[mikegett]

bigd6983 made a valid point. I suggest that you try to find someone that has kicks to see if they are for you. There are some pros and cons to using them. As stated the stock locations can be tweaked to sound just as good as the imaging in the kick panels. The biggest benefit of the kicks is that the speakers can be positioned at the most equal distances. The bad thing is that if not done properly they can have even worse imaging. If the woofer and tweater are directed too close to the drivers leggs then the highs will be muffled. Another negative is that not all speakers are made for a kick panel. Most pre made panels are open on the back and will result in less bass than in the door. If you are looking to keep the bass then this is not the route to go. A custom panel can be tailored to the cubic air needed for your speaker and keep the bass along with the mids. I had some custom made kick panels in my taurus (don't laugh) and hated it. My eclipse speakers were too efficient for a small enclosure. Meaning that when sealed the bass over whelmed the mids. My only option was to remove the back and loose almost all bass. This was my fault for buying the speaker and attempting to make it fit the application. I suggest you decide if you want kicks first. If bass is a must then cheaper less efficient speakers will due in a premade kick panel. If you want bass then talk to the person fabing the enclosure and find out how much volume of air will be used. Then find a speaker that fits that use. If you are unhappy about the positioning of your factory speakers then here are some tips to look out for. Highs. As allways, it is a matter of taste on what sounds good. Just remember that the higher the frequency the smaller wave it produces. This means that a tweater is highly dependant on direction for you to hear it as opposed to low bass that can be placed in various locations and still be heard. You will find out that aftermarket tweaters will not sound as good pointed directly at you in the stock locations. This is due to the efficiency of the aftermarket speakers. They can produce a larger spread of frequencies and achieve much higher volumes. For this reason they will sound too harsh at the same distance as a factory. One of the more common ways to place the new tweaters are on a dash directed onto the window. when done right this can create a larger field of listening (other wise known as staging) and give a very pleasant warmth to the speaker. The woofer is the hardest please due to its vesatility. Its primary function is to produce mids but we all want bass as well. It becomes very hard for a speaker of four or five inches to be that diverse. So, you must decide if it is mids or lows that you want more of. If it is mids then try not to concentrate on reducing too much air volume. This will increase the lows and decrease the mids that the speaker can produce. The mids are a wide enough frequency that they will not have to be placed right at you. But at the same time they will not benefit from the reflected technique used with the tweaters. That is one reason why the older factory 6x9's sounded so muddy. You were bouncing the mids off of the rear window. To compensate, the mid woofers had to be made more powerfull and reduce there sound spectrum. That is why the newer 6x9's tilt the mid and woofer toward you and not the window. And as for bass, the best way to achieve more from your speaker is to reduce the air around it by placing it into a enclosure. Dynamat is good at reducing the air leaks in the door. Another thing to watch is the phase of the speaker. Many people know to check your positive and negative wires when hooking up the speakers. What few people realize is that door speakers can be made out of phase just by being in the door. If you notice that when you close your door or move in your car just the right way all your bass seems to drop, then it is a phase problem. Two speakers pointed at each other will cancel out the lower frequencies. So your speakers are aimed at one another and your bass cancells out. If you block the speakers path then they are no longer canceled and your bass returns. To fix this, simply move the speaker to a slight angle. Or, you can change the positive and negative wires on one speaker. This will result in the speakers being in phase again but only when pointed at each other. This is the hadest thing to solve when setting up a home system. Trying to remove all of your dead spots while using six to eight speakers can be very difficult. A DSP can work to resolve this as well. By shifting the time alotment of one speaker it will produce the sound a split second before the other and return the bass. Sorry about rambling on about all of this. I hope that I have not confused anyone. Explaining how things work is not my strong point. If anyone can help to clarify what I am saying then feel free to respond. Take care, sponge bob calls.