SR104 Confusion...

Beautiful sub by the way

Be conservative with the gain and volume, you'll want to break it in before you start playing it loud.

I've heard from 60 hours to 200 hours.

Me personally? I'm in my truck everyday for a minimum of 1 1/2 hrs each day and everytime I've owned a new sub(s), I give it a good month or so until I start to give things more volume. You'll hear the difference too with deeper, more dynamic bass as the subwoofer begins to break in.

As for power, 400 watts can make that sub move so don't worry about that. I had a JL Slash 1000/1 hooked up to a single 10" SR and loved every minute of it. Just make sure to put it in a properly-sized enclosure. I recommend a sealed enclosure for best SQ.

Get the sub in a box about 1^ft. Recommended box sizes are normally on the conservative side. Keep the gains low as mentioned. If you have it setup right, you shouldn't hear the sub bottoming out. It's either the box size or the gains.

Set the amp gains at about 1/3. Your gains are on the higher side. See if that helps. If you don't want to change the box add a bit of polyfill. Fools the sub into thinking the box is bigger.

According to specs your headunit puts out 4 volts.
In reality it's less than 4 and you only get close to 4 on max volume but I'm not looking to turn this into headunit voltage topic.
3/4 gain is def too much since ifrc D4000.4's gain is adjustable UP TO 6volts (6v is the "lowest" setting on the knob) so 4V should be as arun said somewhere in 1/3 area.

and yes, get a bigger box, I bet you'll notice the difference right away. When sub is broken in you can also add some poly to you rbox just to see if it'll sound any better. It will sound a bit different but it's up to you to decide if it's good different or bad different.

1/2 way is fine or maybe a little more. If you have a remote or a bass level control you can always attenuate it.

You have to consider a few things

(1) Your HU is rarely going to output 4V with music, most likely 1.5V.
(2) Different music will have low frequencies at different levels. Hard rock has a more powerful kick drum and bass lines than lets say alt rock or lighter rock. I would go with the gain at halfway or a little higher so that you will still get good bass on music where the bass is a little lacking. You can always turn it down via remote or bass level on a HU on songs that have more bass in them.

Here is a link explaining gain setting http://elettromedia-usa.com/event-schedules/tech-tips/amplifiers/how-to-adjust-gain

This explains why you can't match up your amp to 4V if your HU outputs 4V, play it by ear. I can almost guarantee that if you put your gain at 1/3 its going to sound like your sub is barely working. If the sub sounds fine then you are good. If it sounds questionable turn the gain down, its that simple. Sometimes its easier to set gains with the crossover opened up to 100Hz or 120Hz, this helps to hear distortion.

arun1963 wrote: »

1/3rd the way up, on gains is a good and safe starting point. For a while I was running my 12" svc off the pa200.1 with the gains at 1/3 and it was great. Upto halfway is normally safe though. 3/4 is way too high.

I'll agree with you there, 3/4 you are probably getting close to 300 mV as far as sensitivity which is going to cause clipping. I have mine set at 1 o clock and it works out well with no audible distortion. It really depends on the source material. I think if you listen to tons of low bass/electronnic/rap etc it will distort earlier than if you listen to rock.

My alpine amp has a 'nom' notch on the gain scale which is at the halfway point which is supposed to be a good place to start setting gains.

Get the balance between the speakers and sub to the point where you can't tell which is louder. That's well balanced. Lower whatever dominates. Do this while keeping the gains under half way, both for the speakers and sub.

Leave the sub gains on the hu at 0. Get a good blend using the amps and then you can raise it a bit from the hu when you want some extra punch.

HU voltage ratings are grossly over rated. My 5V pio puts out 4.3V at 64/64 volume. It would probably get close to 5V if I engage stuff like loudness, BBE, etc. At normal listening 46-48, it's 2.2V. I'll take it to 52-53 when I want a bit extra and that is 2.8V. The gains on my amps are at 3V. Works well.

Actually yes, you were supposed to turn up the gains with the HU at max volume. With you turning the HU down, you turned the gain on the amps way up. The point of this is to find max volume while avoiding clipping. 9 to 10 oclock sounds right for full range components however.

Don't be afraid about turning everything up they will be fine, you have a good crossover on them, set it to 60 and you will be fine.

I would suggest just turning off your rears. It sounds better and it requires less sub power.

Volume changes of 20% are going to be noticeable. The car audio shop is used to dealing with the average consumer that can't tell the difference between a cd and a 128kbps mp3 file.

You are going to want that box on the large side to get the low end extension, otherwise you will have too much 80Hz and above information which will sound sloppy.

I heard a big difference in my box when i added 1/2 pound of poly fill, so definitely a volume change that large is going to matter.