kickass audio

Skullz is correct. Fusion is big on the 45Hz bass boost. Thats all the "q" knob is for is a boost in the 45Hz frequency area. You want to have this set as low as possible. If you had a tool like an oscope or the smd dd-1 you could set it a little bit to see how high you can turn it up before it clips/distorts but for now just leave it all the way down.

yea i dont think you have that screw i mentioned above. I have never seen that case alt before. Id give mechman a call if you can. Id hate to mislead you or anything like that.

Who is this directed toward, me or the op?

Depends, is your stock battery sealed or vented? Is your stock battery location actually inside your vehicle? If the battery is vented DO NOT put them in your vehicle. Doing so will expose you to gasses that can kill you when you breathe them in and you cant smell the gas either from what ive been told.

Mechman used to (idk if they still do this anymore) but rihgt near the heatsink on the back of your alternator where the regulator is there is a tiny screw in there. I dont have a pic but there was one on here somewhere. They only had these in the regulators with the red painted heatsinks. If your alt has this then it will be a pain in the butt to get to sometimes depending on your engines setup but all you need to do is get behind there and turn the screw a little to adjust it. It will be the same procedures as posted by crunkjuice but the adjustment screw is in the back of the alt. If you can look at the back of your alt and look in particular where the small and short heatsink is. If its painted red then you should have this, if its not then you prob dont have it. If you dont see it post a pic of the rear of your alt and i can see whether you have it or not.

Hahaha i didnt mount my battery at all. What i did is made my box the EXACT width of room i had from the side case of the battery rack to the wheel well hump i had in the rear seat. Then what i had for where the rear seats are is a little hump so the batteries cannot slide up if i slammed on my brakes hard. i did have a problem with the batteries sliding back a little when i hit the gas hard or went up a steep hill. My dad gave me the brilliant idea to cut up the rubber paddles he had for our old snow thrower that we replaced the paddles on a few years ago and i cut two pieces that were about 2 inches wide and 1 inch deep. I put those pieces on each corner at the rear battery which is near my lift gate. I also took the pieces of rubber and cleaned them up so they were really sticky to the touch and put them in. I cant get the battery to slide, even if i went and pulled on them i cant get them to budge. I doubt you can do what i did since you prob dont have rubber as thick as the paddle wheels i had (its about 1/4 thick) but heres another idea. Get some 2x2 or 2x4 boards and make them so that they wrap around your d3100 tightly but so that it has some room for you to lift it out if it needs to be replaced. Once you have that case made for it take some plywood (or mdf, maybe scrap pieces from your box if you have any) and cut it to the outer dimensions of your battery and glue/screw it down so that the plywood is screwed tightly to the 2x2 or 2x4's you previously cut and assembled. Then once its put together put some carpeting for a enclosure on it and let the glue dry for 24 hours and then put it in. The only problem with this is that since you have a trunk, your carpeting in the trunk isnt really held in place like the carpeting in my truck which is screwed down in some spots. I think you will be alright for just using the same metal that they used that caught on fire on the battery but in a different way. Granted that isnt very strong and will easily break in a strong impact situation, it will hold the battery down well. Just get the battery up next to your subwoofer box and then wrap the metal around the side of the battery and screw it in tight into the enclosure. For any wires that may have a risk of rubbing and getting punctured on the metal bracket, simply get some wiring grommet casing (idk what its really called but its that ribbed plastic that your wiring harness' are contained within on your vehicles stock wires) and put that near there so it wont cut through. Also, here is the quick pics and vids i posted of my system as a run-through. I didnt make a build log as i was rushing to get it done and didnt want to screw around with pausing to take pics. http://www.stevemeadedesigns.com/board/topic/116985-kickass-audios-new-system/ If you need me to, i can measure the dimensions of my d3100 and make a drawing for how to cut the 2x2's and put it on the box.

