Sounds bad

howie777

I just installed DB525s up front and DB690s in the rear deck of my 1998 Grand Prix and an Alpine 9831 in the dash. I also ran 16 ga wire to all speakers from the alpine. My issue is the DB690s do not sound very good at all. There seems to be a lot of sound bouncing around (or vibrating metal). My rear deck has openings for 6x9s and 4", I just left the 4" in when I removed the factory 6x9s and replaced them with the DB690s. I do not have the factory 4" wired up either.

My question is, what can I do to improve the sound? Will Dynamat help at all? I see it can be expensive if you get carried away with it. The DB525s sound much better to me, but If the Dynamat helps a lot I would apply it to the front door panels as well. Although my DB525s sit on a plastic riser on the door panels so I don't know if that is an issue or not.

Any help would be appreciated. I may eventually replace the DBs with Momo and amps this summer but I don't want to do that until I'm sure I can get a good sounding system. I might add a sub or two as well.

Thanks,

Howie

P.S. the Alpine is pretty cool in case anyone is looking into that deck, especially the i-personalize although it really doesn't help much since you only have 3 things you can set that way. But it is nice to know if you remove battery all you do is pop in a disc and reload your settings.

MacLeod

One of the problems with having rear speakers is that it can mess with the staging having sound coming from a bunch of different source points. That may be a small part of your problem but nothing major.

It could also be the mounting surfaces, especially on the rear deck. When a speaker makes noise it vibrates and these vibrations will make metal vibrate (duh!). These vibrations will color your music, adding kind of a reverb effect. It can also transmit into the speaker itself and flat out distort the output. This is a reason speakers distort at high levels.

I would recommend going to Circuit City and buying 2 of their Tsunami Silencer Door Kits for $15 each. Then get yourself a 1/2 or 3/4" sheet of MDF and make you some baffles. First place the Silencer as shown on the directions then mount the speakers to the baffle plates and the plates to the rear deck and front doors. The Silencer will shut down a lot of the vibration around the speaker so it wont mess with the output as much and the MDF baffle plate will absord vibration and also insulate the speaker from any vibration that may get thru. This isnt as good as Dynamatting the whole damn car but then again it only will cost you about $500 less and not take 3 days and the removal of all your interior!!

From there, every time youve got $15 bucks laying around, run up to CC and buy you a kit. Then start appying it to your surfaces little by little. This is soundproofing on the installment plan! OK that was lame.