Door vs Kicks

Canuker

So I am planning on getting my system installed. I have decided upon the SR6500 drivers for the front stage and now am finalizing placement. If I can find someone who is skilled enough would kick panels be worth the effort and cost? Some installers in my city have told me that deadening the door to near over kill should be fine but when I was last into car audio(10+ years) kicks seemed to be all the rage. Any ideas or links to other threads that I missed during the search?

These are going to be placed in a 06 Sonata driven by a PPI PC 2100.

candaddy

Start by measuring the path length differences from your head to each location and note the differences. If the kick panel locations net say (for conversation's sake) a 4" path length difference and the door location an 8" path length difference, the kicks should sound better. By path length I mean left speaker is 4" or 8" closer than the right speaker and vise-versa for the opposite seating location.

Some guys like to put the tweeters in an a-pillar, dash or on top of the door. That's OK so long as the difference in length between the tweeters and the mids to your head is equal. If you have the left tweeter 19" from your head and the left mid 26" from your head, you'll have major phase problems and it more than likely won't work.

The only other problem you can have with kick panels is if your car has a major center console deal where your feet are way inside a tunnel. In some cases cancellation will be an issue with early reflections and the frequency response will be poor.

Try these links for more:

http://www.ofsoundmind.com/OSM2/frame.htm
http://www.elitecaraudio.com/search.php?query=&topic=1

MacLeod

Kick panels work best compared to door locations. It gets the speakers further away from you and at a more equal distance. If you can fit 6.5's in the kicks and can live with the legroom loss if any, then that should be where you put them.

Door locations can be made to work but they take a little more effort in tuning and no matter how much you deaden a door, youre always gonna have a rattle or two.

tk421

speaking of kicks...

i own a JDM honda civic, right-hand-drive. getting thr irhgt speaker angle in my kicks are a problem. but i read that the angle isn't as important as the PLD.

ie - they say kicks are better for even PLD but i think you lose some energy from the speaker since it is not 100% on-axis.

what are your thoughts???

candaddy

You're correct that PLD is more important than axis, but the latter shouldn't be forgotten about. As you change listening angle, the frequency response changes too, often times nonlinearly. Of course, cars have a million reflective surfaces and that will complicate matters, but the closer you can get it to ideal the first time, the better off you are.

Ideally the far side speaker will be perfectly on axis to you, and the near side speaker perfectly on axis with the passenger ("cross firing"). This will tend to mute the near side speaker (making it seem further away) and accentuate the far side speaker (making it seem closer to you). This works best at higher frequencies where your brain locates sound by volume, rather than time alignment. Of course the off-axis response of the speaker will have an effect on how well this works, but that's the idea.

The other thing to consider is time-alignment. I mentioned that you need to keep the distance between the mids and the tweeters the same, this holds true even when you have them very close together. If the woofer is 4" behind the tweeter, acoustic problems will result and something simple, like a change in polarity of one of the drivers isn't going to help 100%, so getting it right from the beginning is important.

MacLeod

If youre going to get a good processor like the Alpine 701 then you can overcome a TON of problems like off axis response and dial in the image even more with time alignment.

black magic

I have my momo components in Q-logic kick panels in my civic and I think the staging is pretty good (it'd be better if i put the tweeters in the a-pillars). But since i have nearly no experience that doesn't mean much.



But I like my foot space, so I'll be fabricating my new speakers into the door and getting rid of the kicks. Plus I'm afraid someone will accidentally kick my speakers!

MacLeod

I think Q Forms rocks. Good for them for making kick panels anybody can use and install. Not everybody can afford a $1000 custom set from an installer so a $120 set of Q forms and youre in business.

All you have to do is go buy a $30 Dynamat 4 ft2 wedge pack and a $3 box of non hardening modeling clay from Walmart and those things will be plenty sturdy. Of course youll lose some midbass since you cant seal the back wave off from the front wave but if youve got dedicated midbass speakers youre all set.

Deadof_knight

Lets not forget the distance farther also makes them better location in front of you.... alot of this depends on the car.....

Deadof_knight

making sure the door is as dead as possible makes for improtant part of the install no matter where they are ......