12" Free Air System

carloduplessis

Hi Guys,

I am a newbie and would like to jack my sound a bit up (just a tad). I have bought a Panasonic 12" Free Air sub and cannot find any "bright" ideas on the net on how to install this into my car.

This is what I have
standard 4 speakers in the car
1000W amp
Tweeters
SubWoofer.

Any suggestions on how this needs to be mounted to get this car not to sound like a kiddies party sound system?

Ciao
C

1996blackmax

I had a free air system back in the late 90's. They were two 12" Kicker Free air subs. I made a wedge type enclosure right behind the seat to mount the subs to. It was angled behind the seat with some room between the front of the subs and the back seat. I had made side walls for it too. I then sealed the whole thing up so that the front souund waves of the sub would be sealed from the back waves. If you would look at my opened up trunk you would see the back of the subs. The subs were firing up through the speaker holes in the rear deck (no speakers in them). One of the things I noticed was that the subs did not go very deep, as say a sealed enlcousre, but they did sound ok.

Just remember that a free air sub's power handling will be less than if that sub was put into a ported enclosure. My Kicker's could handle 400 watts RMS if put into a box, but only 250 watts RMS if used in a free air application.

What kinkd of amp are you running?

neomagus00

that's actually supposed to be the advantage of a freeair sub, low-range extension. i'd venture the guess that your trunk wasn't perfectly sealed, and so the lowest frequencies cancelled themselves out (the better sealed the trunk, the lower the frequency before cancellation begins...)

carlo - if you can completely seal the trunk (completely!), and mount the sub in, say, the rear deck, then freeair is a good option. if you can't or won't seal the trunk, a large sealed box is for you.

1996blackmax

You may be right.


I also recall Kicker use to make an amplifier module to make the Free air subs act more like their competition type subs that would go in sealed enclosures. I wondered if this would have helped, but never got the chance to try it out.

The nice thing about this setup was that I had almost all of my trunk space left.

neomagus00

yeah, that'd be the main reason people go with freeair... most of them don't realise is the whole sealing-the-trunk bit can get rather involved...