Nope... just building a garage, finishing college, restoring a house, retoring a 1953 GMC panel truck, and building a business! I hate wasting time! Especially when I have FINALLY made it to my final semester and if I bomb one class I will end up taking yet another semester! I have had the panel truck since '99 and am getting pissed that it is taking so damn long! Oh, and I plan and host a car show almost totally by myself! (up to 75 cars by my second year and expanding to a burnout contest, a db contest, and hoping to bring in a dirt bike exibition team so I can expand to a second day!) After all of that, my time for moding the Ram is almost gone... and so is my patience!

-Panelrodder

 

You can get lucky if you know what to look for. The good news is that most of the subs today work in small boxes. Take a tape measure with you when you go to the local shop. Base X width x hight=?, ?/ 1728= cubic feet. Look at the paper work that comes with most subs and pick one that best fits. Don't forget to measure the port as this is just as important as the size of the box and you must subtract the port displacement from the total in order to get the inclosure correct. I will tell everyone a secret. Log onto partsexpress.com. Go to the Dayton subs. There is one sick 10" that will shake the **** out of your truck and sound good. Dayton makes most of the raw drivers for most of the speaker co. There are only about ten speaker manufactures in the world. Most of them can be bought from here or Madisound.com. It does help to know what you are looking for but you can find the perfect set up from these two sites. Vefa and perless are the other two mojor players. Perless is found a lot in car audio. Madisound had a 6.5 and tweeter set for around $125 that would cost around $500 under a different name. Sounds great! It's all the same stuff. I spent 10 years in high end car audio and I have spent the last 7 years in high end home audio/video. I will only make my own speakers after I learned this little secret many years ago. Good luck to all. I will help the best I can. They also have everything else you will need! Take a look.
Brad

 

which ones? I have tried several, non dual, 10" in a regular enclosure. They all said that they pump in about 1cuft or more. Sony, Pioneer, Kenwood and they all missed a certain low frequency (reverse or normal, I dont know) which they did not miss on a larger sealed box.

 

It's all in the box. A ported enclosure has a port which has a tuning frequency (say tuned to 32hz). At this point, the box is at its optimum. Lower than that tuning frequency, the box basicly falls off meaning no more output. A sealed box will go all the way down but with less output about 3db lower than a ported box. There are many different box designs out there. A ported box seems to work the best most of the time but it has to be the right size with the right port.
If I had to take a stab at it, I would say that the port was too small meaning that the tuning frequency was too high. There is a lot more to it than what I am talking about here but this will give you a basic understanding.
Brad

 

JL makes quality equipment and you can count on that with everything they sell. However, they are far from best for the price. You can easily match or beat the performance on all of their products and spend less money doing it.

As mentioned most subs nowadays are designed with small enclosures in mind. 10" subs for the most part excell at around 0.75 cu. ft. Dropping down to 0.6 cubes is acceptable for almost all and some actually prefer it.

Prefabricated enclosures really aren't worth your time and money if you cannot get something that will match the speaker you plan on putting in it. Calculate the value of your time and the cost of raw material for building your own enclosures and compare it to the total cost for someone to build you one and make a decision on what works best for you.

Dayton isn't the OEM for most of the speaker companies out there. It is true that they do OEM work but saying they do most of the OEM work out there is a huge exaggeration. There are also many more than 10 OEMs out there. There are at least that many in the United States alone. When you consider that most audio equipment is manufactured outside the US that is a pretty silly statement. Danish Sound Technology(the parent company of Peerless, Vifa, Scanspeak) does do a bit of the OEM work for car audio companies as mentioned but they do mostly home audio.

Ported enclosures don't just drop off under tuning and their peak is normally a few hz above the tuning frequency. The driver and the port become more and more out of phase the further you get under tuning and eventually the speaker starts to act as if it weren't in an enclosure at all. The problem isn't the roll off in frequency response. The problem is the increased excursion that occurs under tuning. If you play too low of a frequency at too high of an amplitude you can overexurt your driver and damage the suspension. This is why most people use subsonic filters. All they are is a crossover designed to be used for your subwoofer when used in a ported enclosure. You just set the high pass filter to 6-10hz below your tuning frequency and it will stop you from overexurting your driver. You aren't cutting out much information because the lower threshold of human hearing and reasonable amplitudes is around 20hz. Also, there really isn't much sub 30hz sound in music so it is likely you won't hear the difference.

You don't want a prefab ported enclosure because they are so finicky in their design. If your space is off or the tuning is wrong for you particular driver it will sound like crap and you run the risk of overdriving the speaker and tearing the suspension. At least with sealed all you are really doing is changing the frequency response and efficiency a small ammount. You do not risk damaging the driver unless the enclosure is WAY too big.

 

Well said.