momo components

Airplay355

so i have a pair of mmc5250 components. I'm looking at all the parts but i have no freakin idea how to install the tweeters.

i understand the whole pop off the side panels, put the crossovers in plastic bags, drill holes in the sidepanel for tweeter (i want the flush mount). but what holds the tweeter in the little plastic cup and keeps it from rotating? am i supposed to glue it in there or something? probably not, but how do i keep it in there?

i haven't tried installing them yet, i just want a plan of action before i go drilling holes in my cars interior.

[Deleted User]

The tweeter pops in the cup and is held in with pressure.

beardog03

I don`t get the plastic bag trik.....why do that ?

Jstas

It keeps them from getting wet. Car doors are not weather proof and condesation will develop. That's why they all have drain holes in the bottom so the water doesn't pool up and rust the door out from the inside. The problem with a plastic bag is that it doesn't allow the crossover to breathe and heat build up can become a problem. If moisture is that big of a concern, one should use electrolytic grease on the connections to displace water and prevent corrosion.

Otherwise, use some industrial strength velcro on the inside of the door and stick the crossover to the panel, out of the way and in a place where it is unlikely to get wet. Mine have been in a similar position and not in plastic bags for 5 years now without a problem.

Now that I said that of course, they are all going to fry on the way home tonight.

Airplay355

Thanks for the velcro idea, i'll do that instead...I don't want anything getting coroded. I live in NY so i'm sure there's plenty of moisture in my doors.

Airplay355

Should the silver part of the tweeter (the plastic around it) be flush with the black ring I put it in? Or is it supposed to stick out more then that?

Jstas

As long as you have drain holes in the bottom of the doors, moisture should not be a problem for you. Also, just put the crossovers high enough up on the doors that they aren't sitting in line with where a window weatherstripping might drip.

Mine are velcroed to the inside of the outer door skin about halfway up the door. I had to make sure that the wires were long enough to not interfere with the window mechanisms.

Another place a friend told me about was in his car, the arm rest bubbles on the door panels are hollow. If that is the case for you then you can do what he did and mount them in the hollow bubble. That puts them inside the car and decidedly out of any environmental harm.

If you do put them inside the door, you shouldn 't have to worry about water unless it can puddle on the connections. So mount them in a way so that if water might get on them, it will run off easily.


The silver part of the tweeter wasn't flush for me because the tweeter needs room to swivel and not pinch the wires. It won't sit completely in the ring. If you are worried about the bright silver sticking out like a sore thumb, what I did in my friend's Jeep was I popped the tweeters out of the rings and ran around the edges with a black Sharpie. You could paint them too but the paint will get scraped off by the ring. The Sharpie won't make them black but it will tone the silver down alot so it will look like a graphite gray.

beardog03

Thanks for all the tips/help...

Sorry Airplay if I hyjacked your thread....didn`t mean too

Airplay355

My tweeter still swivels back and forth/up and down but the top of the silver is flush with the top of the black ring. The grill on the twtter bubbles out though; that is nto flush with the black ring. I'm not afraid of the color, I just don't know if i pushed them in too far or not. the wires don't appear to be pinched and the tweeter still swivles, so are they where they're supposed to be? I don't want to push them in too far and then suffocate the high frequencies because things are reflecting off the black cup that the tweeter is in.

Jstas

If they still swivel freely, they likely will not be a problem. Unless the edge of the cup extends past the tweeter's grille, it is unlikely that it will be causing a reflection problem. The MOMO tweeters seem to have a good off-axis response and you shouldn't have many problems with reflections unless you are pointing them at something solid and smooth like the windsheild.

kismetcapitan

I mount my crossovers in the front kickpanels - definitely weatherproof there. In my previous Nissan (B13 SE-R), I also put the tweeters in the kick panels to try to equalize the pathlengths. Never again - there's a reason why kickpanels are called kickpanels! Those tweeters saw abuse no speaker should ever see in its life....

btw I had those tweeters adjusted that far - I wouldn't worry a bit about it, even if you angled them so far in that you got a millimeter of cup extending past the tweeter dome.

kismetcapitan

oh, and where di you go with your mounting position? Sail panels are a pretty good idea IMHO, or even the A-pillars, depending on how your dash is designed.

