Got my Boston SX50's hooked up!
JoshParsons84
Posts: 565
Today I got my Boston SX50's hooked up to my Alpine PDX-4.400. Compared to having blown Pro60's ate the hell up with distortion and only driver side working these SX's are nothing short of miraculous! Now....the reason my Pro's died was because they was never dialed in and EQ'd right - anywhere and distortion set in like a virus. Sorta like a real nice computer ate totally up with a Trojan, it's totally worthless. I wanna keep these Bostons for a while 1. because they sound fantastic but also they have to last until I can save up for some Focal's or Boston's Z series. Could I have some input on what I should adjust my knobs to on my amp? And also on my Alpine CDA-9831 deck? I don't know how to tune and properly set up EQ....sorry for bein noob but I finally got me some instead of saying I'm gonna get this and I'm gonna get that!!! LOL
Post edited by JoshParsons84 on
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Chances are you blew your pro60's because your gains were set too high. That was the virus. Poor tuning and eq would not kill a speaker. Too much power would. The pro's were rated for 125watts at 3ohm. At 3ohm your amp would put out enough to kill the speakers over a period of time, if thw gains were set too high.
Set your volume to about 80% and your gain to min. ow raise the gain to the point where you just begin to hear distortion. Then back off on the gains a bit. -
JoshParsons84 wrote: »Today I got my Boston SX50's hooked up to my Alpine PDX-4.400. Compared to having blown Pro60's ate the hell up with distortion and only driver side working these SX's are nothing short of miraculous! Now....the reason my Pro's died was because they was never dialed in and EQ'd right - anywhere and distortion set in like a virus. Sorta like a real nice computer ate totally up with a Trojan, it's totally worthless. I wanna keep these Bostons for a while 1. because they sound fantastic but also they have to last until I can save up for some Focal's or Boston's Z series. Could I have some input on what I should adjust my knobs to on my amp? And also on my Alpine CDA-9831 deck? I don't know how to tune and properly set up EQ....sorry for bein noob but I finally got me some instead of saying I'm gonna get this and I'm gonna get that!!! LOL
Have you ever heard the Boston Z series first hand? If so, how would you describe the sound? -
I have not heard the Z's but have heard the new Pro SE's and they're freaking bad ****! I'm telling ya dude I love the Boston sound.
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Chances are you blew your pro60's because your gains were set too high. That was the virus. Poor tuning and eq would not kill a speaker. Too much power would. The pro's were rated for 125watts at 3ohm. At 3ohm your amp would put out enough to kill the speakers over a period of time, if thw gains were set too high.
Bingo!
Setting an EQ wrong will only make them sound bad but wont hurt them. Granted if you were to crank up say 80 Hz by 10 db it would make it more likely to clip the amp but I agree that if it wasnt due to faulty speakers from the get go, chances are the gains were too high and they simply overpowered them.polkaudio sound quality competitor since 2005
MECA SQ Rookie of the Year 06 ~ MECA State Champ 06,07,08,11 ~ MECA World Finals 2nd place 06,07,08,09
08 Car Audio Nationals 1st ~ 07 N Georgia Nationals 1st ~ 06 Carl Casper Nationals 1st ~ USACi 05 Southeast AutumnFest 1st
polkaudio SR6500 --- polkaudio MM1040 x2 -- Pioneer P99 -- Rockford Fosgate P1000X5D -
Well lemme give you the lowdown on my current setup and tell me where (IF) it's wrong at. First of all the sub (Boston SPG555 in sealed box) is blown all to hell same way the Pro's did. That being said my settings are:
EQ - 4-Channel Amp
CH - 1/2
Gain: 11:00 HP Filter: 120Hz
CH - 3/4
Gain: 10:00 HP Filter: 160Hz
EQ - Mono Amp
Gain: 10:00 Gain Select: 0.1V - 1.0V LP Filter: 160Hz Subsonic Filter: Off
EQ - CD Player
X-Over
HPF: 120Hz LPF: 160Hz
EQ1
-08 2.0 60
EQ2
-03 1.5 150
EQ3
-02 2.0 1K
EQ 4
+03 1 10.0K
I generally turn the volume to 25 when I get loud with the max volume being 35. My subwoofer level goes to +15 with rock it usually stays at +4 or +5 and rap being about 0 or +1. I feel NOW (hopefully) that my EQ settings are right. My installer set my 4-CH amp so I hope he knows what he's doing LOL. Does my Mono amp sound right? As well as my CD Deck EQ settings? My only question besides how can I master tweaking lol is what is my gain select? And what is my subsonic filter? If my gain select is supposed to match up how many volts my deck is when I switch it over to 1.0V - 8.0V I have to turn the gain on my amp much higher about 11:00 or even 12:00. And I think I read on this forum that your subsonic filter is supposed to be turned off?
