Common Thin Subwoofer Mistakes. Bass in a small space. #NVX

so in this video we're going to talk about thin subwoofers and we're going to talk about mistakes that people make and problems that people encounter when they try to use a thin subwoofer let's take a look at this cool 10 inch subwoofer here that nvx sent me and then we'll build an enclosure for it I'll show you some of those mistakes this is the smw 10d4 10 inch 350 watt shallow mount subwoofer the first thing that really jumped out at me when I opened it up was this big dust cap here that appears to be carbon fiber there's something else in the packaging that I'll show you a little bit later in the video this subwoofer ships with a really cool accessory one thing interesting here that I think is kind of cool is there's a little bit of shrink wrap on the tinsel leads before the tensile leads get woven into the spider there also appears to be some kind of venting on the back of the cone underneath the dust cap there's no pole vent on the back and that's good because you don't have to worry about the clearance on the back this is a thin subwoofer after all and the goal of course is to make the subwoofer fit into tight spots the dual 4-ohm voice coil it has eight millimeters of x-max now that eight millimeters of x-max is kind of a blessing and a curse you don't want a lot of x max if you're trying to cram a subwoofer into a tight spot but you need x-max in order to get loud and get low now of course it is a thin subwoofer and you buy a thin subwoofers so that you can mount them in tight spots the mounting depth on this thing is 3.23 inches and I'm going to build an enclosure for this thin subwoofer and I want to talk just in general terms about the pros and cons of thin subwoofers when you should consider using them and when you should not consider using them so here I am working on the enclosure my goal for this enclosure is to Simply make the smallest enclosure that I can physically fit the driver into just to give you an example of how compact this thing can actually be because typically we see these thin subwoofers behind the seat in a small sports car or behind the seat in a regular cab pickup truck and we typically have the seats leaned back a little bit so there's more room on the bottom than there is on the top so this box is going to be three inches deep on the bottom and two inches deep on the top so the overall bottom is going to be three inches plus the two pieces of MDF so four and a half inches and the top is going to be two inches plus the MDF in order to make the angled Cuts I'm going to go ahead and cut the side pieces and the top and the bottom slightly oversized and then set them down on a flat surface and do a little bit of measuring what I'm going to do here is measure two and three quarters of an inch from the back of the enclosure and make a mark and then go to the other side and measure three and three quarters of an inch from the bottom of the enclosure and then just draw a line connecting those two points and my goal here is to now cut along that line so what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with the top and the bottom I'm going to take those over to the table saw and I'm going to use my angle gauge just to roughly get an idea of the angle that I have here it looks to be about 17 degrees here in this case 90 degrees minus 17 is about 73. now it's just a matter of lining up the saw with the mark making the cut and hoping that it works [Music] now the side of the enclosure is going to take a little bit more work the challenge here is to make a safe and accurate cut on the table saw to do that I'm going to grab a piece of scrap and create a makeshift jig on the table saw so now I take my template tape and tape the sides to this makeshift jig and carefully run the entire thing through the saw and it should give me a perfect cut foreign if you've been watching my videos you've probably noticed that I've upgraded my table saw the only reason why I'm able to afford these neat tools so that I can build things for you is because of my patrons over on patreon and I want to say thank you to everyone who joined me on patreon my ten dollar patrons are scrolling above the screen right here and I always want to give a special shout out to my 25 patrons Bo David T Doug Dylan Baba and stereolab LLC now it's just a matter of taking everything over to the workbench and seeing if it all lines up the way I expect it to I'm a big believer in dry fitting and mocking things up prior to assembly just to make sure everything fits and has been cut correctly always a good idea to Mark all your pieces at this point so that you know they're going together correct when you actually start gluing things together because nothing sucks worse than glue in half your subwoofer box together and then realizing that you've got the pieces in the wrong angle or the wrong orientation and as