A subwoofer is fitted into any car audio system if you are looking for more bass. However, having more bass is not always a good thing and the sound quality can be impacted from this. There are two types of bass, low deep refined punchy or boomy one note duff duff sounding bass playing from your car subwoofer. Bass can also sound muddy at not clear and not blend it properly with your music. There are many ways that you can look into helping improve the bass of your car subwoofer if you are looking for the best sound quality possible. You will need to try them out before you consider upgrading your car subwoofer, as most of the time its all about how good you do the installation and setup.
1) Its all about the box. Chances are if you are not happy with how the bass sounds, you most likely have an untuned premade box. Premade boxes are cheaply made, they are not glued and screwed, just stapled together poorly. They are also not fully sealed inside causing air leaks. If you build a custom subwoofer enclosure based on the specs for the sub, you will get better sound quality and spl levels. The two common types are sealed and ported boxes. Sealed provides better sq and ported can provide more spl.
2) Refine the gain control. This is adjustable on all car amplifiers using a flat shaped screwdriver. What most people that are new into car audio think is that turning this setting all the way to the highest level will increase bass and make it sound louder. In fact it makes bass sound worse because it increases the level of distortion and clipping, resulting in the bass to sound not clear and muddy. You can tune to the gain yourself using your ear, as you dont always need fancy tools and testing equipment. Simply turn it all the way down, play a track with decent bass from the stereo, turn up the volume to almost maximum, go back to the car amp and adjust the gain, stopping when you hear distortion.
3) Adjust any bass booster settings on the amplifier. These are added as a feature to add more bass in a particular type of frequency range. Now it all depends on your listening tastes. If you like more of a boomy loud kind of bass set it to between 60-80 HZ. If you like deep thundery low vibrating bass that shakes windows then set it around 30-40 HZ. Once the frequency is setup, you then need to setup how loud you want the bass boost to kick in. There will either be an adjustable dial or an flickable switch that will increase the amount of DBs. Adjust this while music is playing loudly, reducing it when you hear the bass distrort.
4) Correctly setup the LPF setting. This is a filter that is placed on the car amplifier that blocks out all the treble so only bass is playing to your car subwoofer. This will stop any frequencies going to it and make the sub play more efficiently making it sound much better. The best setting for this would be to set it around 80 HZ, so it will play anything below it and anything above it will get filter out that is doesn't exist at all.
5) Adding a separate parametric or graphic equalizer. This will provide you with more control over which parts of the music you want to hear the most. It will contain different levels that you adjust to increase or decrease based on certain frequencies. The come in 5 and 10 eq bands usually for car audio. The more bands you have, the more control you have for fine tuning your car audio system, however they are also more expensive and harder to mount away underneath your cars plastic trim.
6) Add a more powerful amplifier. This only applies if you are underpowering your car subwoofer currently. If you are, this will prevent it running to its ultimate capability for what its designed for. The cone will not be moving fully, resulting in less bass to be heard. So if you are in the need of a new amp, ensure that the RMS output matches what the speaker can take. You can find the power ratings usually online on the manufacturers website.
7) Use better RCA cables. Cheap ones have poor build quality, the soldering inside the plugs are not so great and they have poor shielding. This can affect sound quality, as sounds such as buzzing and humming can be apparent. Upgrading your RCA cables to thicker higher quality ones will certainly help improve the bass from the car subwoofer to sound more clear and refined. Also make sure that they are running separately down your car trim panels, away from the red power wire to prevent any interference occurring when listening to your music.
6) Add a more powerful amplifier. This only applies if you are underpowering your car subwoofer currently. If you are, this will prevent it running to its ultimate capability for what its designed for. The cone will not be moving fully, resulting in less bass to be heard. So if you are in the need of a new amp, ensure that the RMS output matches what the speaker can take. You can find the power ratings usually online on the manufacturers website.
7) Use better RCA cables. Cheap ones have poor build quality, the soldering inside the plugs are not so great and they have poor shielding. This can affect sound quality, as sounds such as buzzing and humming can be apparent. Upgrading your RCA cables to thicker higher quality ones will certainly help improve the bass from the car subwoofer to sound more clear and refined. Also make sure that they are running separately down your car trim panels, away from the red power wire to prevent any interference occurring when listening to your music.
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