creyc

Duh its not gonna be fixed free, he said he touched the two speaker wires together. heh But sending it back to rockford can mean sending it to their repair shop for a fee I'm kinda surprised it didn't go into protect or fuse-out before the fets cooked. Those new rockfords have pretty touchy protect circuits...

Degrade the sound quality?? It's sub bass...it's a pretty damn easy signal, you could carry it over a coat hanger.

I would just use an inline crossover on the RCA, like one of these nifty devices: 30 Hz 20 Hz

hey tell your boss you've got priorities!

Measure it with your DMM and find out?

4 Havocs it is...

lol. what do you know?

Because two 18" BL's would probably be close to (4) 15" Havocs anyway, probably a bit louder on a meter. I just wanted to see if Fi's bad boy sub would work for me...doesn't sound like it would. And swapping out for (4) 15" BLs would be a good option except I don't have the $$ for that.

So it sounds like BTLs are made for numbers, not music then? I don't REALLY care what the meter says, music comes first. But as long as it sounds good on music, give me a 150 because I'm currently at about 145 and need more. Seems like BTL's aren't my route though...

I'm not too interested in putting insane gobs of power on either one. In fact the thing that interested me most about the BTL is how loud it gets even on < 1000w due to its efficiency. It's a LOUD sub, this i know. I was hoping some of you guys who have heard both a Q (or Havoc if you have) and a BTL, could give me more of your thoughts and opinions on the way the two sounded. Almost everyone says "A Q is for SQ and a BTL is for SPL" but no one explains why the BTL sounds "bad" or what it lacks in comparison to a Q. I'm looking for more opinion than fact here guys so lets hear it! What do you think of the two? What bugs you about the way a BTL sounds on music?

I'm running (2) 15" AA Havocs, which are similar to fully loaded Fi Q's. They sound great, get low, and pretty loud too. (metering around 145 dB) Anyway it's not loud enough for me of course, so I'm looking at all my options and the BTL has caught my eye, particularly after seeing some of its amazing efficiency numbers compared to my subs. It sounds like these BTL's would convert a LOT more of my electrical (amplifier) power into sound power, though I don't know at what SQ expense. I use my system for music listening, so I need to be loud along a fairly wide bandwidth. I know this is mostly determined by the enclosure, but switching to BTLs is gonna sound different no matter what, and I'm trying to find out what that is, and will it still sound good enough for music? (rock, alternative, indie stuffs) If BTL's are gonna sound mechanical and rough I'll say skip it and just add more of my current 15's.

If you have a digital multimeter I would just tone the wires out to find out which are which. Most multimeters have a continuity mode where it will beep if you're touching two ends of the same wire with the leads. Problem solved.

1500 RMS is pushing a Q if you're not VERY careful. Don't even consider it without cooling option.

34Hz. Now go build it.

For a daily I would say around or under 5000 RMS for the subs. Beyond that charging and power supply starts becoming an issue and requires multiple alternators and banks of batteries. A good HO alt and a few big batteries should keep a SAZ-3000D or RF T4k happy.

For most music a 38Hz tune works pretty well for my ears. Most of the rap music is in the low 40s, with few exceptions in the upper 30s and very little content in the mid-low 30s. Sould Survivor or the low note in White Girl for example have a pretty gnarly low 32Hz bassline while Prime Minister on the other hand as well as most Lil Jon songs are in the 40s. You'll just have to build something and experiment. To be pretty safe I would tune at 34 but you'll sacrifice a bit of SPL most likely.

148.7

Voltage drop? Put a meter on the DC input of the amp and see if when you hear it "dipping" if the voltage is also dipping..

How old is the alt?

That sounds like an alternator issue to me. But then you didn't mention if you upgraded your alternator charging wire, or the rest of the big 3? Check that first. I'm running a SAZ-3000D at the full 3kW off a 250A mechman alt, yellow top and kinetik 1800. On songs with long bass sections, like Prime Minister, Airforces, etc, I drop to mid 13v but never lower. So with you pulling even less power from the amp, your alternator alone should be able to feed it enough power I would think. If that was my setup I'd temporarily take out a few of those batteries and see if the problem is identical. I don't think the batteries alone could be pulling enough current (while charging) to cause this kind of an issue but may as well check..

No chance the coils were wired out of phase with each other? I did that once on some subs, slowly rolled up the volume only hearing faint sound from the sub. Measured impedance, measured amp voltage, scratched head..felt the subs they were WARM. A-HAH! If they played even remotely loud however that's not likely the problem, since the coils (in a perfect world) would directly complement each other and the net output would be 0. In practice they aren't so perfect, but still shouldn't be terrible. 3000 watts is no joke, either. 3000W at DC will cook ANY woofer.

Do you have to dance in real life, like a wii sorta? I mean computer games are fun cause you can do things (like kill 100s of people with rocket launchers) that would otherwise be...'tricky' to do in real life. Dancing...seems...uh, boring? I guess there's a MMPOGRGGM? for everything.. (can't remember that abbreviation!)

blowthrough is the only way to fit (4) 15's in a single cab truck, lol. It roughly means building a sub box in the bed (often bandpass), cutting a hole out of the back wall and running the port into the cab. This keeps the subs OUT of the cab, but the sound IN the cab. Search for blow throughs (or walk throughs, just larger scale) and you'll find lots of info on how its done, what type of accordion boot to use, etc etc..

Wish I had a need for um, bump for some nice woofers!

I've heard tons of opinions on this. Some say mini single cab trucks with toppers, because its easy to compress the small cabin. Some say big cargo vans, obviously tons of room for a massive system Some say vehicles that get naturally loud due to their shape, like a CRX And of course my personal favorite is an SUV for a daily driver. It's comfortable, "normal" looking enough for daily use, and unlike my experiences with small pickups, has a much better "sound" component of it which somehow makes it easier to get great sounding bass. Possibly the worst vehicles would be small sedans, with limited trunk space and tons of work required to convert to an effective walled setup. Although people certainly get crazy loud in sedans, so that goes to show there's an exception to all of these.