Now with all that information and everything how can I tell what my slope is, and all that greek everybody seems to know around here? Also on another note I haven't set my TA, but I do have my measurements. I'm gonna go back over my deck manual and see if I can figure out the correct times. I'll repost back later with some more updates on the sound process!! -
Start by identifying what sort of sound you want. Do you want sound that will seduce your senses or one that will assault it. Both ways are legit, in fact most young people today want the latter. That's just the way it is. This post is from the standpoint of showing you the first way. That way you would have experienced both and then you can take an informed call.
As you know car audio is very different from home audio. To get the 2ch effect in your car, you have to manage different things from what you manage in your 2 ch setup. Since you're managing different things, the terminology is different. It's not Greek and Latin.
The first thing you have to do is to get your speakers in phase. At home, you sit equidistance from your speakers and they are in phase. In a car you need TA to achieve this. Measuring and the speaker distances is a starting point. After that its about playing around till it sounds right. Running only front comps and a sub gives the best results. Rears add some phase and cancellations even with TA.
Once your speakers are in phase, you need to balance across the 20-20khz range. If you break up the sound into four parts, sub bass (20-60hz), mid bass (80-200hz), midrange (300-3khz) and highs (3khz upwards, all appx values). The four ranges should be balanced with each other and should complement each other. No one range should overpower or be weaker than the others. Ideally you need to do this two ways. One for correcting imbalance for left / right and then level matching across the range. With your hu I think you may just have the later.
Now lets see what your drivers are doing, based on your xover selection. Your sub is playing way upto 200hz, with the cut off at 160. Apart from distorting the sound, this is pushing your driver to its limit and beyond. Now, when you pump up the gain to +4/+5, you're driving your amp into clipping killing your sub.
Your mids are kicking in at around 100hz when they should kick in at 40hz. I'm figuring that you have tons of boom in the 80-300 range, which you are trying to manage by running 60hz at -8 om your eq.
Set this mid bass right by crossing sub and mid somwhere in the 50-80hz range. Try different settings and see what works best for you. Once you change the xover point set EQ1 to -2 at 80hz, set EQ2 to -3/-4 at around 300hz at a 1.5 q curve. Set Eq3 to -5 at 1 khz on a q slope of 2. Set eq4 to -4 at 8khz
Bypass everything at the amp. The gains at 10 for the front channels and 8:30 for the rears. The mono is fine at 10.
Dial this in and see how it sounds. -
WOW!!! Thank you so much!!! I'll repost with latter results
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results?
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Sorry for not being on as of late....been working 12's+ so been pretty wore out and not a lot of time to put on my stereo. But, I did get my **** set the way arun told me to. On my EQ 1 doesn't have 80Hz I have 40Hz,60Hz,90Hz so I set it on 90, EQ 2 is 100Hz,150Hz,200Hz so set it to 200, EQ 3 500Hz,700Hz,1kHz,2kHz,4kHz,6kHz set at 1kHz but I think 700Hz might sound a lil better, EQ 4 was a little tricky it's 10kHz,12.5kHz,15kHz set at 10 but the boost at -5 just sounds completely muffled so it's at +3 I like my tweeters just a tad bit shrill, very very little.
Now for my xover's...still lost on them...i have no clue even as a starting point what to try them at. Suggestions would be really appreciative. Also the damn TA is still confusing the hell out of me. I wanna learn this **** so damn bad but I got a real bad feeling that I'm going down the same path as my damn Pro's and I don't want that again. I know for you all that know this already it's frustrating repeating yourself over and over but I apologize because I cannot grasp this car audio thing very quickly.
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The idea of giving you the eq settings was to start you at a a point so that you could then play with frequency selections and q curves to see the diff each change makes. If you analyze each change for, 'better or worse?' and 'why', you will eventually get to a setting that works best for you.
