MM6 Off Axis response

PolkMomoRam

I have a 99 Dodge ram standard cab and am contiplating building kick pods for my MM6's. If I do I will lose the use of my parking brake and take up alot of floor space. I was wondering if anyone has any input on the off axis mid and mid-bass response quality of the MM6? If it's pretty good, I could easily make some very low in the door pods for the tweets, or even put them in the kicks. I want my system for sound quality first, and then maby a little boom on the side. Any Suggestions would be appreciated :-)

My system consists of:
Eclipse 3413mp3 H/U
Cross fire CFA 302 Amp: running two alpine R 6 X 9's until I get some time off to install the MM6's.
Cross fire 500D Sub amp: Running two Polk Momo 12's in a custom built sealed enclosure w/ .95 cu/ft per speaker and stuffed with poly-fill.
I also have a 2.0 Farad cap and about 175 ft/2 of Fat Mat Extreme applied to any and every piece of bare metal I could get my hands on.

PoweredByDodge

i've got two 99 ram quad cab's sitting in the driveway... i can tell you that going with a stock door cut out installation is not a bad idea...

coaxials in the doors is honestly not THAT bad... but if you're really into sound quality, its not for you.

in the other one i've got a set of polk DX series components running off around 200 watts rms per side. the 6.5" is set into the 6x9 stock hole ... the tweeter is at the top of the door panel, just a finger's width down from the window sill... flush mounted in the door panel... with them aimed at a 45-ish degree angle toward the center of the truck and just a hair up, they sound fantastic... i used to have them up at the bases of the a-pillars on the dash, but that really sounded not too much to my liking.

i dont know if that's gonna be what you want to do - but honestly, it sounds F-in fantastic...

PolkMomoRam

kewl...Thanks alot! I was hoping someone would like the stock locations, especially since I have about 15lbs of fat mat applied to each door and they're solid as a rock. I have also made two plates out of formica to use the stock 6X9 location for the MM6 6.5 drivers. I'm just wondering if the tweets LOW in the doors would give better imaging and then piggy back another set of tweets in the A pillars facing each other and slightly aimed at the windshield and crossed over really high and attenuated with L-Pads to help pull up my sound stage.

PolkMomoRam

also, do you think 75 watts RMS of ROCK SOLID power is decent to these speakers? The crossfire amp running them can easily do 300 watts peak of pure power

MacLeod

As far as tweeter locations go, ideally you want the tweet and mid to be as close as possible. The music is supposed to be coming from a single source. The general rule Ive always heard of and used myself is to keep the mid and tweet no more than 8" apart max and it would be best to stay within 6". If you go to far apart then the music seems to be coming from 2 different sources and can mess with the sound quality. It want sound like crap but it wont be at its best.

I had a 2000 Ram and had a set of MB Quarts. I mounted the mids in the stock location and the tweeter on the upper part of the door panel just below the mirror sail. I surface mounted them and angled them toward me. My imaging was pretty good. The soundstage came to the top of the dash and was fairly centered. About the only way youre going to get better imaging is to use kick panles but I prefer not to since they take away from legroom and Im a 250 lb weightlifter so I like to spread out.

I dont like mounting tweeters on the A pillars because it tends to localized the stage to that location. Im even more againt aiming them anywhere near the windshield. Glass relfects high frequencies very harshly and will make your highs very painful to listen to. I would recommend sticking with the stock mid location and stick the tweets in the upper door panels and just see how that works fer ya.

As far as power goes, the MM6 requires a little more **** than your regular components. I would recommend no less than 100 rms to each one. Also dont pay attention to peak amp ratings. They are pretty much worthless. The only rating that means anything is the RMS.

PolkMomoRam

polk emailed me back and recommended that I face the extra set of tweets directly at each other and then build a seperate high pass passive X-over for them so I didn't mess up the impediance and cross over freq. points. They actually told me to go to the12volt.com for info on building the crossovers. Thats pretty kewl customer service !

PoweredByDodge

unless you give each set of tweeters a separate frequency band then you WILL mess up the impedance by doubling up on tweeters.

i'm assuming you have 4 tweeters and two mid/woofers. if so -- if you cross over one set of tweets at say 4k to 10k and hte other set at 10k to 20k Hz, then sure, u wont mess up the impedance.

However, that is absolutely retarded, and if you're going to do that then you might as well have bought a 3-way component set instead of a 2 way set.

If you run both pair of tweeters at 4k high pass, even if you have them on separate crossovers, if they are running off the same 2 channel amp, you're going to drop down below nominal impedance between those frequencies.

it's nothing to sweat about, but i just figured i'd give u the straight scoop.

99% of the 2 channel amps out there are 2 ohm stable in stereo mode, so you're not going to hurt the amp... and it should sound just as good as running each set of tweets off its own amp (or 4 channeling them).

anywho -- if you really are gonna go ballz out with two sets of tweets... i'd do one at the top of the door panel, just below the window sill (which is roughly 8-ish inches from the top of the woofer (stock location) and do the other set on the top of the dash surface mounted and then aimed toward the center of the vehicle -- or possibly at the center of the front glass.

i dont see any gain in putting two sets of tweets next to each other in the door... nor any gain in putting one set low in the door and one set high in the door.

short of going with kick panels and TWO FULL SETS of momo components (twet and woofer), i think u might be stretching for something that's out of reach (and possibly unnecessary).

as far as 75 watts rms per channel goes... it'll do the job... not as well as more power would, but if you like the amp and are happy with it, then there's no reason to scrap it. However, I'm more of a 150 - 200 watts rms / channel person when it comes to polk components -- as my well beaten/battered and now wounded dx components will testify to.

PolkMomoRam

what I'm trying to do is raise my soundstage if I go for a lower mount in the doors or in kicks. (kicks imaging are perfect in a ram but sound like the sound stage is in your lap.) It's proven that you can choose a very high (8K or above) cross over point with a pair of tweets that are installed ALOT higher than your regular tweets to raise your sound stage. CDT, a VERY prestigious speaker company makes a kit just for this called the imaging kit. It's specifically designed for their VERY expensive components. Two other companys that have proven this technique is JL Audio....almost ALL of their award winning cars durring their peak in the early 90's used this. And MB Quart, which has also won TONS of awards with similar setups in customers and show cars. All of these setups ALWAYS use a primary component speaker setup as usual and then the extra tweets for ambience and to raise the soundstage. If you were to cross these over so they had seperate non conflicting cross over points, you would totally defeat the purpose as your sound stage would be spaced out over MANY different path lengths. If you do it the way I have described above, your path lengths are preserved by you regular components and the fact that your extra tweets have such high Xover points as to only add ambience and height to your sound stage.