If you have a car subwoofer fitted into the trunk of your car and you want louder bass, but dont want to get another sub there are a couple of things you can do. Now there a numerous factors that you can look into to making your car subwoofer playing bass from your music louder. To make your subs hit harder you will need be thinking about related associated items that make the sub work. Things such as the amp and enclosure box out of MDF are other important factors that design a car audio system for a sub. Just having a powerful rated subwoofer planted in a box is not sufficient enough for saying i expected a loud subwoofer system and i am not happy with the results. Today we are going to explain to you in the most detail as possible to help you with making your car subwoofer louder for free and the other ways which will involve costs. Most of the time that we have learned during this its not the speaker buts its always 99.9% of the install that impacts of your system sounds.
Now to the new people in the car audio world, a sub is just a big box with a amp with wires coming out of it that makes bass happen in your car. But let me inform you there is more to bass than just that simple thought. You don't always have to spend thousand of dollars on your car to get the loudest bass system in town. In fact based on real life experience we have seen a $300 dollar system outperform a $850 dollar system. The tone of the sound quality was much better and the spl level were noticeable louder to everybody that had a demo of the system at car meet. This was all down to the box, the expensive JL audio sub was stuffed into a cheap prefab box from walmart, however the cheap Sony Xplod sub that is meant to be crap was in a custom built enclosure made from 3/4 MDF tuned to 28 HZ. So yeah guys and girls you want to make your car subwoofer louder you have come to the right place. Lets begin with the basics and explain everything to you in the best understanding possible.
1) Positioning of the enclosure: This is a very important factor because how you setup the box to fit in your truck can affect how much bass gets into the cabin and inside the car. There are two common ways to position the sub box in your car. Either facing towards the rear seats or towards the trunk lights. If the box is ported its best to face it towards the trunk and you also need to make sure that there is nothing blocking it such as the carpet and stuff. Facing it towards the trunk lights is better because it allows the bass waves to reflect onto the lid and bounce back into the car. It then bounces back into the car making the bass sound louder inside the car and also outside. The best thing about it is its free to do, so why not give it a try!
What you can also do is remove the back parcel shelf from the rear of your car if you are not using it for 6x9 speakers. This will help make the bass travel back into the car and fill it up inside with air making your car subwoofer bass sound louder for free. If you do this as well as the tweaking the position of the box you could gain upto 3DB in spl. We have proven this with a termlab setup in out workshop with a number of hatchback vehicles.
2) The box is very important: Now working in the car audio shop we have seen all sorts of installs that take place from customers thinking there best. Most people go with the easy route which is stuffing a sub into a box that is already made. Now some people think that its just a thing made out of wood that is a square or rectangular shape with a hole drilled out for the speaker to fit it. Now there is more to that there is alot more of science behind this that determines the whole bass experience and how it sounds. Some off the shelf prefab boxes are ok don't get me wrong if they are built around the spec for the sub. However we have seen some in the past from Halfords and Walmart over in the USA that are made from chipboard that are held down with some cheap staples from a nail gun. That is not good for sound quality and the vibrations from the bass are most likely going to damage the box in the long term and cause air leaks.
Now there are three main types of sub box designs. I am going to go through them all with you to understand the differences to help you make the correct choice. Now before thinking about this its always best to do your own research and find out what the manufacturer recommends. Sometimes a sub is only designed for a sealed box and making a ported box for it will make it underperform. Also its good to check out car audio forums on the internet to see what others think and what boxes have already been built before, seeing what results they got from it to help you come to your conclusion.
Sealed: This is the easiest to make because there is nothing technical from putting six pieces of wood together as long as you get the measurements right. Its called sealed because its air tight so nothing can escape out. Due to the nature of this design it creates a tight punchy sound ideal for all kinds of music really. It also has a flat frequency response and is not peaky in a certain sound wave area like with a ported box around tuning. This means that if you are after accurate sound quality and are not the kid that wants the louds boom boom system from your block go for this design. Another thing to point out is that they are the smallest design and you can make a small box to fit into the corner of your ride. Since they usually hardly take up anyroom in your trunk at all making them perfect if you have kids or need to go shopping on the weekend because it means you can still keep your system and do your daily chors.
Ported / Vented: This is just like a sealed box but instead with either a slot or aero port fitted into it that is tuned for a certain frequency. This gives you the edge to help focus your sub in a particular frequency point. If you are after low deep bass that you can feel in your chest and through your seats its best to tune around 28 or 30 HZ. If you are after louder boomy bass then its ideal to tune around 45 to 50 HZ. The only drawback with this design is that sometimes they can be a little tricky to come across and are often less forgiving if you even make the smallest design error. Other than that in terms of performance for money ratio you will get a louder sound in a ported box vs sealed and the sound quality with almost be identical if built right.
Bandpass: Now this design contains both a sealed and ported chamber in one box. This is the most trickiest to get right but it gives you the best of both worlds. You get good sound quality and equal loudness that you get from both sealed and ported designs together. These are very complicated to build and should only be done if you are a car audio expert. They also tend to take more room up in the trunk which is another reason why they are avoided if they ever are used in the big car audio planet. This is purely for the most bang for buck in terms of how much sound you get out of your car sub which results in maximum slam and thump.
Box building tips.
1) Make use of todays technology and resources, put down them pens and use a free subwoofer box calculator tool software. Basically you download it onto your computer, enter the right measurements of your desired box based on the space you can work with. It will then auto generate the exact fiqures and tuning of the box. All you need to do is make a note of the size for the wood cut outs and put it together and thats it. The best one that we recommend is called 'Torres Box Tuning Calculator' its free to download and is very popular on the steve meade designs website. We even use it at out workshop and we even worked it out manually and its always accurate the first time around when using this brilliant tool on our computer.