Page 14 of your hu's manual gives you the way to set hpf / lpf, which is your crossover point. You can select from 80hz, 120hz and 160hz. Select 80hz for both lpf and hpf. The manual does'nt talk about slopes option so I'm assuming these are default. Prob with default slopes is that they tend to be shallow. 12-18db/oct. At a lpf of 80hz your sub would still be playing well into the 100's. But lets do this for now. Its better than the sub running into 250hz, the way it is set now.
Page 16-17 of your manual gives you the way to set your time alignment. Go through it and try to set it. You can do it two ways. One for each speaker individually and one is front left and rear left together and FR/RR together. Do it the second way.
Sure, you'll have spend some time to set things up properly. But at the end of the day you have to set it. No one can do it by remote for you. Hang in there you'll be well rewarded. -
Update.....still haven't gotten the hang of TA so haven't gotten it set yet. My current settings sound amazing!! I'm trying to hear ambient noises instead of how loud and clean my speaks are, which they are btw. In different recordings I can hear people like talking and having conversations as if the originial recording people was all just hanging out lol. I'm guessing that's what I'm supposed to hear is very faint voices and sounds? I know I turn the vol up to 28 of 35 (which is 80%) it's freaking loud!!! But, not only is is super duper loud but it's also very very clean and when I listen to heavy metal and rock the snare drum is real tight and kinda kicky which is what I was looking for. It's all a learning experience and it's fun along the way, the only set back is I don't wanna blow my new speakers even if they're JUST SX's the way I did my expensive Pro's. I feel now I got everything dialed in and it sounds great although I just have a lil bit more tweaking here and there nothing major just....to kinda familiarize myself with everything and hear everything myself.
Arun you got me started pal and I appreciate you for that and initially that's all I'm looking for is just somebody to get my settings at least correct enough that my **** won't blow again! Now it's up to me to customize the sound to my liking. Right now we got a damn foot of snow out so I prolly might not listen to the radio for a minute. Thanks again Arun and I'll repost in a couple of days! -
Glad things are working out. At 10ish gain, your speakers will be fine. The faint voices you hear in the recordings would earlier have been smudged out with the sub running into the 200+hz range. Ideally you should run your sub lower than the 80hz, but its fine for now.
TA will help bring your speakers in phase and the sound presentation will be from the front. Try what the manual says measure the distance each speaker is at, calculate the ta value in ms as per the given formula and feed those values in for a start. See what happens.
You don't have to thank me. I'm just a noob like u. Maybe just one step higher -
80Hz on my amp? Or 80Hz on my deck? On my deck my filter wont go below 80Hz...my choices are 80Hz,120Hz,or 160Hz. If on amp what do you think I should try? Basically what I don't know about crossovers is what turning it up higher means and turning it down lower means. If I could grasp that concept I'm sure I could find a good crossover point myself based on ears.
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Damnit! My mono is still clipping and shutting off...I've got my xover set at 65Hz with my LPF on my deck set at 80Hz. What am I still doing wrong? When it shuts off I have to lower my subwoofer level on my deck one notch then turn it off and turn it back on. I know that can't be good for it.
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JoshParsons84 wrote: »Damnit! My mono is still clipping and shutting off...I've got my xover set at 65Hz with my LPF on my deck set at 80Hz. What am I still doing wrong? When it shuts off I have to lower my subwoofer level on my deck one notch then turn it off and turn it back on. I know that can't be good for it.
At a xover of 63-80,clipping will almost 100% be the result of running your gains too high. Don't boost the sub gains from your hu. What amps are you running? your gains dial on the amp goes from 7 o'clock to 5 o'clock. With most amps 7 o'clock position is min and 5 is max. On some amps this is reverse i.e. 7 is max and 5 is min. In this case setting the gains at 10ish would mean setting them at 3/4 of max, way too high.
The gains dial would have volts mentioned on it. Where is the min at 5 or 7 o'clock position? If you're totally confused, just give me your amp make and model and i'll check it for you. -
JoshParsons84 wrote: »80Hz on my amp? Or 80Hz on my deck? On my deck my filter wont go below 80Hz...my choices are 80Hz,120Hz,or 160Hz. If on amp what do you think I should try? Basically what I don't know about crossovers is what turning it up higher means and turning it down lower means. If I could grasp that concept I'm sure I could find a good crossover point myself based on ears.
Leave your deck setting at 80hz for lpf and set lpf from your amp at 50hz.