Jstas

Kickpanels aren't always weather proof and many cars do not have space behind the kickpanels to mount things. I know in my truck I have a fuse box on one side behind a kick panel and a drivetrain computer on the other side behind the kick panel.

Also, most cars have rubber grommets and hoses that the wires run through for the electronics in the doors. Those can wear and become cracked with time and they will certainly allow road debris and other water and dirt to get into the spot between the kick panel and the passenger compartment walls. Granted this isn't much of a problem on a relativly young vehicle but, if you run speaker wires through this hose and end up not being able to fit that grommet end back in the hole, you're not so weather proof anymore.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, just relating some knowledge gained through personal experience.

MacLeod

Why not mount them insde the car itself? Maybe somewhere near your amps. I have my amps and crossover mounted under my rear seat. No water there!

Airplay355

I was going to put them under the dashboard where there's a shitoad of wires...

One question though....How the hell do i get wires from the door into the car?

That rubber hose with wires for power windows and locks it tighter then a virgin on prom night. How do I squeeze wire in there? What the hell am i supposed to do? I want the crossovers inside the car like Mac suggested. I think that's the best place as when i took the side panel off there was alittle moisture all ready in the bottom of the door.

Airplay355

I was going to put the tweeters in the top of the door, on a slightly angled part, right below the side view mirror and above the door handle. I circled it in the pic.

I'm not sure if this is too low, or too direct...what do you guys think? I thought it would be good to have the tweeter and woofer alittle closer together and to have the tweeter aimed at me instead of pointing in across the car.

Jstas

None of us had it any easier with the door speakers we had to install too. Get creative and find a way. If you have holes being plugged up by rubber grommets, grab a screw driver, pull the plug out and jam the screw driver through the plug. Notice I said plug and not hand. BE CAREFUL! At that point, jam the wires in there and pull enough through to reach whatever you are trying to reach. Thread them into the hole in the door where the plug came from until you get to the plug. Replace the plug in the hole and you have a fairly weather proof solution.


As far as tweeter mounting, the best thing to do is test it. However, the MOMO tweeters are quite bright for most peoples tastes. Given that, direct focusing might be harsh. As I said before though, the off-axis response is pretty good off-axis response and if you face them across the car, it will tone down the harshness and probably help imaging.

As far as tweeter to woofer distance, the closer the better. The reason for that is because if your spacing is very far apart, it can skew your sound stage. It can also cause things like dips in crossover response to become more apparent. If the tweeter is mounted in a spot where there are no easy reflections but the woofer is in a spot where there are nothing but reflections, it'll screw up the sound stage.

Another thing is if the tweeter is closer to your listening position than the woofer, the same channel's signal has a longer distance to travel for the woofer than the tweeter. This can cause the sound coming from the pair to sound disjointed and out of phase. Sometimes you get lucky and it will help imaging but most of the time, especially in a car interior with many surfaces ripe for reflection, it can cause a glaring disparity that requires a good deal of crossover and equalizer tweaking to get remedied.

The best place for your tweeter is at the center of your woofer cone, all the way at the bottom of the cone but that is physically impossible. So, the closer the better. My tweeters are surface mounted on the door panels right over the woofers that are mounted behind the door panels. While my imaging likely wouldn't win competitions, it is pretty good and the response is down-right creamy! It was at the Polkfest, open for auditions but only two people took the opportunity.

kismetcapitan

Airplay355 wrote:

I was going to put the tweeters in the top of the door, on a slightly angled part, right below the side view mirror and above the door handle. I circled it in the pic.

I'm not sure if this is too low, or too direct...what do you guys think? I thought it would be good to have the tweeter and woofer alittle closer together and to have the tweeter aimed at me instead of pointing in across the car.

That's the location I went with on my Skyline. Not too bad - the imaging isn't going to win any contests, but it sounds much more balanced side to side than when I had the tweeters mounted in the footwells.

Airplay355

Well I figured out a way to wire the speakers through the molex in the door and through the rubber tubing, so I didn't have to drill any holes in the body! **** yea! That's a ghetto way of doing it lol, I don't want wires hangin in my door.

Anyway, I'm going to rewire my head unit with monster cable (Thanks for the idea Mac) and then I'm gonna put the crossovers underneath the dash with velcro(thanks Jstas). After that I'll semi put the side panels back on and start checking out different tweeter positions for the one i like best.

