:
fs(HZ) - 163,6

Tweeter:
fs(HZ) - 1250

I can interpret for the woofer and tweeter. Say its better to XO them above 62 and 1250 HZ respectively

Why is the midrange frequency 163,6 - Does that imply the safe bandpass
range is between 163HZ - 6KHZ ?(i am certainly wrong here, still..guessing)