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Nov 29 2020

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Mike has some thoughts

Mike played around with the Bike Party system from 11-12-20 and shared the following thoughts.

From source to speakers

Head unit: All head units clip no matter the quality/price point. While this is annoying, once accepted as fact, it becomes easier to configure amplifier gains and expectations accordingly. Our particular Pioneer unit does not like to go into its top 3 clicks on the volume knob – and will like it even less if we use bass boost.

Amplifier: Amplifiers all want to see a certain voltage on the input side to create a certain power on the output side. The gain will set this ratio. The gains on the amp were set too low. I had suggested conservative settings as I wasn’t sure how the amp would behave and I did not want to destroy any hardware. While I boosted the gain, I still belive that the sub can take even power and the tops probably can as well. However, I was testing everything inside and, again, I do not want to destroy the drivers by feeding them too much. I suspect I will increase the gains with the new design.

Speakers: The JBL sub is great, but in a small box were playing too low and sounding muddy/boxy. Raising the crossover point a bit cleaned it up a whole lot. You can think of boxy like talking into a bucket where the early reflections hit you right away so your voice sounds unnaturally deep.

The inexpensive JBL is fine but the actuall is still too small for it. We are all looking at the box thinking; “Wow! This thing is tiny!” The tiny box would probably work just fine with a 10″ woofer and we can experiment with that. However, using a 12″ sub means we need more volume inside the box to allow the driver to breath. Increasing the height by 3 inches isn’t going to make a huge difference in mobility or weight.

I also raised the crossover point on the sub so it has more punch and lets the speakers above work a little less for a given output.

Permanent link to this article: http://lbhsound.com/wp/mike-has-some-thoughts/

1 ping

  1. Rethinking our input requirements – LBH Sound

    […] I also raised the crossover point on the sub so it has more punch and lets the speakers above work a little less for a given output. – Mike Hatt […]

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