Time To Show Off What I've Been Doing

[hobbes26]

Take a look

Here!

Any comments good or bad appreciated.

[csiple]

Hobbes, My doors are the exact same. I cut the plastic cup out so that the magnet would fit but I still need more space because the basket was hitting the metal door frame. Most likely if I had cut that metal for my speaker to fit flush, the speaker would rub up against the window. So, I guess I needed to devise some kind of spacer ring out of mdf but I wasn't really sure how to secure it. I never thought to put the ring underneath the door panel like that. Do you have a problem reattaching your door panels with that 1 inch spacer ring in?

Starting this evening and all weekend I had planned on fiberglassing some door pods or at least attempt to. I suppose I need to practice up for the sub enclosure. For overall sound quality is it best to mount them in the doors like that or would a door pod be better? If door pod then should the pod be sealed or open in the back? Did you seal off all the holes in your door with dampening material, not the drain holes but the others? Is this recommended?


Sorry for all the questions...


As far as comments goes... Looks great to me. I see a lot of attention to detail going on there. Nice use of wire ties too.

[hobbes26]

Yeah, luckily for me, the ring fits in quite nicely - it's actually a tad bit too thick for the door panel to fit properly, but I think it'll be fine the way it is.

I wanted a pretty stealth install, so I did it this way. I'm not sure if making door pods would be better SQ-wise, but i'd think that if you wanted to try aiming your speakers like that, you might as well go for speakers in the kicks. Then you can leave the doors alone and not have to deal with them. If your speakers have good off-axis response, I'd suggest putting them into the doors w/o pods and just leaving it be - I just think it's too much work otherwise - but that's just me.

Whether to go sealed or not - I think for the most part, people leave it open in the back - I don't know how well car speakers will fare in an enclosure, depending of course on how much volume you give it.

Interestingly enough, there doesn't seem to be any sort of drain hole in the doors. I will be sealing the door off though - I'll be using Brown Bread in place of the vapour barrier that was in there before. Essentially, my speaker enclosure will be the entire volume of the door. I'm planning to cut holes in the kickpanels to put my tweets.

[texcon]

In my doors, I added sound deadener to inside of the door skin (the inside of the outer portion of the door) and to the back and front of the door shell (the part with all the wires and crap on it). I sealed all the holes off in the door shell with mat and it seemd to work quite well.

[Steven Kephart]

Wow Hobbes, that is looking great. You are making me want to do that to my car. Please keep taking pics of the progress. I can't wait to see the end result, and maybe hear it in the future. Good luck!

Steven Kephart
Adire Audio

[geolemon]

It does look good.. the prep work looks great.

You scare me though... saying the doors don't have drains!
ALL (repeat after me... "ALL") doors have drains!
Do NOT seal the bottom of the doors, there ARE drains.
You block them off, I give your doors one year, maybe two, before rusting out from the standing water.

Also...
Remember, your speaker needs a baffle or an enclosure to work properly.
The size of the enclosure or baffle determines how low it can play.
If you build an enclosure, then the enclosure also determines how much power you need to make it play loud... the smaller, the more you need.
Or, in other words... an enclosure could make your speakers need more power than they otherwise might.
So, I'd recommend the simple "baffle" route.

...but, look at your inner door skins. Big holes, covered by a thin plastic sheet. Think that plastic sheet makes a good baffle?
Not even close.
You are installing the speakers on the inner door skin metal surface... so THAT is the surface that must prevent the sound coming off the back of the speaker cone from leaking around and cancelling the sound coming off the front of the cone.
And, the thin plastic covering the big holes isn't going to cut it.

The cancellations get worse, the lower in frequency you get...
So, the most noticable issue right off the bat you'll hear is a lack of midbass, the way it is now.

[hobbes26]

Heh, I'll look again for those drain holes. But i've never tried to seal off anything intentionally.

How do you propose I make the 'enclosure' for when I install the speakers in the doors? I was just planning to put one (maybe two) layers of the mat dampener there in place of the vapour barrier to cover all of the holes - hardly a solid enclosure, but still better than nothing.

[jnc2000]

use MDF and make baffels

[hobbes26]

...... and cover the whole door? That's gonna be difficult......

[geolemon]

The easy way out is to layer up some damping material, and get creative regarding the many tiny holes you'll come across.

The more difficult way out is to lay up a thin (but rigid) fiberglass cover plate over the whole inner door skin (over a mold release, such as WD-40 coated tin foil or duct tape). It basically needs to be just thick enough to be rigid.
After it cures, and you pull it from your mold, I'd line the inside surface with a layer of damping material, place it back in place, predrill and screw it in place.
That'll create a pretty good baffle, the damping material helping to both deaden the panel, and seal it when screwed down.
Obviously much more involved than option #1.