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Thread: Car audio experts... need some sub advice

  1. #11
    Administrator OvRiDe's Avatar
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    Default Re: Car audio experts... need some sub advice

    The 911 is a tough nut to crack when it comes to subwoofers. The most common placement does seem to be the rear seat. The problem is you lose the use of the back seat. Of course that seat isn't THAT usable in the first place, unless you are about 4'2. Here is an example of a rear side panel.




    Here is a pretty nice example of a rear seat replacement box.



    There is a worklog on the build here..

    http://fiberglassforums.com/build-pi...1sc-build.html

    I have been a member of the fiberglass forums for a while, it has a ton of information, tutorials, and examples of this kind of fiberglass work.

    What ever you decide to do .. I want pics!

  2. #12
    Custom Title Honors BuzzKillington's Avatar
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    Default Re: Car audio experts... need some sub advice

    Search "Center console sub" in google images. Now that you mention it though, that does look like a pretty tight fit.
    PS3: CaptBuzzCooler

  3. #13
    Mostly a nutcase CorsePerVita's Avatar
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    Default Re: Car audio experts... need some sub advice

    Thanks again guys. Looking at the pictures in OvRiDe's pics it looks like that's a nice setup but not sure how far I wanna go, that's pretty much an entire seat tear out.

    That door panel looks freaking rad! So that's a sub enclosure?

    I'm 5'10" and my wife is 5'8" so the seats pretty much sit pretty far forward so the idea of having it near the floor doesn't bug me too much, and the seat idea doesn't either.

    Here's pics of the spare area. The actual area where the tire itself sits provides little space since it domes. However, just past that is a nice empty area up near the headlight. Sorry for the dirty pictures, I haven't cleaned out the storage area and waxed it since I bought it lol.






  4. #14
    iShot the Sheriff jdbnsn's Avatar
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    Default Re: Car audio experts... need some sub advice

    While the rear panels look great and would be a pretty good solution, they offer very little air space to accommodate subwoofers. They would be well suited for a pair of morel 8" mid-ranges though. Plus, sidepanels are very tough to work with, you are looking at a very involved process in just removing them much less rebuilding or fabricating new ones. The trunk space looks pretty small, I think it could be done but it would be limited and if there is no communication with the car interior you will lose a bit of the bass because having the box in the same chamber of the seating adds the pressure created when the subs are firing gives you alot of the sound effect. In my opinion, the bass shakers securely fastened under the seats is your best bet unless you are willing to take on a huge building operation.

  5. #15
    AARGH dr.walrus's Avatar
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    Default Re: Car audio experts... need some sub advice

    Your four options are, without losing the back seat

    1. Custom rear parcel shelf box
    2. Custom door panels
    3. Custom rear footwell box
    4. Standard underseat sub

    That parcel shelf idea, if suitable for your model of 911 (i have no idea if that's the case), would produce the most and best sound without sacrificing any practicality.

    If cash is limited? Underseat is your only viable option, unless you want to learn to fiberglass!

  6. #16
    Fresh Paint
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    Default Re: Car audio experts... need some sub advice

    This topic is right up my ally...

    jdbnsn has this pretty well tied up with ideas and seems like his dipped his hand in this before

    Well Jon is defiantly right about air space, if you want a kick a$$ system its all about the box baby! Lol Coming from a competition back ground and hopefully becoming a autotech at a local audio shop soon, as my last trade wasn't nearly as fun as my hobby

    So my thoughts on this might be a little crazy and out there but just hear me out... One go for the spare room you got, if your not willing to use your back seats for you box then defiantly go for the front of the car where you have the room.

    Two: Possible port placement, not sure if you heard of this but if you're able to run the port under the dash/firewall to get that sound in the car it self, you'll be amazed at the out come. As long as you don't use crappy subs that distort it should be fine, along with to big of port. You may end up getting a muffled effect out of the port if its to big.

