integra tweeter position

[Boost Cruisin]

i have a 90 integra and just bought a new set of splits and i was wondering where is the best position for the tweeter to go

thanks

[CJL]

Bottom of windscreen in the corner or the door i guess :P

[Javed]

Im fiberglassin my kick panels up to house the tweeters, meant to be the best spot for imaging if aimed right :)

[wynode]

Kick panels?

Ear level or thereabouts for me thanks.

[Boost Cruisin]

also where should i put the crossovers?

[wynode]

Where ever you want :)

I put mine under the carpet in the corner (hard to explain) but basically to the left/right of where your feet are (so you don't kick them).

[micka]

to find the best spot for tweeters get some blue tac and stick them all over the place and have a listen. stick them wherever they sound best to you.

for crossovers often put under dash, but you can put them in the back of the car (if your external amps, if any, are there), or you could liquid nail them to the inside of the door trim (this is good if you're lazy and want to put the woofers and tweeters in the door, without having to run 4 wires into the door).

[wynode]

to find the best spot for tweeters get some blue tac and stick them all over the place and have a listen. stick them wherever they sound best to you.


Couldn't agree more.

[CJL]

U moz well stick them in the boot if ur gonna put them where the kick panels are :P

[Fhrx]

Read this article I wrote for INCAR magazine:

Okay, lets all think about staging for a second. You don’t go to a concert and sit with your back towards the band right? And admit it – we’d all like to be right in front and center of the band on stage true? And you’d also like to be at the right height to – like you were on the actual stage right in front of them listening. This is the imaginary image we try and capture inside cars today when we position tweeters in vehicles.

And getting this is not just a simple matter of slapping them in just anywhere either.

The problem with mounting tweeters up high (e.g. on the sail area on the door) is this:

Think about the position of your ears in relation to the tweeters. One speaker is belting the high pitch tunes out about two feet from your right ear where as the left tweeter is triple that distance away. The stage has no choice but to be right out the right window. Sheer laws of physics govern this fact.

Now if you place the tweeters down in the kick panels then the right speaker distance is about three feet and the left speaker is about three and a half. The problem is not eradicated but it becomes a lot less noticeable as the distance separation is reduced.

Now obviously the tweeters cannot be placed anywhere where they fire straight into ones feet so you have to be very careful about their placement on both sides and the more often than not this results in them being mounted very high in the kick panel, quite often out of sight like mine are because they’re so far up under the dash.

The next question people ask is this; isn’t the stage going to be low?

The answer is not so much to do with the tweeter location but the power level they both receive. If you have sufficient power going to each tweeter from a high quality amplifier then your tweeters will not only fill out the stage ‘height’ but the entire front cabin of the car. The stage can sometimes be at around chest height and this can also be sorted by using ambient tweeters if one wants it higher.

And someone is bound to mention time alignment – they always do.

The biggest problem with time alignment is this; the better you make your side sound (and you can get it absolutely perfect), the more your passenger suffers. Think about it – it time delays the right side speaker so both signal paths reach your ears at the same time. The problem is that the passenger has the reverse problem to you so as you side gets closer to being the same side to side, theirs get worse and worse.

So how does one get the stage right in real world terms?

At the end of the day you just have to play around a bit (and sometimes it can take up to four hours or so) to get the tweeter placement just right to achieve a nice stage ‘width’ , ‘height’ and ‘depth’.

Get yourself a nice big blob of blue-tac. Stick the tweeter onto a panel somewhere and grab a song with powerful female vocals (a strong female voice is generally considered best for stage testing). Close your eyes and imagine you’re at the concert. Now listen to where she is coming from. Is she singing right in front of you? Is she off to the left a tad or right? Simple move the tweeter a few inches in a direction and have another listen. How is the image? Can you hear where all the band members are exactly? How is the depth? Does the drummer sound like he is behind the other musicians?

Keep doing this until you get the image dead center or just off to the left a little bit but remember to take a rest every fifteen minutes to let your ears normalize. If you attempt staging for hours your ears tend to ‘hallucinate’ and give false readings.

So there you go, I hope all that made sense.

[wynode]

Good info Marty.

When I was experimenting I actually found I got a really good soundstage by positioning the tweeters on the dash facing upwards. You know where the little air vents are on the dash that direct air to the windows? Yup, I put them in there facing upwards towards the windscreen.

The staging was perfect IMO, however I couldn't make a neat enough cover for the tweeters so I mounted on the doors below the little A piece.