If you are interested here is the link it will take you to the page were you download the Torres Box Tuning Calculator' software for free!
2) Make sure you glue and screw! Dont go the cheap and easy route by hammering in nails into the box to hold it together. Before you know it your subwoofer will be hitting hard in your car slamming past everybody and the box will be falling apart. Trust me we have seen this happen and you will notice right away that the sound has gone from boom to capboom. What you want to do is wedge the glue when you are fitting the different parts of the box together. Followed by drilling a hole every 3 CM and fitting a threaded screw in.
3) Make sure you use MDF. This wood name stands for medium density fibreboard its made by broken down hardwood that makes it more stronger than your usual plywood. Its light and very easy to work with at home in your garage and cut it with a normal jigsaw nothing fancy is needed. The best thickness that is the most superior for building speaker cabinets is 3/4 inches. You can go higher if you want, but that is only necessary if you are using heavy woofers such as 18s with a big huge chunky magnet weighing it down all the time.
Now that the positioning and enclosure is been explained to you with high importance, there are other things that you can do to make your car subwoofer play louder. Lets start off with the car amp and what you can do to it.
1) Bridge the car amp: If you are powering a single car sub on a two channel amp, you can jumper the two channels together and create one massive output. This will provide double the power because what you are doing is adding up the power from both sides and totalling it up. You will need to check whether or not it is compatible because you can make the car amp overheat if its not designed for it.
2) Lower the ohm load: The lower the electrical resistance placed on the internal mosfet transistors on the amp the more power it will deliver to the sub. Ohm resistance in car audio usually starts from 4 and works all the way down to 0.5. You can wire them in series or parallel and change the wiring on the dual voice coils to get it down. If you look online there are all sorts of diagrams to help you with this we have found some useful ones on the Crutchfield webiste, so we have left a link as you might find this very useful.
3) Use the bass booster setting: Turning this on and adjusting it accordingly will make the bass from your car subwoofer more louder slightly noticeable to the ear. However, the consequences of doing so will result in a blown sub by the end of the day. You will need to watch out for any kind of clipping or distortion heard to prevent this from happening, usually you can tell from listening to it carefully.
You can also help make the car amp help put its full power out by doing a few things to the electrical system. If you have a powerful car amp and sub, if you electrical system is weak no matter how big the stuff is rated out its never going to perform to its full potential that it is rated at in the book. Here are a few things that you can look at to stiffen up the voltage. Its also ideal to connect a digital volt meter to monitor how low it drops to see whether or not its lacking when the bass kicks in the dash.
1) Replace the alternator: The stock one is only really designed for the electricals in the car such as the lights, heaters, dashboard, radio, wipers and maybe a few extras but not for an intensive car audio system. This is the electrical component that charges up the battery, if your car audio system is pulling more power than its getting charging you are going to suffer from voltage drop without a doubt. There are many different alternator brands that deal with high output alternators, some that we use in our customers vehicles at our car audio shop are by Mechman and DC power engineering.
2) Do the Big three upgrade: This is simply an small upgrade of the existing wires running to your alternator, chassis and car battery with bigger ones. This will allow more current to flow easily across different parts of the electrical system helping it get to the car amp quicker.
3) Use 0 gauge wire: If you have a powerful amp then you got to have 0 gauge wire running for both the power and ground wire. This allows maximum current for the car battery into the amp and it ensure that the car amp is never hungry of juice. This is only recommend if your entire system is rated around 1500 watts rms otherwise you will be ok running 2 or 4 gauge wire.
4) Upgrade to a deep cycle battery: The stock battery that came with your are is designed for starting the engine and the stock electrics. Its not really designed to be abused and stressed out with all this extra car audio stuff. Upgrading your stock battery to a deep cycle battery such as the Yellow top optima or from XS power will ensure a longer discharge rate. This is because they are made to output short high current bursts of amps perfect when the car amp demands the extra power at random times.
5) Power cap: Some say they work and others say they don't, well in fact we say they do! They are not that effective if you are comparing it against a second battery installed but they do stop small problems such as dimming headlights and stuff. They basically act as a small temporary battery bank, they slowly build up a charge, store it inside and let it out when the car amp needs it simple. Now you need to remember to charge them before you install them and also they have a small handy volt meter on them which allows you to keep track of the voltage which is cool and a great little bonus.
If you are using a stock factory stereo if you get the chance you want to replace it with a aftermarket one as soon as possible. This is because the stock radios are limited to what audio settings you can adjust and most of the time you will have to use a speaker wire to RCA box converter to the amp that create a poor signal to work with. Once you have the aftermarket car stereo fitted into your car there are a number of settings that i am going to explain to you that you adjust for the best sound.
1) LPF: This is the setting that blocks of the treble and the vocals going to the subwoofer. This make your car sub play more efficient because it concentrates on only playing bass. You can switch it on and usually adjust it from 80HZ. You can increase it slightly to make you bass sound louder with the expensive of being less deep.
2) Subwoofer Level: Most good branded car audio headunits from Pioneer, Kenwood, Alpine and Sony allow you to adjust the DB level of the sub from the front of your car. Sometimes this by default it on 0, you can increase it higher to make the bass from your car subwoofer sound louder.
3) Parametric Graphic Equalizer: This a great feature that will never get outdated, it gives you full authority of controlling the different sound elements of the system right from the bass, mids and highs. The first couple of frequencies usually range in this order or similar 60 HZ, 120 HZ, 250 HZ. The first one is used to control the bass from the sub, if you turn it up you will notice that the bass will start to get louder. The other ones that are after it are used to increase the midbass giving you more attack and punchyness with your music from your car 6.5 inch door speakers. Overall, using the equalizer can add a great addition to increasing sound quality in your car audio system that is often forgotten about.
0 Comments: