By: Jason Cuadra Since I took off my car tweets to fix a dented dome, I decided to play with tweeter placement. My tweets are the wonderful LPG 26NA's, neo domes which can play down to 3 kHz with a steep xo. Very flat and low distortion. IMO, subjectively they sound better than the Morel neos I've tried. My door midbasses are Vifa P17WG's. Nice combo I lucked into, in spite of a (temporary, quickie) single R and C crossover. A friend who had expensive a/d/s car speakers was impressed. My main f/r anomaly now is a dip from 2 kHz to 4 kHz, which my coming (proper) xover will cure. I took some modelling clay and long wires, and picked some test CDs. So I would have a reference for A/B comparisons, I recorded my test cuts onto MiniDisc and used my portable MD player and Grado headphones. Interesting that if you listen for a long time (minutes) your ears get used to f/r anomalies and they become less audible. Whereas if I go from my Grados to my car system, I can within seconds spot f/r anomalies. With the same track playing on my car CD player and on my Grados, I can pause one and switch to the other within a second, and f/r anomalies are plainly audible. Anyway my original locations were beside the midwoofs forward in the doors. I wanted to see if I could place the tweets on the dash to get better imaging (or its facsimile) without making the tonal balance suffer. I found out a few things, listed in no particular order.
I've narrowed down my choices to two positions. Pointing at the dome light above
the center console, and second, pointing at the near occupants chest or something like
that. I don't know how to fix the tweeters at such an odd angle. In general "imaging" in a car is more like a pleasant arc of sound at the dash level, with no real specific palpable images. Is this what the car audio rags call "soundstaging". Pushing the tweets into the farthest corners of the dash pointing up sounded terrible. It sounded like a boxed in tweeter. In general pointing at the glass to reflect off the glass was bad. My LPGs sound better than my home AR's soft domes. And I generally don't like the "sharp metal dome sound". Disagreements welcome. |