speaker upgrade?

ilikesound

i have the mmc6500's now, and im wondering if i should go with the SR line as a slight upgrade..

if so, will the tweeters fit in the mounting cups supplied with the momo's, or are they seperate sizes altogether?

what is the sound quality difference like, i wonder? anyone have experience with both?

MacLeod

I ran Momos before upgrading to the SR's and I definitely think its worth it.

The SR's have a much more smooth and natural quality to them. If you can swing the extra money and are wanting the best SQ you can get, then its worth the upgrade. But if you just want some good tunes to listen to while you drive to work and back, it may not be worth the $750 price tag to ya.

The tweeter wont fit in the Momo cup. This is my biggest **** about the SR's. No surface mounting so instead of drilling 2 little holes you HAVE to cut a honkin' 2" hole wherever youre going to mount them. :mad:

ilikesound

actually, i was just demoing both the SR line and Focal's line of K speakers. the one that's around $630 with tax sounded a HELL of a lot more detailed than those SR's...i could hear everything that i wanted to hear out of my system, and none of the treble frequencies that have been haunting me were there at all. i may end up going with those. the $1000 line of the focal's is great for reference, but i feel that i would like to have more detailed midbass, which the ones that im talking about certainly produced very very well.
i believe the product is the Focal 165KF K2 Power 2-Ways. let me know what you think, as i may end up making a purchase next week.

MacLeod

Its your ears dude. Get what you like.

neomagus00

...keeping in mind that a car sounds nothing like a showroom, so unless you heard them each in vehicles similar to yours, take your experiences with a hunk of salt...

Jack from Indo

I got those Focals and truly love um. LOTS of detail. But I've not been able to hear the Polk SR's yet, and hope I can soon, we finally got a distributor here in this country.

ilikesound

honestly, i wouldn't even do it. the sr's, while sound exellent for a reference sound awfully plain in the midrange. those focals really sound exellent. :cool: those are what im going to buy.

ilikesound

neomagus00 wrote: »

...keeping in mind that a car sounds nothing like a showroom, so unless you heard them each in vehicles similar to yours, take your experiences with a hunk of salt...

yea, i know, but you can't deny that speakers SOUND different, neomagus. even if it is in a showroom, if you demo the ones you have VS the ones you are looking at, you can still hear the difference.

neomagus00

ilikesound wrote: »

yea, i know, but you can't deny that speakers SOUND different, neomagus. even if it is in a showroom, if you demo the ones you have VS the ones you are looking at, you can still hear the difference.

oh, absolutely true. the difference you hear in the showroom, however, will not be the same difference you'll hear when they're installed in a vehicle. car speakers are designed for a car environment (tweets often separated from the mids by several feet, and firing into glass and in different directions, and mids that have to have a wide dispersion to reach your ears from the floor, but not so wide they create extraneous reflection... etc, etc). there's a lot more that goes into them than i thought before i visited the polk hq, and there's a lot i'm sure i still don't know.

bottom line, go with what you hear, but try to get a listen in a vehicle if you can, or at least keep in mind the differences.

PoweredByDodge

on the 'where to listen' note... while a showroom is nothing like a car, and each car is different, i will say this.

i am of the belief, based upon my listening of the same model speakers in various vehicles, that if speaker A sounds 'better' than speaker B in car X, and they're driven with similar quality source units and amplifiers, then speaker A will sound 'better' than B in car Y... unless its some wacky difference like a corvette as compared to a lincoln towncar. when there's that much of a internal volume difference, **** gets cooky.

Jack from Indo

If you do get the Focals, I can tell you that 1. they got great crossovers with up to -7db in one db increments of attenuation, and 2. they need about 2 weeks to break in, then the midbass is even better.

My only complaint is that after 5 months of loving them, I'm now thinking that yes, the tweets are slightly too bright no matter how I set them (Im biamping). But I wouldn't say that they're so bright it's a real problem, and they may only sound that way when I'm stressed, cause at other times they seem just perfect the way they are.

I would love to hear the SR's supposedly "natural" tweeter sound soon if I can though.

These Focals love power. Go over the rated RMS if you can. I started with 75 RMS per which sounded fine, then went with 165 which did sound better.

ilikesound

yea, i plan on bi-amping anyways, since people seem to think that it gives a better sound, yada yada. i can't tell the difference, but i like to think that just because they're going straight to the amp, they're getting the power that they need, nothing in between. but the focals may not like my polk 400.4 very much in terms of its internal crossover, so maybe i should be using that instead of bi-amping..dunno yet, really. jack, did you just upgrade your amp to get that power, or what? which one are you running now? my tweeters sound exessively bright when put thru a crossover, but bi-amping them let me turn down the gain on them a bit, so they mesh a little bit more evenly now. still have peaks, but they're less noticable i think.

ilikesound

neomagus00 wrote: »

oh, absolutely true. the difference you hear in the showroom, however, will not be the same difference you'll hear when they're installed in a vehicle. car speakers are designed for a car environment (tweets often separated from the mids by several feet, and firing into glass and in different directions, and mids that have to have a wide dispersion to reach your ears from the floor, but not so wide they create extraneous reflection... etc, etc). there's a lot more that goes into them than i thought before i visited the polk hq, and there's a lot i'm sure i still don't know.

bottom line, go with what you hear, but try to get a listen in a vehicle if you can, or at least keep in mind the differences.

i wish i could demo them in a car like mine...noone around me can afford these things in the first place, though! haha.;)

MacLeod

ilikesound wrote: »

yea, i plan on bi-amping anyways, since people seem to think that it gives a better sound, yada yada. i can't tell the difference, but i like to think that just because they're going straight to the amp, they're getting the power that they need, nothing in between. but the focals may not like my polk 400.4 very much in terms of its internal crossover, so maybe i should be using that instead of bi-amping..dunno yet, really. jack, did you just upgrade your amp to get that power, or what? which one are you running now? my tweeters sound exessively bright when put thru a crossover, but bi-amping them let me turn down the gain on them a bit, so they mesh a little bit more evenly now. still have peaks, but they're less noticable i think.

The reason bi-amping yields better sound isnt because of how much power anything is getting, its because when you bi-amp you can tune the tweeter independantly of the mid and vice versa.

Jack from Indo

ilikesound wrote: »

but the focals may not like my polk 400.4 very much in terms of its internal crossover, so maybe i should be using that instead of bi-amping..dunno yet, really. jack, did you just upgrade your amp to get that power, or what? which one are you running now?

I'm using 2 STEG K series amps. One for the tweets that's 2channel x105 and another for the mids that's 2 x165. I would think your Polk amp will be perfectly good whether you biamp or not, but I'm not familiar with it so don't know how much crossover control you have.

The focal passive crossovers are crossed at 3600 with an 18db slope. But they also have this little switch in there that has two settings of HI and LO, which is supposed to boost the mid/high frequencies just a tad when/if you install the mid drivers in the doors facing each other. The reason you might want to do that is because, as you may know, the higher a frequency the less it is able to bend and spread in all directions. So, this switch is designed to make up for the fact that your speakers might not be facing directly at you, and so you may be losing a bit of the mid to higher frequencies, from about 600-3,600hz, I presume. This switch is not necessary if your using kick panels, and might not be necessary if you have a wide enough cab.

This all may be a reason not to biamp, if you want to use that little switch, and you don't have an EQ that will allow you to do the same thing. However, I find that in my car, where my speakers are already slightly facing me in sort of a semi kick panel set up, I do not need to boost those frequencies so it's not an issue.

On the other hand, a good reason to biamp is so that when you get a really good EQ someday, like a Alpine H701 or similar, you can just hook it up and be in tuner heaven.