    For the box, well with the amount of space your working like most have been suggesting fiberglass is probably the way you want to go. Also you don't necessarily have to make it perfect, reason for that is you can do a wrap in fabric making the over look great.

    If you lean toward a custom mdf box bigger is always better, that is no lie when it comes to bass. There is only so much room you can work with and my experience build the biggest box possible.

    I do really like the side panel boxes for mids or even 8" subs for the rear bass effect seeing how your bass is going to be up front if you choose that as your only option.

    I really wish i had taken more time with my buddys 944 because all he wanted was a deck put in, which was easy as pie. But i never looked around on where or how he could put in a sub.

    Hmmm, trying to picture this in my head to give you more ideas.

    Trying to wrap my head around this one, its actually bugging me now. How much head room do you have up front? In order to stay away from fiberglass you gotta have enough room to have 1" 3/4" (box thickness) plus the 12" sub even if faced on a angle you might run into problems with clearance, I'm thinking back seat myself. But is that what you really want, to be completely honest my buddy had a 2+2 300zx and it was so pointless to have the back seats but if your willing to do some custom work it can look pretty sweet.

    If you take some more pics with the storage area I might be able to come up with a design you could follow... No promises or anything but I could give you a good idea where to take it.

    Kordova

  7. #17
    A.B. normal msmrx57's Avatar
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    Default Re: Car audio experts... need some sub advice

    There are some newer subs (shallow mount) that don't require a lot of volume. However they are more expensive than traditional subs of the same performance level. I'm certainly not an expert but for what you're after they should provide enough punch without having to hack up the interior.
    Quote Originally Posted by SXRguyinMA View Post
    Now, off to the basement to do some fiddling with the rods and such.
    so far left of center i'm in right field

  8. #18
    iShot the Sheriff jdbnsn's Avatar
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    Default Re: Car audio experts... need some sub advice

    I will tell you in my amateur opinion as someone who has built car systems less than 6-7 times and never professionally. If you don't have a great deal of experience doing this, go small. The under-the-seat subs sound like **** to be generous and since they are usually not attached to the frame but just bouncing around under the seat (unless you bolt them down of course) they add very little enhancement to your audio quality for the money. The smaller or flatter subs being mentioned are really not a new idea. Back when I was in high school they marketed "free-air" subs which supposedly didn't need a box at all, and consequently also sounded like ****. The distortion at any significantly gangster-impressing level was so bad the buyers lamented.

    What Kordova said about the box size is quite true however, and there in lies the rub for you. My first proof of this was my friend in high school who build an enormous sub box in his hatch back Skyline and mounted two 6*9's and one 8" sub. We laughed at him, until he turned it on. There is a measured airspace/volume recommendation for all subs, the rockford fostgate site has a calculator for your dimensions if you choose to build your own (and it doesn't have to be a rectangular cubical structure either, kinda cool). What is not usually mentioned however is what is gained or lost by exceeding the recommended size and I haven't enough experience to say with certainty that it always sounds better to go bigger, but from the examples I've seen it does look that way. What I do know for sure is that if you go less than the recommended size, you lose quality, and it seems to be an exponential loss the smaller you go.

    So that means for you to get really nice and crisp sounding bass in that car you are in for a major project, even for a skilled technician who does it daily he would be clearing his schedule for a few days. Taking out seats, side-panels without destroying them or losing any of the little plastic fasteners, working around seat belts, pulling up carpet, routing cables twice (the second time is after you've put it all together and realize you forgot the power lead), building the box, dreaming up ways to bolt it down without losing the seal or jacking up the MDF, taking it back out because you forgot to address moisture control and then bolting it back down, taking it out again because you forgot to hook the power lead back up. Then you turn it on and it doesn't work, trouble shooting for 6 hours with volt-meters and NASA grade electro-spasmaticoshygmomanometers until youo want to cry, then realizing the fuse that came with your power lead only works at low amperes, fixing that and still doesn't work because one of your 6 ground leads doesn't conduct through the waterproofing, and so on and so on. It's very rewarding to undertake and complete a project like this, but for the week and a half to two weeks you are working on it nearly all day with the finishing touches and vinyl or carpet coverings including the ripples you couldn't get out of the corners that keep you lying awake at night, your car in unusable and dismantled in piles of stuff that don't look so familiar when you go to put it back together. Don't forget the 5-10 extra pieces that you really don't think you've ever seen before and can't figure out where they went (maybe part of the lawn mower?)

    The short cut ways like subs marketed to people who don't want to build a real box sound about like you'd expect any shortcut to, they sound like a short cut. Even if your front trunk is suitable for a fiberglass/MDF enclosure, I would still be sure you are ready for a true grit experience, and that would be alot easier than replacing the back seat and side panels with enclosures. But the fact of the matter is, that's a Porsche and it looks to be in pretty nice condition, I learned on old Hondas and they didn't always come out un-scathed. You risk major tears to the interior, dents when you are moving larger sheets in and out, or boxes, or dropping amps, etc. A Porsche does not have stock electrical system designed to support a large amplifier either, so consider a second battery, or adding a 1 farad capacitor (or both) or buying a new high output alternator to make up for the new demands. I don't know what your living situation is but if you are married, expect a pissed off wife because you are always in the shop making your avoidance of her obvious to the neighbors, if you live with your parents expect them to get sick of the mess you are making, if you are jobless expect the project to take at least 3 extra months of welfare check installments to make up for the extra fasteners and wire-harnesses, or waterproofing varnishes that you didn't think to add into your project budget. I don't want to discourage you from doing something creative by any means but I do want you to be aware of the scope of this undertaking and risks to your classic car.

    If all of these bases are covered and you still want to roll up your sleeves to build a beast then go for it. But if you are looking for a reasonably good sounding system with maintaining the classiness and well kept look of your Porsche then I'd consider keeping it to highs, mids, and bass-shakers with maybe small subs if you can find a good place to mount their cute, tiny little boxes under the seats or behind the kick-panels. But you are not going to build a ground-pounder system in that car without a huge amount of effort and sacrifice to your marriage, parent-emancipation case, or SSI good-standing, not to mention your Porsche will have greatly diminished value due to the visible alterations that few others will appreciate, and don't forget the spare tire you have to have delivered to the site of your blow-out (mine did fit on top of my box just barely but watching me try to un-wedge it and extract it from the trunk was hysterical, yours won't fit so place it in a large box with packing peanuts and drop it off at FedEx to be held until notified). And in my humble opinion, those systems that show the subs out in the open look tacky anyway unless they are marketing devices for stereo companies.
    Make sense?


    EDIT: Oh, and not exactly related but a significant consideration before pouring blood, sweat, and tears into any car project is another risk. The first system I did really well was stolen out of my car within one month of finishing it. That was my first lesson in security measures, either bolt it down so that the manufacturer themselves couldn't take it out or make it plug'n play so it's easily removed by even an amateur thief (and let's face it, professional thieves are too busy in congress and wall street to worry about your car) because if you half-ass it then half of your interior goes with the system. The second well done system I did, the car was totaled within 6 months probably because I was too busy head banging to Judas Priest to watch the road. The third one was the Celica shown above and the car's radiator exploded in Philadelphia while I was in medical school which believe it or not, totaled the car (lol, piece of ****) so I spent half a day in the parking lot of the comfy-Philly August 99 degree heat with 380% humidity on a black-top parking lot in full view of my many homeboy 40oz beer swilling fellow tenement dwellers removing the components rather than pass them along to the sales lot. They now have a home in my current car seen here. So just keep in mind that a work of art in a state of inertia carries certain inherent risks, and if you go to all that trouble just to watch it crushed it will break your heart.
    Last edited by jdbnsn; 03-01-2011 at 08:16 PM.

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