Sub Position

[Qcksilver]

I have 2 10" subs in a normal or averge sized sub box in my trunk. i currently have them facing to the rear as most people i've seen. a local stereo shop guy was telling me he doesn't understand why people set them up this way. he says if your going for sound quality you want to spin the box around and point them in toward the interior of the car not away from it. he claims this will also cut down on trunk rattle. so anyway my question to you guys & gals is this. can anyone confirm this or is this just one guys opinion? i havn't tried it the other way but i am wondering if he is correct. after all he does do this for a living. please let me know if this is correct or not.

[wrightie]

This guy obviuosly should not work in a stereo shop. Anyone who tells ya that it sounds better the other way is flat out wrong. when the box is facing in to the car the sound waves from the back of the box cancel out some from the front , hence not the best sound. trust me on this one I went through this one a few months ago.

Wrightie

[mikegett]

Originally posted by wrightie@Feb 12 2005, 02:28 PM
This guy obviuosly should not work in a stereo shop. Anyone who tells ya that it sounds better the other way is flat out wrong. when the box is facing in to the car the sound waves from the back of the box cancel out some from the front , hence not the best sound. trust me on this one I went through this one a few months ago.

Wrightie
This is not always the case Wrightie. I will agree that the installer should not state one way as being better than another. After all, the only measure of your system is how you think of it. As for positioning, there are good points and bad about both. In most cases people will position the sub to fire at the rear. I prefer to avoid this due to enhanced rattling and more boomy sound to the music. If you have ever had a home system and placed the sub close to a wall you will find the same result. And so have any neighbors that may live over you. If you turn the sub toward the front of the car it seems to have less distortion. If you are using tens then I am going to imagine that you like tighter bass. This might be a option for you. What wrightie was refering to was phaze cancellation in a sound stage. It is possible for two speakers to cancell out and form a dead zone in your car. This tends to be more of a problem at lower frequencies (the wave lengths are wider and have a better chance of merging). As you add more speakers this will become more of a problem. I have had two occassions that this became a problem. The first was in our church. I had helped to setup a soundstage. We had a relatively small room that housed about fifty people. When the church quire hit lower notes the sound went dead in the center of the room. I had a choice to move all eight of the speakers, adjust the timing, or change the phaze of the speakers. Time adjustment is the best method if your hardware allows it. By putting a few miliseconds of delay on two speakers it fixed the problem entirely. My car (a Taurus) was a different story. I did not have time alignment and the front speakers were cancelling out some of my lower frequencies. Since the speakers were in the doors and 6.5's it would be very hard to move them. My only other choice was to change the phaze. By reversing the positive and negative of one speaker it placed it out of phaze from the other. This gave me back the lower frequencies that I lost, but altering phaze can cause minor distortions in your sound. These distortions are seldomly heard in subs but can be noticable in midrange speakers. In most cases I would try to avoid this if possible. In most cases a sub will not have a problem with front stage speakers. If you do encounter this place a crossover point between subs and speakers. There is no reason for the front speakers to reproduce frequencies that the sub is doing and vise versa.

[mikegett]

One more thing I forgot to mention. Since Qcksilver has two subs in the same enclosure there will be less chance of phaze cancellation than with Wrightie's seperate enclosures. Wrightie will have two enclosures facing toward each other in the trunk. This is a perfect example of when time alignment may be needed. At the very least try to place a longer speaker wire to one sub.

[Qcksilver]

Wow, thanks for the info. new stuff to me for sure! wicked cool how you guys know this stuff. so basically what your saying is that with my 10's i should leave them the way they are now, facing the rear. i've tried it the other way and to be honest i don't know that i hear a difference. maybe it's just from flying airplanes for so long my hearing is slowly going, that's what the wife says anyway. so if i'm understanding you correctly i should leave them facing aft. plus i think it looks better when i open the trunk also. let me know if you have any other words of wisdom for me. thanks again.

[mikegett]

What sounds best to you can never wrong.