My stereo never sounds quite perfect to me. It may be my speakers but i feel like it's also because we have plastic door panels and the sound is just bouncing around and reverberating all over!

i currently have Hertz HSK165.4s in the front powered by a Precision Power PCX480 amp. At first i thought it was the sub tuning but even if i shut it off there are still peaks in the lower midbass area i can't seem to get rid of. Playing around with the EQ kind of gets rid of it, but then the sound isn't balanced anymore. I got my doors dynamatted at a shop and from what i saw it wasn't fully done. Should i do more or will the car just always sound a little hollow unless i dynamat the whole car?

 

Are your interior door panels vibrating with the speakers? If so, find a way to damp them and/or mount your speakers more solidly, and you should get better sq. All that energy spent vibrating your door panels should be sound instead.

Or if you feel there are lots of extraneous sound waves echoing inside the doors, you can seal off your speakers from the rest of the door with something like the foam baffles XTC sells.

 

yeah i have both happening

i heard about some type of baffles, is it the one where you mount directly behind the speakers on the door skin or the one that completely seals off the speaker? i heard the one that seals it off reduces your amount of midbass or something...

 

Have you thought of using a deadening pad behind the speaker itself against the door skin. Something like Amazon.com: Dynamat 11800 Dynaxorb Speaker Kit(TM) - Two 6 x 6 x 1/4 Pieces with Adhesive (1… . I have not experienced what you are talking about with my components up front, but I am using JBL GTI components so its a very different speaker.

If the panel itself is vibrating, then maybe a few pieces of dynamat strategically placed on the door panel itself could help also.

 

I was talking about the latter originally, but either would help. One small issue with a behind-the-speaker absorption pad, it would be rendered mostly useless any time your windows are down.

And yeah, with anything that encloses a speaker like the XTC ones, there's gonna be a change in speaker dynamics. For the majority of applications, I wouldn't hesitate to use them. For mid-bass & mid-range drivers, I'd much rather have an enclosure that's too small than one that's too big (like your entire door). And you can always experiment by making vents in the foam to give it more breathing room.

If you're really curious, a program like winISD would be the way to figure out what sort of impact on the frequency curve an enclosure would have. Assuming you can find thiele/small parameters for your mid-range drivers, of course - most companies don't bother publishing them (if they even know what they are).

 

oh goodness... wanna know something dumb? It was the Subwoofer cutoff, way too high. I googled it and came to a tutorial... hahaha

My HERTZ midbass speakers can handle tons of bass so i think it's cut off at 40hz right now, and i set the subwoofer to overlap just a teeny bit. EARLIER i had tons of overlap so everything was canceling out or just plain crashing together. I kinda guessed it was the settings too because when i turned the subs completely off, it sounded much better.

I'm sorry for being a bother! This is my first car and my first car stereo so i'm still working on how it should all sound. At home i prefer having no subwoofer at all but in a car the 6.5'' just isn't enough bass, especially with our loud interiors!