The xover point defines where output from one speaker is tapering off and where the other speaker is taking over. Eg a xover point of 50hz between the sub and your components means that the sub will start tapering off at 50hz. Above 50hz is being played stronger by the mid driver of your components.
You also have to factor in the slope at which you're cutting off. This is normally mentioned in db/oct. A crossover of 50 hz does not mean that your sub is not playing anything higher than 50 or that your mid isn't playing below 50. They are. How far below and above 50 is defined by the slope.
So a xover at 50 on a slope of say 12db/oct means that your sub is playing 1 octave above 50 hz i.e. 100hz, 12db lower than its playing 50hz. Likewise your mid is playing 1 octave lower than 50 i.e. 25hz 12 db lower than its playing 50hz.
Since you don't want to 'hear' your your sub playing anything above like 70hz (hearing your sub above 70hz would muddy your mid-bass, the range of 70-200hz that your mid driver is supposed to play). It is always preferable to have a lower sub-mid xover point on steep slopes. Eg on my hu I cross the sub-mid at 50 hz with the sub on a 36 db/oct and the mid on a 24db/oct. This means that my sub would play 100hz (1 octave up) 36db lower than it plays 50hz. At 100 hz, my mid would be much stronger so I would'nt 'hear' the sub at 100.
I hope I have'nt totally confused you. -
Huh? What did you just say? LOL Yes man you've successfully confused the total hell out of me hope your happy. OK I understand leaving my LPF on my deck to 80Hz and then set my amp xover on 50Hz, which would be at 6:00 then right? And I think I read in my manual that my slope on both of amps are at 12 db/oct. So what does that mean then....12 db/oct? You've prolly explained it already I'm just not understanding all that well.
Oh I'm so sorry BTW my 4 channel is an Alpine PDX-4.400 and my mono is an Alpine PDX-1.1000. By far the 2 most solid amps I've ever had the pleasure of hearing to tell you the truth. -
Sorry bro for confusing the hell out of you. You asked about xovers so I tried to explain, obviously I over complicated things. Anyway, great set of amps. Thats one part of your setup that is pretty much upgrade proof.
Lets keep this simple. Keep your LPF / HPF at the deck at 80hz like it is. At the amps:
PDX 4.100:
Select hpf for front and rear channels and set xover dial to 80hz. Set the gains at 10 o'clock for front channels and 9 for the rear ch.
PDX 1.1000:
Engage LPF and set the xover dial to like 60hz. Yes, I'm setting it slightly lower on the amp than the hu. Set the gains to like 9:30. I'm keeping your amp gains a little lower cause you have a tendency to bump up the sub gains at your deck.
If you can overcome this tendency you can raise the amp gain to say 10.
Thats it. With this generic setting, your speakers should be safe. Next you can start dabbling with TA and see how that goes. -
Well, changed ALL my settings to what you specify and.....it all sounds wonderful however, my subwoofer doesn't hit good until I turn my sub level on my deck to bout 7/8 of 15 and I know it's NOT supposed to be that high. Only thing I can think of is that it's where the rubber surround is missing a chunk of woofer LOL.
In the meantime....I've been searching and hunting and thinking of what sub I wanna replace my blown SPG. I've thought of all kinds of things but a couple I've narrowed down in particular and the first one I thought of was building a box for 2 of those SPG's 2ohm in a custom ported box. That option is kinda pricey. Another thing I thought of was a lot cheaper and I'm thinking about getting the db1222. I bet it would sound fantastic hooked to my Alpine 1000 watt PDX along with my loud and crisp Bostons up front. What do y'all think about that? -
LOL the settings aren't going to work if you have a busted sub. Change it.
If youre thinking of going the polk way, look at the mm or the sr series. 200-400 watts rms would be plenty for good presence. -
See...I think I've developed a new catagory or car audio but dont have a name for it. I like real loud sound quality for speakers but when it comes to the sub have it set up for SPL and low dB. SQ + SPL= ?SQL? If so...then thats the competition I wanna set my stereo up for lol. So what's wrong with the Polk DB's? I heard them hooked to less power and they sounded great for the price. I liked them cuz $300 for 2 Polk subs IN a custom box was a great price. So...the MM's huh? Well have to check into them cuz still gotta build a box, and if that then go ahead and get the SR's. I bet the SR's would sound good hooked to my Alpine.
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The db's are fine. No issues. The SR's are a pure sq sub. Yes they would sound great with the pdx.
