So does the placement of the muffler effect the sound or drone or even performance?? By placement I mean, either further away from or closer to the engine?? Would running a dual exhaust and having the mufflers (1 on each side) right behind the rear bumper like they do on some muscle cars help or hurt performance and or sound/drone??

 

Muffler placement makes a difference. I dont know about performance, but it does as far as sound and some of the drone. I'm some what of a mustang guy. And I have learned there is a big difference in sound. The 05 and up cars have the mufflers at the back bumper compared to the 04 and back.

Putting the muffler at the back bumper would give you the sound of dumped exhaust (if you didn't put tips on the muffler and have them aimed straight out the back) and not have half as much drone in the cab as if you had your muffler dumped at the axle.

So it would help with drone levels and would have different sound compared to a truck with a muffler with pipes out the back as to have a muffler after the axle ran out the back.

And to mount a muffler after the axle on these trucks would require the removal of the spare tire.

Also this is what I plan to do in the future with my exhaust since my truck doesn't have a spare tire.

I hope this helps.

 

ditto above, the muffler shop I asked said to get rid of drone, move the muffler as far back as possible and also use the longest muffler you can fit.

 

Yes it does help. I was really just concerned about the drone because I had a Jeep Cherokee that had the WORST drone after I changed the exhaust and I really didnt want to have that in this turck. Now I just have to take some measurements and shop around to find something that will fit in there nicely so it wont be seen and still sound decent.

 

There's another thread here that describes another option of adding a short pipe with a specific length to cancel the drone frequency. I've never used that approach but the theory is sound (no pun intended) and based on write-ups, it does work. I have done things like moving the pieces (muffler, cross-over) to different locations (this changes the associated pipe lengths so they won't resonate (drone) at the same frequency) and in some cases where it's not possible to move things because of space, I've used an "acoustic break) in the droning pipe - what I used was the flex joints that are available in many sizes, usually a pipe stub at each end and a woven coupling in between, they're about 8 to 10 inches long. Acoustically, this turns that piece of exhaust pipe into 2 pipes that won't resonate at the original frequency.