4 Mistakes that Kill Bass - Car Audio Subwoofer Improvements!

so you build and install a car audio system into a vehicle and you turn it on for the first time and you're just not impressed the subwoofer bass performance is lacking in the mid bass from our speakers is just not as punchy as what we were hoping for if you've ever been in this position it is not a good feeling but not to worry my friend because in this video we're going to talk about four different mistakes that are often made that lead to poor bass performance and at the end of the video I'm also gonna give you some bonus tips for how you can add more bass once you make sure that you didn't make any of those four mistakes hey what's going on guys welcome to car audio fabrication my name is Mark and I'd like to welcome you to this channel where we do car audio reviews and build dog videos and lessons like this video because I truly believe that when we design build and install a car audio system the correct way we can really experience and feel the music rather than just listening to it so mistake number one wiring issues it's really important that when we're finishing up our install and making the connections from the wires to the actual speakers we want to double check and make sure that similar speakers have these same polarity in other words let's say that we have our six and a half inch speakers up front that are gonna be providing our mid bass we want to make sure that both of those six and a half inch speakers on each side have the positive wire on the positive terminal and negative on the negative terminal now the same goes for our subwoofers if we have multiple subwoofers we want to make sure that they are also wired in correct polarity the reason for this is if you have one speaker that is going out while the other one is coming in the speakers are going to be working against each other they're not going to be compressing air and building upon it to create acoustical energy now maybe you have poor bass performance and you know for a fact that you've connected the correct wires to each terminal on the speakers something else that you want to verify is you want to make sure that wherever you're getting that signal from that it is wired with the correct polarity as well as an example say that you installed a line output converter and that you tapped in to the rear speakers of the vehicle you would want to make sure that would that line output converter that you connected the positive leads to the positive wires and didn't have them opposite from the left to right side otherwise you could have polarity issues let's say that you check the speaker terminals you know they're correct and you've checked your wiring on something like an integration piece like a line output converter and you know it's correct there's still one more thing that could be wrong the speaker may be wired incorrectly from the factory this seems crazy but I've actually seen it happen quite often where the terminals the positive and negative terminals on the speaker will just be labeled incorrectly so ultimately the best way to really check polarity is you can use a polarity test tool this tool that I'm showing on screen allows you to simply hold the device close to the speakers and it fires off a series of pulses so what you can do is you can use this little device to check all your different speakers and make sure that they are all wired correctly in the same polarity a link to that device is down in the video description so let's say that you check all that you know that everything is good to go polarity wise mistake number two that can be made is phase issues a common example setup that we can use for a car audio system is something where we had a subwoofer playing frequencies from let's say 20 Hertz all the way up to 80 Hertz and then let's say from 80 Hertz we hand it off to a six and a half inch component issues with phase can arise in that handoff transition from the subwoofer to the speaker this is because the subwoofer and the speaker will be located in different locations within your vehicle let's say that both the subwoofer and the speaker are playing 80 Hertz our goal is to be at a listening position that those waves work together not that they work against each other and cancel each other out so there's a couple quick solutions to see if you're having Faye's issues one of the first and easiest solutions is to actually flip the polarity on the subwoofer or on your speakers generally it's going to be easier to just flip it on the subwoofer because a lot of subwoofer amplifiers have what they call a phase switch where you can flip it 180 degrees out of phase now yes at the beginning of the video I talked about having every wired in the correct polarity but it's only important for like speakers in other words the subwoofer and the speakers don't necessarily have to be wired in the same polarity it's okay to have them in different polarity because it might help correct your phase issues because when you switch the subwoofer 180 degrees out of phase it might correct the issues that you're experiencing with lack of the base another solution is you can move the subwoofer around within the vehicle before you permanently install it in order to test and make sure that you don't have any phase cancellation issues ultimately though one of the best solutions is to have a digital signal processor where you can actually delay the front speakers so that the sound that is furthest from you at the subwoofer when that finally arrives to you you can delay the front speakers to then deliver that sound from them at the same time this functionality of a digital signal processor is called time alignment and ultimately it's going to be the best solution for you but a DSP can be expensive so it might be easier to try flipping the polarity on the subwoofer or moving the subwoofer box around first if you'd like to check out one of my other videos that I did it more in detail on what a DSP is you can check out this video here on screen now mistake number three subwoofer enclosure type and construction along with installation of speakers let's say as an example that you have a sealed subwoofer box installed in your vehicle and you find that you're not quite getting enough bass you might want to consider another subwoofer box type you'll find that a ported subwoofer box will generally have more output but it's important to consider that every subwoofer has a different range of variables that affect how it actually responds and plays music as an example let's say that we take a ported subwoofer enclosure let's just say it's one cubic feet tuned to 32 Hertz and let's say that we put two different 10 inch subwoofers in it we know that we're gonna get different sound from each of these two different subwoofers this is why prior to building and installing our subwoofer box we should consider what the frequency response will look like for the subwoofer that will be using now it's also very important for our base performance to consider the volume that is required for a subwoofer if you install a large subwoofer into a space that is far too small for it the subwoofer isn't going to perform to its optimal capability and one of my previous videos I talked about how you can estimate what your box volume will actually be after all displacements for something like a ported subwoofer box you can check that out here on screen now let's say that you're confident within your subwoofer box type something else that you're gonna want to consider is the construction of the subwoofer box one of the biggest issues that I always see is when a subwoofer box isn't sealed well and this goes for ported subwoofer enclosures also the only way the air should be able to come in and out of a subwoofer box is through a pore and obviously if it's a sealed box it shouldn't be able to come in and out at all it's really important to make sure during the construction phase that all of your cuts are extremely straight and accurate and if they're not it's important that when you're actually building the box that you use plenty of caulk in order to seal up all of the corners next it's important to make sure that your box is properly braced if you have a very powerful subwoofer but then a box where all of the walls of the box can easily compress and flex then you're going to lose out on a lot of acoustical energy and that means that you're losing out on output to alleviate this problem you should have bracing another important thing to verify is more on the installation side of subwoofer boxes you want to make sure that they are fully secured within the vehicle properly securing the box to the vehicle makes the box much more stout and it makes it so that you're not losing any of that acoustic energy which means again more output now I'm the speaker side of things and getting good mid bass it's also equally important that we consider our installation something else that's really nice to add is these foam rings these rings help to bridge the gap so that it directs all of the sound through the hole within your door panel the reason that's important is if you have the sound bouncing around inside the door panel it can actually cancel out a lot of your mid bass performance for a full video about that and making custom speaker adapters in order to make sure that you get the best mid bass performance again video on screen now finally mistake number four poor system design it's really important that when we select all the different gear for our car audio build that we properly match the different items your amplifiers output power and watts RMS should closely match the capability of the subwoofer that you're purchasing as an example let's say that you're using a subwoofer that is super beefy it's super strong I can handle a ton of power and you're using just a moderately powered amplifier you're not going to be powering that subwoofer to its full potential and actually the amplifier is gonna have a hard time moving this big beefy subwoofer so you're gonna have reduced performance compared to if you just had a matching subwoofer now let's say you have an amplifier that's much more powerful than what the subwoofer can handle although you're gonna be able to power the subwoofer to its full potential you're leaving opportunity within your amplifier you could have had more output something else that often gets ignored is you have to remember that it takes power to make power you can't buy a 10,000 watt RMS amplifier and install it into a little car something like a Honda Civic without upgrading the electrical system it's important to have a big enough power plant within your system and in this case that's the alternator we want to look into something like an upgraded aftermarket alternator if we're going to be using a huge amplifier we also want to make sure that our power delivery system the wires is also upgraded in order to handle this increased power I want to go into more detail on this in a future video so if that's something you're interested in let me know so that's the four mistakes but what are a couple of easy ways that if we check all those off the list we make sure everything is good what's a couple other ways that we can add bass if we're just not impressed with what we have well in my opinion one of the most efficient ways to add more bass is to add more cone area as an example let's say that you have a 10 inch subwoofer and it's just not performing to what you would hope it would be and you have the room to potentially add a second 10 inch subwoofer well that's gonna be more cone area so you're gonna have more bass so as long as you have more room and you can also power that second speaker you're going to have more bass now let's say that you only have enough room for 1/10 what could you do well you're gonna want to look for more excursion excursion is how far a subwoofer or speaker actually moves in and out if we get an upgraded subwoofer that's still a 10-inch but it has more excursion we're going to get more bass also for upgrading that subwoofer we're probably gonna have more power handling capability within the subwoofer we can feed it more power we can have more bass so there we have it I'm wondering how many of you guys actually make it all the way to the end of these videos I know that this stuff can seem a little bit monotonous but it is super-important for really getting the best performance out of your car audio system a special thanks goes out to John Bryan Ally Jerry EJ Emmanuel Truman James and Colin along with the rest of the patreon support team a huge thanks to those guys for helping contribute and crowd fund the making of these videos more videos on screen as always thank you for watching you guys Rock I'll talk to you soon