Thats good you are getting a new battery. What you could do if you wanted it to look good is to make a little hold down for around the SIDES of the battery out of 2x2 boards or maybe even 2x4's and then carpet it with carpeting from your enclosure. I did the same thing but for the 2x2's i used on each of my amps to raise them up above the box so they can breathe and i carpeted them with the left over pieces from my carpeting. It turned out great for me and i didnt glue any of them down, i just held it tightly and hit it with my pneumatic staple gun. You really need to improve those wires though as that will deff be your next problem. Get the rubber grommets that crimp ring terminals come with and put that on your wire, cut the wires end to the right length and then take the wire terminal and crimp it on a bench vice (or anything else like that so it has a tight crimp on the wire), then i put some flux on the top of the wire inside the crimp terminal and then soldered the wire in with lead free solder (expensive as all hell but works great). I can hang from the crimp terminals i made for how tight they are held in place. Take it from me, i made lazy cuts on my previous builds and i almost lost my car from it a few times. Just crimping a terminal is alright but you can still yank the wire out of that and start a fire. Now if you crimp it and solder it, i find it has a way stronger bond and is damn near impossible to rip it out of the terminals crimp.

I know its out of your price range and im not trying to be a SMD nut hugger either but i run a single Ascendant Audio SMD 18 in my truck in a 5.5 cubic foot box NET tuned to 30Hz and it gets down and is power hungry. I slam my smd at a average rating of 4kw+ rms and sometime i burp it to piss ppl off and i feed it over 5800w RMS and it takes it like a champ. The amps barely get any warmth to them and the coil on the smd is cool. I really like how my setup turned out and i recommend to use one if you can wait to buy one. They are costly and big but trust me, i love how mine sounds. It slams the hell out of anybody elses system i have heard with multiple 15 and 18's and it is very musical too. Just my 2 cents tho.

If i were you, idc how well the battery held a charge or passed a load test. The matter is that the battery melted and has a risk of cracking the case now if it is shocked or bumped and that can be dangerous. Granted these batteries wont leak acid if something touches them and the case cracks, it will start another fire. Buy a new D3100 battery, fix those crappy terminals you use for your wiring by cutting them right and soldering them on, and brace the battery the RIGHT way.

One quick question, was the XS D3100 installed by the shop owner or you? If it was installed by the shop owner, even if he didnt provide the battery he still is liable for it being installed in an unsafe manner. If you installed it, it is totally your fault for doing the install like that and the shop owner doesnt have to help you with any costs of repair or damages that were incurred.

Haha my setup wasnt that costly actually. Only 6k for what i paid and its worth over 8k. And another good tip is that batteries are mainly for storing power when your vehicle is off to give you some play time, to assist with voltage drop when your alt cant produce enough amperage to run your equipment, and to act as a buffer for storage from your alt to the amp. Other than that, your alt is what takes the full on force of keeping your voltage up high and charging your batteries up to the normal operating range of them. Also, for voltage drop, where is your amp in the vehicle grounded off to? If its a unibody construction vehicle, ground it to the strut tower or go full out and make a dedicated ground from front to back. If you have an actual frame you can use that to ground to. And you dont happen to have a capacitor in your system at all do you? I had one and as soon as i drained that puppy out of juice, it attacked my battery and alternator up front to get its power back and my voltage would drop badly until i removed it from the system for good. And finally, you cant really get rid of voltage drop unless you have more power from your alts than your max amount of current draw from your entire vehicles electrical system (this includes your amps) and a capacitor (very large one in my case but i wont use them ever again) to help with those quick bursts of voltage drop. Capacitors are made to work with a system where the electrical system is perfect but you have quick moments of voltage drop because your alternators Voltage Regulator does not work that fast and takes some time before it tells the alt to produce more power. The capacitor will take that time it takes for the alternator to realize it needs to pump out more juice and keep the voltage the same as well as it can. For a ground in my system, i didnt go balls out for the ground (yet, lol) and run a dedicated ground from the rear battery bank to the front battery. What i did was in the engine bay i took a ground from the negative of my battery, drilled a hole in the frame to fit a 3/8 bolt through it (threaded the frame hole so it screwed into itself) and then took a wire wheel brush to the frame to remove the paint and put the ground on up there. Then when i got done with it i painted over it 2 times to prevent rust and corrosion. For the rear, i took the cargo bolts that my truck had and removed one of them, then i bought a longer bolt at Valu and put that through the existing hole for the cargo bolt. Then under the truck i got a nut for that same bolt and put a wire from the bolt to the frame in the rear. I have .1 ohms of resistance in that ground wire and my power is equally the same for the front and rear. The ONLY time my lights flicker is if im at a stop and i dont rev up my engine (i idle at 600 RPM's) and my alt isnt putting out full power so when i go full tilt my lights will flicker and my voltage drops down to 13.5 some volts, give or take a few millivolts. Then if i start driving it goes right back up to 14.45 like its supposed to.

