posting on the wrong account again aye?
Printable View
Funny you should say that...
I have nearly 30 years experience in the higher end audio industry.
I have a number of years expereince in the car audio industry.
I am the head judge in Queensland in Australia's MEA sound quality car audio format competition series.
I have built a number of pro level cars and hold a national championship from my own car when I was living in New Zealand.
I might know what I'm talking about...
The OP actualy stated that he was confused after your contribution.
I read it, then re-read it to make sure I understood what you were recommending. Your advice was far from helpful.
Sir, your advice was very incorrect and would have resulted in the opposite of what the OP wanted to achieve.
I'm doing something you failed to do - understand the situation more fully before making my recommendations.
I hope you're not a doctor because you'd be prescribing treatments before you know the ailment...
And because I know Morel products (and many others), I do know how to get the best out of them. The basic principles are the same in many cases anyway.
I never said I had the same speaker system. I stated I had Morel products - they do many.
As you guys can tell by the time of this post, I came home very late today and haven't had time to play with the settings. While waiting at the traffic lights today I did manage to play around with the different preset band settings and familiarize myself with tuning the bands in custom mode. I tried turning on the HPF on the headunit and it just didn't sound right even at a few different frequencies.
My mids are in the door panel (stock location)
Tweeters are on the dash corner facing diagonally
Ok, it's good that you're playing with things because it's the best way to learn by experience what works and what doesn't.
If your speakers are pretty new, you can expect the sound from them to change for the better subtly over the next few weeks as they run in. Things will free up - bass may become a little deeper and treble may settle down Ok, it's good that you're playing with things because it's the best way to learn by experience what works and what doesn't.
If your speakers are pretty new, you can expect the sound from them to change for the better subtly over the next few weeks as they run in. Things will free up - bass may become a little deeper and treble may settle down and become smoother.
Your set up is pretty typical and can work very well. There are a few things you can do that can tweek it to make it sound a bit nicer.
BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER, TURN OFF ALL EQ AND BASS/TREBLE SETTINGS, TURN OFF ALL HIGH PASS AND LOW PASS FILTERS - SET EVERYTHING BACK TO FACTORY DEFAULTS OR ZERO POINTS.
There's three areas you need to focus on to begin with. I've gone into quite a bit of detail but these are simply;
1. Ensure your mids are mounted properly
2. Work on your tweeter angling
3. Adjusting eq settings in the head unit.
So let's begin.
If you can, make sure that your mids are fitted snugly with no gaps between or around them, their door spacers (if you're using any at all) and the door. Any 'leaks' will allow the sound from behind the speaker to come through and cancel the sound from the front of the speaker. This can result in a thinner sound because the bass is being cancelled out slightly.
Fixing this issue enhances the bass and let's the speaker perform properly and give you to sound you're supposed to hear. It also helps balance the sound of the whole system relative to the sound of the tweeters.
Some people even go as far as sealing up the entire door with sound deadening sheets to get truely striking results from 6.5" drivers. I'm not saying you should be going this this extreme but consider if you can, maybe sealing up some of the smaller service holes in the doors as well as securing your drivers properly.
Now that we have that done, let's look at your tweeters.
Many systems with tweeters mounted away from the mids and up high 'can' sound a little harsh. Some people choose to put their tweeters down low in the kick panels or much lower in the doors to combat this. It works but tends to result in a sound that comes from down near your knees rather than straight ahead at or very near head height.
Let's stay with a high mount postion for now and take a look at what we can do with their angles.
Trust me on this one, if the tweeters are in surface and angle mount pods, try swiveling them to face more towards each other. I'd even try swiveling them so far that they start to fire forward and actually into the windscreen.
Try it and see what happens to the sound. Most drivers start to sound 'quieter' when you are sitting out of their direct path or their 'axis point'.
Many high end speaker systems (I'm talking about speakers costing as much as or more than $100k) use this principle to stunning effect. It may also give your sound stage more depth of field so that it's not all so 'in your face'.
When you get things sounding better and you feel that it's as good as it'll get, THEN, and only then should we be moving on to some of the things your head unit can do.
Set your amp to play normal. Switch off all high pass and low pass filters because they don't do what you've been told previously. They're for other stuff.
If you head unit has them, turn them off there too.
Go to your head unit equalizer and if you can, select a frequency around 8 or 10khz to adjust. Depending on how effect your swiveling was with the tweeters will determine how much you may want to turn down the volume on the selected frequency.
If you don't have frequency options up this high, try choosing the next highest one down. Hopefully it'll be something above 5khz. If not, you may just be better off using your standard treble adjustment instead.
If you do have a few frequency bands up high to play with, try knocking back the volume a little on two or three of them and see how you go.
This should help things quite a bit overall. And don't forget that things will settle down from new as your speakers are played more over the next few weeks.
Take your time, and have fun.
This thread has been amusing.
I think playing with the positioning of your tweeters will help with a lot of the harshness that you are experiencing, having played with these drivers before, they are good value for money, but they arent great. The tweeters especially are one of the weak points in this component set.
I have found in a few cars, that firing them across the windscreen, pointed straight at each other helps with some of the 'harshness' that they have up high.
These speakers are as good as you are going to get, on a budget. You will probably find that EQ wont help, as it fixes some things, but adds in problems, or issues of its own. You may end up just having to move them to your rear fill, and upgrade to something better, speakers and ears are funny things, if you do pick something else, take the time to listen to different speakers with the kind of music you would listen to with them, and pick the best from there.