I'm mocking it up I see a little bit of a problem let me grab a flashlight and see if you can see what's going on here the back of the subwoofer is hitting the back of the enclosure the enclosure is too shallow for this shallow mount subwoofer and that is the first mistake that people make when they try to build a shallow mount subwoofer enclosure they build the enclosure too thin so the subwoofer doesn't fit the subwoofer is not sitting flushed in the Box we don't have enough clearance so what do we do about that if you remember when I was unboxing I said there's a special piece this is that special piece right here it comes with this nice metal back plate the idea behind this back plate is pretty simple if you've built an enclosure that's too thin you just cut a hole in the back of your enclosure throw down some gasket material and stick this back plate on so in this case Rod made the box too thin I've got a really simple fix for it I just grabbed my router cut out a hole in the back and then screw on this plate then I'm going to take my big rabbeting bit and make a little Groove so this thing thing sits flush clearance problems go away and you can cram this subwoofer into a really tight spot so just to give you an idea of how tight a spot you can squeeze this thing into if the mounting depth is 3.23 inches which is basically three and a quarter inches and if you're front and back of the box are three quarter inch MDF that's an inch and a half you can fit this thing into an inch and three quarters deep in closure so it's really cool that nvx included this piece because that solves a mistake or problem number one let's take a closer look at the box that I built my goal here was to Simply build an enclosure that is just as small as I could possibly make it to show you just how tiny of a space you can fit one of these thin subwoofers the Box itself is 12 and a half inches wide by 12 and a half inches tall so why did that go with 12 and a half by 12 and a half simple I had scrap pieces left over from another build that I did that I'll give you a link to up here because this box was just built to prove a point and that point is of course you can get one of the thin subwoofers and cram them into a really really small box and that is the next mistake people make whenever they are installing a thin subwoofer it turns out that most thin subwoofers even though they can fit into a small box probably shouldn't fit into a small box for example according to the owner's manual mvx recommends that if you use a sealed box you should go with 0.75 cubic feet and if you go with a ported enclosure you need to go with 1.25 cubic feet I don't know what the airspace is in this little box but if it's roughly a foot by a foot by about two and a half inches it's nowhere near that size and that is the other big mistake that people make when they go with a thin subwoofer they don't make the enclosure large enough to give you an idea here is an enclosure that I built last year for a regular size subwoofer this thing just happens to be tuned to the exact tuning frequency that nvx recommends and it just happens to be the exact enclosure size that nvx recommends and as you can see the box is huge now I know when I say that someone is going to jump into the comments and say something negative about this nvx subwoofer but if you take the time to read the specs for pretty much every shallow mount subwoofer on the market you will find that virtually all of them have the same problem it's simply a matter of physics there's this thing called Hoffman's iron law it simply takes space to make base how do you get the most out of this subwoofer while taking advantage of its thin mounting depth because if you have the space for this enclosure here you're not going to go with a thin subwoofer I tackle this problem the same way I tackle every other problem and that is I jump into something like win ISD and I start looking at what happens through the frequency response the port airspeed velocity and The Cone Excursion as I try out different tuning frequencies and box sizes and then of course I like to pull up SketchUp for drawing out plans or at the very least getting a rough idea of what I want to accomplish and I'm going to build that enclosure in the next video hit the Subscribe button so you don't miss it I'm Justin the DIY audio guy and I will see you on the next adventure

Channel: DIY Audio Guy

Views: 86,302

Keywords: DIY, Audio, DIY Audio, Car Audio, Home Audio, Speaker Builder, subwoofer, speakers, ampifiers, DIY speakers, diy amplifers, bass, nvx, nvx shallow mount subwoofer, shallow mount subwoofer, thin subwoofer, shallow subwoofer vs regular, how to, car subwoofer, subwoofer box, car stereo, 10, subwoofer, 10 inch subwoofer, speaker box design, subwoofer design, car audio system

Id: n7j4e_LRl88

Length: 9min 7sec (547 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 18 2022