The idea of having multiple batteries kill your alt is b.s. if you ask me. I ran my first system in my Envoy off the stock 120 some odd amp alternator and i had a XS S3400 and D3100 in the system for power. I did NOT do the big-3 and only had a volt to at most 2 volts of drop at the peak of a bass hit. I never got the alt hot or anything either nor did i burn out a wire on the stock system. It can run it but the only real way you burn out alts is if your draw a shit ton of current and cannot get the power replaced. For example if you have amps like i do now and run them at the ohm load i do off a stock alt, you will slowly kill the alt as it will work its ass off to try and charge the batteries back up. As long as you dont drain the crap out of the batteries you will be perfectly fine to add them in your vehicle with the stock alt. I would if you can perform the big-3 as it does help more than you think with voltage drop and power transfer. I always have the tendency to get better batteries then a alternator to wrap it up for the electrical system. If your batteries are in good shape (floating voltage of 12.5+) you can just get a better alt and use that for now then get the batteries.

Im learning the box building game still but i think thats a little big for a single 18. Plus how the hell are you going to get that to fit in that car? I have a AA SMD 18" and it is in a box tuned to 30Hz and is 5.5 cubes NET, that means it does not include the displacement of the port at all. Now i have a slotted port since i thought it was a lot easier to make and my SMD gets down and beats the hell out of my truck. Also, what kind of power are you throwing at that sub? And i would brace the box too with it being only 3/4 thick, some wooden dowels from home depot will do a good job. With your box being that thin it can cause box flex and make it sound like crap. I would send RAM Designs a message on here and ask for his help. A good box design from him isnt much and he helped me with my box and it turned out perfect.

