i finally did some much needed & well deserved tuning on these fine speakers, more than a year after installing them. let's open this back up, shall we?
i've been in oregon for over a year now, it has been an amazing journey and i'm so happy to be where i am now. the new job has been absolutely amazing, i work from home almost exclusively & get paid well for easy work, hard to ask for more than that
so, to pick up where i left off - the plan was to put one or two ported sa-10 subs in the hatch, and blow the little fit to pieces. this has been scrapped, i've decided that's not something i need or want, and i'd like my car to not rattle apart anytime soon - i'd also like to get my hatch space back that is currently being taken by my sub box, so i've decided that i am 100% going to be removing the spare tire and putting a sub down there. i did some measuring today and i can actually fit the jl 10tw3 prefab box down there (the 10tw3 is my sub of choice) and still fit the factory floor over it and look totally stock, but i'm not sure how i would secure it down there without some janky shit...it is enticing since i can just go down to the car toys that's 5 minutes from my apartment and pick one up and slap it in, but i think i'm going to hold off a month or two and try to do a fiberglass enclosure (my first!!) so i can use the spare tire mounting hole & bolt. i should be able to offset the sub from that little bump for the mounting enough to keep my depth down a bit more than the jl box as well, so the factory floor should fit a bit better. and lastly, doing it this way should give me plenty of space to nicely install the amp & dsp, where it would be incredibly tight and hard to fit with the prefab. we'll see what happens here
on to what i did today - this weekend was 100 both days here, and most places up this way don't have air conditioning (including mine). it's okay on 80-90 degree days since it still goes down to 50-60 degrees at night and you can cool the place off pretty well to prepare, but when we get more than one 100 degree day in a row it gets pretty hot inside...so i decided to sit in the a/c in my car and do some tuning! i haven't done a real, solid tune since i installed everything so i figured i owed it to the speakers to do them some justice. i used this time alignment guide on diyma as well as cmusic's guide on diyma. i played around with crossovers a lot as well, and i just have to say, the car sounds so much better! the difference that proper time alignment can make is just amazing. i don't think mine is quite perfect as far as getting to the exact spot in the "doppler effect" (i wasn't able to hear anything in either mid-tweet setups, i think the 360.3 software may have glitched out on me...i tried restarting the software and pc & it didn't help so not sure) but the mid-sub are either on point or very close, and it tightened everything up significantly. staging & imaging are both much better (not quite perfect - still need to do some l/r eq matching) and tonality is the best it's ever been in my car, i absolutely love it. also readjusted my gains & levels to give me some more volume access for dynamic tracks and also make it so i don't have to go so high on the volume, there's no volume knob so being able to get to cruising volume and back down again quickly with the buttons is nice - also sounds much better at higher volumes now than before, and i finally found the l6v2's mechanical limits, oops
well, i think that's it for today - nothing too extravagant, just kind of excited to get the hatch finished up and work on the tune a little bit more to get everything all situated, maybe another tuning session later this week. we'll see what happens!