Channel: CarAudioFabrication

Views: 3,647,763

Rating: 4.737536 out of 5

Keywords: car audio fabrication, car audio, caraudiofabrication, subwoofer, bass, weak subwoofer bass, improve subwoofer bass, louder subwoofer, make subs louder, loud bass, how to be loud, more spl, louder sub, loud sub, phase, polarity, subwoofer volume

Id: hXOnkOXvznI

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Tec_]

Good video Mark, I'd love to see a video with information on power. I think the question "how much power can I run without electrical upgrades" (or questions along those lines) gets asked enough that a video form you could be a valuable source of information. Keep up the good work!

[u/mad-n-fla]

What about crappy output...., or muskie?

[u/Stuke00]

So what are the 4 things?

[u/Xrc6]

Thanks for re-iterating those couple of points regarding foam rings and matching amp power to speakers. I brought those points up in another thread a while back where I was basically told I was wrong and wasn't needed due to *reasons. Shame how many people out there still continue to spread rubbish or they copy and paste audio science that sounds great on paper but then fail to actually apply it properly to a vehicle. Audio science and theoretics only work when you apply it to the specific application, otherwise you're just fighting with yourself and your ears.

Your install and tuning to a vehicle's acoustics is actually more important than hardware itself (as far as quality goes). Poor installs and lack of any tuning has the highest bass and mid-bass murder rate in the country. Another killer that few talk about is tweeter murders, where people let their tweeters reflect frequencies off of just about anything they please and often poorly positioned. This is why I disagree with low level placement, regardless of time alignment and phasing when your passengers legs are in the way for example. Vehicles have so many various plastics, shapes and apolstry that high frequencies absorbs and reflects differently.

And loved that you pointed out the fact that an amplifier's power is limited by what your vehicle can actually provide. Many people lose out on their musical dynamical peaks because their amp can't really spike out that burst of power due to wiring, alternator..etc. Match your amp to whatever alternator and battery you plan to use and leave room for the car's lights, A/C..etc. Otherwise you an kill batteries. Say yes to the Big 3.