Airplay355

here's the site that taught me how to wire the car. http://www.the12volt.com/installbay/forum_posts.asp?TID=78731&PN=1

I think this is a much better alternative then drilling a hole in the body but if there's one thing I learned about putting in speakers today it's that having it work is more important then how you do it...You can make it pretty as hell but if it doesn't work there's no point. Lucky for me, wiring through the molex was very very easy, especially after I spent hours figuring out how to do it on the first door. The second door only took me a few minutes, even with the airconditioner in my way.

So far I have the woofers in and everything wired. All that's left is to drill holes in the door panels and put the tweeters in.


I'll post pics when I'm done

Airplay355

Finally I'm done! Only one casualty too, just a little plastic clip thingy that actually doesn't do much. Oh well, whatever.

Here are pics! I love it so much. It doesn't really comapre to what was in my room but that's ok, it's still a great system and sounds much better then it did before.

I'm so proud of myself for being able to do it without drilling holes in the body. At one point, I thought that was the only way to do it to keep the crossovers inside the car.

One crossover is in the glove box, next to 7lbs of tampons and tylenol (not for me) and the other is underneath the dash on a flat spot i found under there.

I wired everything through the molex. I just driller 4 holes in empty spots and ran wire through. It's alot easier then it sounds.

I decided to go with surface mounting the tweeters instead of flush. I didn't like the way the tweeters sounded in the door as much as I liked them up by the mirrors. And since I can't flush mount them there surface mout was my only option. I'm glad I did it this way though. It was very very easy to do and it looks alot better then I thought it was going to. I thought those black cups were going to stick out like sore thumbs but they really don't especially up against the black plastic they are screwed into.

Right now everything is running off the pioneer receiver. So far it seems things are holding up fine. I think it's doing a fairly ok job of powering them, though I'm sure they could use an amp.

I still have stock 6x9's running in the rear deck of the car. There's also a pair of 5.25" stock speakers in the rear door. 6 speaker stock stereo, weird huh? Whatever the 5.25" speakers aren't hooked up and the 6x9's don't seem to be detracting from the sound just yet so I guess I'll leave them.

You guys have any suggestions? Anything I should think about or change?

(PS. I know my check engine light is on, it's my O2 sensor)

Here are some pictures

audiobliss

Very nice! The tweeters look great there, and I'm sure they sound better there, too. I'm not too fond of that crossover in the glove box, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Congrats on your first install! Hopefully you have many more ahead of you!

hearingimpared

MOMO. Wasn't that the head mobster that Chili Palmer reported too?

Airplay355

Honestly, I don't they sound that amazing.

It's either because I'm spoiled from having a Musical Fidelity amp with SDA's in my room.

Because they are little 5.25" speakers and need a sub.

Or because I'm powering them with a head unit.

I'd like to vote that it's all three however.

kismetcapitan

you need a sub and at least 50 real watts (not head unit watts) pushing those things. Then you'll be impressed.

audiobliss

I would put the majority of the blame on relying on HU power. That's pathetic, and a real amp would do wonders.

Jstas

hearingimpared wrote:

MOMO. Wasn't that the head mobster that Chili Palmer reported too?

No.

MOMO is an Italian company that has made a business out of providing things like steering wheels, shifters, seats and other parts for various makers like Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, sPa, DeTomaso and quite a few other Italian marques. They even supply FIA Formula 1 and WRC teams and race car builders with parts. They have been around for a very long time and because of thier association with the likes of such fine marques as Ferrari and Maserati, they are considered to be makers of fine, high quality parts.

That's where the MOMO inspiration comes from. A rich, racing hertiage reagrded the world over. Not from some silly mobster.

MOMO Italy
http://www.momo.com/index2.html

hearingimpared

Jstas wrote:

No.

MOMO is an Italian company that has made a business out of providing things like steering wheels, shifters, seats and other parts for various makers like Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, sPa, DeTomaso and quite a few other Italian marques. They even supply FIA Formula 1 and WRC teams and race car builders with parts. They have been around for a very long time and because of thier association with the likes of such fine marques as Ferrari and Maserati, they are considered to be makers of fine, high quality parts.

That's where the MOMO inspiration comes from. A rich, racing hertiage reagrded the world over. Not from some silly mobster.

MOMO Italy
http://www.momo.com/index2.html

Thanks ???

ilikesound

yea, thanks doctor serious.