I would totally go after the shop. Hell i had a problem where i TOLD the shop i was going to be upgrading to a big ass system with 3000+ watts rms going to a solox subwoofer and i told them to give me the biggest wire i would need for it, money was no option for it either. The guy went into the back room and cut me 25 feet of 4 gauge cable. Well i installed it and he gave me a ANL fuse holder which did NOT have any reducers on it (at the time i never knew about them, i was getting into the car audio scene 2 years ago) and i told him "hey, the 4ga cable i bought from you was not holding into the fuse holder very well and i could pull it out without any force". He told me "just cut the jacket off one half of the cable and put it into the block with that, we do that all the time". I told him how retarded that sounded since you were not conducting power all around the wire, only on a part where the screw would sink into the wire and he insisted it was fine. So i did it and then a month later when i upgraded my amp from 300w rms to 1400w rms i smelled a burning smell whenever i drove and noticed i couldnt ever get a heavy bass hit to last without it turning the amp off and back on a lot. One day when i drove to college on the thruway it got so smelly that i pulled over and opened my hood to discover that the 4 gauge cable he sold me was burnt back 4 inches from the fuse block. It didnt short out on anything or come loose but was overloaded which i WARNED him about when i needed power wire. So me and my dad went to the shop and started a big war and fought with the co-owner of the company before the other owner came out and was nice enough to help me out. He gave me the same length of cable but in 1/0 and instead of cca, it was OFC cable, a new fuse block with fuse, and new crimp terminals for it all. He told me to take the old one out and return it back to him and i can keep the 1/0 for free. So i made out fairly well and was lucky it didnt go any farther before it did short out on the metal frame to my engine. Sorry to rant but just go back to the shop, bitch to all hell and make them fix it. They installed it either way and as long as you didnt recommend to do something as idiotic as this then they are at fault 100%. Do you have any pics before the battery caught on fire? If you have to take it to court to get money back and what not they will want to have pics to see what it looked like before it caught on fire to show it was functional and how sloppy the work was and that you didnt do the install. I promised the guy at the shop i got the wire from that if i didnt get this corrected i would go to the Attorney Generals office (i know the guy personally as a good friend) and shut his place down since my car could have burst in flames. And final say on this.. What i did with my batteries in the rear of my truck was to place them in a plastic battery holder. I bought mine online for like $20 but you can go to walmart and get them for the same price. They just look like a box but have openings for the battery to vent (it wont since its sealed up) and openings to feed a ton of power wires through. Then when i got my 4 d3100's i wired them all up as tight as i could and then noticed that the battery would slide just a bit if i stopped hard or hit the gas. So what i did was cut a thick piece of rubber from the old paddle wheels off my dads snow thrower and put them under the battery on the front and back and it doesnt slide one bit. Also, if you dont want to do those two things, XS Power sells hold down brackets for almost all their batteries. They are similar to what they dont want music posted above and can bolt into whatever you put them to. Edit: You could if you wanted to use the same method that they used in the shop with those plumbing hold down straps BUT DO NOT wrap it across the top. If the battery slide again and touches it, it will catch fire again. You could use those straps but wrap them around the sides of the battery and then brace it to the side of your subwoofer box or something. And since i think about how a-holes will try to screw you, the shop will prob say something like "well vehicles have bars that go across the middle of the battery on the top and they are safe" Those are ONLY safe because there is a tray at the bottom that the battery sits in and prevents it from moving around anywhere close to touching that bar to short out.

Way to make another thread about something you asked here http://www.stevemeadedesigns.com/board/topic/116395-good-bypass-module/page__p__1634378#entry1634378 Anyway, i have the exact same unit and mine does it too. Sometimes if i lean on something with the keys in my pocket, it will shift the board out from under the center of the buttons and i have to tap the remote lightly to make the lock and unlock keys work. They are perfectly fine to be a little wobbly as they are just two plastic buttons placed on a single piece of rubber so thats why they move a lot, and the buttons are a little smaller than the opening so it has a lot of wiggle room. Just a heads up, since those buttons on the front have a big opening, try to not expose it to rain or dust a whole lot. It is very easy for it to get past the buttons and travel on the board in the remote or on the screen. The remote is extremely easy to take apart, ive had mine apart to clean it every 4 months and have never had any problems. One thing i would recommend for it would be a screen protector like you use for a cell phone. I bought protectors for my droidx when i got the phone and had 2 extra protectors so i drew the outline of the screen and placed the protector over it. Now it doesnt get scratched and it has a matte finish so i can look at it in direct sunlight and it wont come back and blind my eyes.

You can only run the subs at .5 ohms, 2 ohms, or 4 ohms. If you wire each sub in parallel, it will mean each sub is down to 1 ohm. Now having two 1 ohm loads, the amp will take half of that and make it a half ohm. This is dangerous for your amp in a daily scenario. Now if you wired the subs in series, you can make each sub get a 4 ohm load. Now with two subs, your amp will see half the resistance and only put out power at 2 ohms. You cannot get any more power out of your amp unless you do like cleansierra said and buy a dual 4 ohm voice coil. If you did that, you would need to wire each sub in parallel and then connect it to your amp. It would then see a 1 ohm load and you will be getting almost 2kw of power to them. Dont do what i did and wire down lower than a rating you should be at for an amp. Granted my amps can take .5 ohm loads per amp, its supposed to be at 1 ohm strapped minimum. There is a lot of math and tools needed to find out if you can drop your amp down to a lower rating than it is capable of running. Plus you need electrical to back it up. Too much time, money, and experience to just jump into so DONT DO IT!! Just leave it how it is at 2 ohms or buy a dual 4 ohm coil config of the same sub and then get it to 1 ohm.

