help with sound problem

brabbit17

Hello all, after reading this forum for a long time, I finally joined. I need some help with a problem. I am new to car audio so if the answer to this question is simple, please bear with me.
I have a 99 toyota 4runner that had the stock stereo and speakers. I have never hated the sound from it, in fact I always thought it sounded good for a stock system. I decided to upgrade the stereo and the speakers. After many hours of reading, I bought a jvc avx820 stereo and polk db6501 components as I plan on getting a sub at some point. After hooking up everything, I am very disappointed with the quality of the sound that I am getting. The treble is very harsh and even distorted on certain songs. I have no idea what could be causing this and am almost ready to give up. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Brad

zarrdoss

have you messed with the eq or bass and treble?

brabbit17

no, i dont like to use the eq settings as my recordings are of good quality. it almost sounds like the tweeters are blown out, but theyre brand new

zarrdoss

Sometimes its not the quality of your recordings, just the acoustics of your cars interior to overcome. Stock systems are kind of engineered for that particular vehicle, you might give it a try, If no luck then I wold check your connections and settings.

brabbit17

ok, new test results.

I pulled the speakers out of the car and hooked them up to an old pioneer home theater receiver that I have. It puts out 100w at 8 ohms while the jvc stereo is 20ish rms at 4 ohms. Am I correct in thinking that since the speakers are 4 ohms that they are getting more power from the home theater than from the jvc stereo even though the impedance doesnt match? By the way, the speakers sounded fine when I hooked them up this way, no hint of distortion. Could my troubles be because the car stereo isnt powerful enough for the speakers?

zarrdoss

Yep most components don't run so good on deck power, I would be in the market for an amp maybe when you get your sub you can get a multi-channel, sorry I missed the part where you don't have an amp. but most of the time you will have to tweek the eq a little to compensate for road noise acoustics etc IMO.

brabbit17

alright, thanks for the help

tk421

get an installer or experienced car stereo afficianado to listen to and check your system. it could be many problems. eg: HU has loudness on, EQ settings wrong, poor quality HU, not enough power to HU, speakers installed improperly, rear wave cancellation, speakers electrically out of phase in the car.

arun1963

Your xovers will have a toggle switch for tweeter attenuation, set this to the min. This should help.

MacLeod

The EQ isnt for fixing the sound of the recording, its for correcting for the crappy listening environment that is the inside of a car.

Also, a head unit is a horrible power source. It barely makes 10 watts per channel and youll run out of clean power very fast. Chances are youre listening to a lot of distortion from the head unit because its simply running out of grunt.

Another thing to remember, the stock speakers in your car are made to have good bass. They do this to mask the fact there is no subwoofer. So they make decent bass - everything else sucks. A set of component speakers are made to reproduce midrange and high frequencies very well and to leave the sub bass stuff to the sub. So pretty much no component set youll buy will have as much bass as your stock speakers, but theyll have much better mids and highs. Invest in a small sub 8" sub and a 50-75 watt per channel, 4 channel amp. Run the Polks off the front channels and the sub off the rear 2 bridged. This wont be huge power but it will be 10 times better than running off the head unit.

brabbit17

thanks for the pointers everyone, I started looking at amps and subs today, i guess ill just do it all a bit sooner than i planned. Im thinking about the alpine pdx-5 since it will allow me to buy 1 amp to run front, back and sub when i collect all those components. Any thoughts on a good sub to match this, i was thinking sealed box and 2 10s or 1 12? I listen to mostly rock/metal so i dont want boomy, muddy bass, just some low end presence.

arun1963

You could also look at not running rears. You could bi-amp the comp's of the front and rear amp channels and just run the sub.

The pdx-5 puts out 300watts rms at 2ohm for the sub. If you hooked up two 10's, each would get about 150 watts. You may be better off giving one 10 in a sealed box like you said, the full 300 watts.

MacLeod

Id go with a single 12 in a sealed box.