It shouldnt. I have an AA SMD 18 tuned to 30Hz in a 5.6 cubic foot box net and it slams to all hell and beyond but i can still hear my mids and highs perfectly fine even when the bass slams. I have my mids and highs on my dc audio 175.4 so they are all getting good power and they are set so that channel 1+2 are for the mids, and channel 3+4 are for the highs so i can control them better but either way i have no problem hearing my mids and highs over my sub. As it was said before, making a good box will help you with having great results. Also, if you plan to run your speakers off your headunit, it may have a risk of drowning out your mids and highs from the bass as there isnt enough power to defect the bass knocking them out. I noticed this greatly in my previous car, 1998 oldsmobile 88. I had a 12" Kicker Solox in a shitty ass prefab box that was tuned really high. It got loud and punched for the bass (not how i like it now with my new system tho) but my mids and highs were also kicker, i had kicker 5.25" components up front and a kicker 6x9 in the rear and ran them off my headunit and i couldnt hear them at all when the bass hit hard. So if you plan to use your headunit to power the mids and highs expect them to be easily drowned out from the bass but if you have them on an amp and properly tuned, you should hear the entire stage just fine.

thank you a ton!!! i read that but i must have skipped right over it. lol.

Alright, so i have audacity on my computers and im not sure how everyone on here knows what songs hit at a specific frequency. How do you all find out what frequency slams in songs? Just tonight i was playing the song Muevela by Angel y Khriz (yea i know, why did you play that) but it slammed really well in my truck on my SMD. In fact it slammed so hard my gauges on my dash were jumping around and everything i was looking at was shaking so bad since my eyes were shaking. If someone could please tell me how you can find out how you know the peak frequency of a song it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!!

youre welcome man. thats what we are all here for, well mostly all of us. hahaha.

youre welcome bro. Also, since im 99% sure you will ask this, as the "what size batt...." along with "whats the difference between the s and d batteries" are the two most asked questions about xs power. The S3400 comes with top posts in the box so if you have terminals from GM that bolt to the top of the battery using the brass posts, you will want to select this battery. The D3400 comes with screws and a washer so you would only be able to connect power cables to it with a ring terminal on the end. If your battery has terminals on the side, you will need an xs power i-bar kit. the i-bar 551 and 555 kits are what you will need if you have terminals that bolt to the side of your battery. The 551 is what i use and its great, but the 555 would be easier if you plan to have a crap load of power wire running off the front battery. edit: you can either call xs power or go to Meades site: http://wccaraudio.com/xs-power/agm-batteries/12-volt/xs-power-12v-3400-group-34-agm-battery.html and get the 3400. I never ordered from Meades site so idk how fast it will ship but i assume fast. Plus his site has better deals on batteries than i paid for my s3400 2 years ago.

s3400 or d3400 will fit in the stock tray(s) up front. If you want to do some modding, you can do what meade did and move the ecu back and take out the tray and have a d3100 sit in there but then you have to run new power and ground wires to your starter, engine, fuse box, etc.

I wouldnt know about those as snakes are rare to find where i live in New York. lol. But if you do put plexi-glass over the top of it, and done make any lip on the bottom of it where a snake can sneak in it should be fine. again it looks kinda weird sometimes but its better than blowing money on getting koi every time they die from something getting to them or having to keep wasting time cleaning it out.

Twisted, just thought id warn you. Idk how it is by you but where i live in Western New York, birds love to come to a little pond and eat the koi so be prepared to have a ton of dead fish. The one thing you can do to stop it would be to get something like plexiglass and put it overtop of the pond to protect it from the leaves, birds, etc and have it raised up a little so they can get fed and all that. The problem with doing it like that would be that any moisture that gets build up on the plexiglass will show and prevent you from seeing into your pond clearly unless you were to drill holes all over the place on the glass which kinda looks weird to me. Also you cant use that fountain you have for the middle of the pond with that either if its covered up. Other than that it looks great, keep up the work.