JL Audio 10W7 in '12 TL SH-AWD
 

so i have been into car stereos my whole life. in my 11 TSX, i had 2 JL Audio 12w3's. It sounded good, but was a bit much as i typically like my music to blend well and be impactful and clean. i put the box in my trunk and hooked it up to a JX1000 just to see how it sounded. The ELS stereo in the TL is actually so good, that i didnt like how it drowned the midbass out. So i had a sealed box built for 1 JL 10W7. It sounded good, but definitely needed more power. So i upgraded to a HD1200 amp to run the sub. It still didnt have the SQ I was looking for (to get the impact i wanted, i had to turn it up so loud that all i heard were rattles), and ive heard W7s work best in ported, so I had a custom Ported enclosure built. It sounds awesome now. The ported setup actually sounds cleaner on 90% of music. Some songs still sounded better sealed, but i am very happy with the output and SQ from just 1 10" sub. I went back and forth on all kinds of setups to run in this car, and i can say with confidence, that i recommend this set up. i also tried it with an audio control LC2i signal processor, but it definitely sounds better just running the factory wires directly into the amp.

I still need to tighten up some of the wires.


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mods-
sorry, please move to audio and electronics sub-forum

Nice setup. How much this set up cost you, also how easy can you get the spare tire out.

Great setup!! Who did the work in Tampa? I have a 12W7 in my 2nd Gen TL, but not looking for that kinda bass in my 4th gen. I am thinking of ALpine Type R 10" Or a W3v3.

This is my 2nd gen TL http://www.jlaudio.com/galleries/Mob...1=Mobile+Audio

Looks good man...it's definitely similar to my setup.

Is the box secured to the car in any way? SH-AWD isn't much good if you have to worry about the box being tossed around the trunk.

Also, did you remove your stock sub? If not I recommend it because it's basically useless now anyway and once it's removed there's a nice pathway for the bass to come into the cabin. Hell, I even open the passthrough behind the armrest from time to time to allow even more in :thumbsup:

Hey man, anychance you have pics of your set up. I am trying to retain the most trunk space possible.

Thinking of this if it fits on top of the AWD hump. http://www.crutchfield.com/p_500SBRS...-4.html?tp=112

I'd be curious too. I have a JL 10w3v3 sub in sealed box laying around, and its too big to fit in the 'hump' or shelf area in the trunk. Something smaller that would fit into that space would be ideal.

Nice, but it would never work for me. I would put a club through that sub so fucking fast...

i like the sub sitting on the side better then straight in the middle.. but then again i love the els system.

good job tho. looks clean

Clean install. It's a really good place for some slap while keeping the spare and most of the trunk functional. I recently upgraded from 3 old CVR 10's to 3 RE Audio SRX 12's utilizing that same trunk space. I personally like a lot of bass. If I didn't have to put groceries and strollers back there I would port and use it all up.

The 10's box was a prefab I had laying around. When I did the 12's I measured it out and built it to fit. .90 cubes per. It fit like a glove. I secured the box down with eye bolts and rope wrapped around the back seat frame support.

Here are some pics:

10's


12's

http://s23.postimg.org/51793ce1n/REAudio1.jpg

http://s4.postimg.org/qm1l321gd/REAudio2.jpg

http://s21.postimg.org/7u5xfs6zb/Box1.jpg

http://s9.postimg.org/63ml5hvfz/Box2.jpg

I didn't want to post my pics in OP's thread...so I linked to them. Click 'my setup' below. I have a custom built box as well but my sub is hidden.

The sub will fit in the hump area if you make a sealed enclosure out of fiberglass. Here is my 10" Infinity in a .75 ft^3 enclosure.

https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3749/...db4c6e4d_c.jpg

^^^ First setup I've seen that doesn't sit directly on the side of the trunk (thus not allowing larger items like a stroller or golf clubs) and doesn't block the passthrough. Nice!

I bet an Infinite Baffle set up would sound better and take up less room.

[QUOTE=ufmike316;14070962]so i have been into car stereos my whole life. in my 11 TSX, i had 2 JL Audio 12w3's. It sounded good, but was a bit much as i typically like my music to blend well and be impactful and clean. i put the box in my trunk and hooked it up to a JX1000 just to see how it sounded. The ELS stereo in the TL is actually so good, that i didnt like how it drowned the midbass out. So i had a sealed box built for 1 JL 10W7. It sounded good, but definitely needed more power. So i upgraded to a HD1200 amp to run the sub. It still didnt have the SQ I was looking for (to get the impact i wanted, i had to turn it up so loud that all i heard were rattles), and ive heard W7s work best in ported, so I had a custom Ported enclosure built. It sounds awesome now. The ported setup actually sounds cleaner on 90% of music. Some songs still sounded better sealed, but i am very happy with the output and SQ from just 1 10" sub. I went back and forth on all kinds of setups to run in this car, and i can say with confidence, that i recommend this set up. i also tried it with an audio control LC2i signal processor, but it definitely sounds better just running the factory wires directly into the amp.

I still need to tighten up some of the wires.

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If you are having problems with SQ, it's not due to your sub or amp. A HD1200 is overkill for a JL 10W7. I suspect the SQ issues you are having is due to the limitations of the OEM amp and acoustic configuration of the OEM system. I would recommend a decent processor (Alpine, Audisson or Mosconi to name a few).

A HD1200 is overkill for a JL 10W7, particularily in a ported box. Be careful not to void your warrenty on your W7. I have an HD750-1 powering my JL 10W7 and that's more than enough power for the W7. I've done a tremendous amout of experimenting with my system. Link below:

https://acurazine.com/forums/showthr...light=Brew0360

Since these pics I have replace the front Focal components with a set Focal Utopia 165 WR-Cs.

^ Damn, $2k for a pair of speakers.. they better sound like angels when they sing!

Everyone's got their thing (performance mods, guns, power tools, etc.) and car audio systems is mine. This is definitely one of the best build I've ever done. I spent 3 hours a day commuting back and forth to work due to Metro DC traffic so I want that time to be as comfortable as possible. Great sounding music definitely helps.

Glad I FINALLY found some good photos of TL trunks!!! I am about to start my project as well... Look for posts at www.2012acurainstall.com
Thanks
JC

Dude, that enclosure that is off to the side is incredible. Did you do that yourself?

Yes I did. Spent many hours sitting in that trunk masking, glassing, and doing numerous fit checks along the way. I was limited in the shape I could make it since I wanted to clear the access door in the middle of the back seat while still being able to get to the spare tire.

Absolutely Amazing Work
 

That is absolutely amazing work. I plan on installing Infinity Kappa 12s on both sides and am probably going to try to do something like that but the specs call for 1 cu ft for a sealed enclosure. I still want access to the pass through, the spare tire, and plan on mounting 2 Alpine amps like yours to the rear deck. Any advice?

One way to trick the sub to feel it is in a larger sealed enclosure is to stuff it with polyfill. I didn't add any polyfill to my enclosure, but I had a bag of it handy just in case. Here is an article that talks about adding polyfill to enclosures:

http://www.klausaudio.com/subwoofer-...woofer-box.php

If I had to do it again, I do not think I would mount the amp under the rear deck. If you remove the carpet under the rear deck, you'll find two trunk springs criss-crossed under there. This makes mounting the amp tricky since the springs move as the trunk opens and closes. You also are limited on where you drill into the metal deck since there two stock speakers, a 8" OEM sub, and spooled seat belts in the way. Also, I cut away some of the carpeted cover of the rear deck so that the amp would not sit too low into the trunk. This too was tricky since cutting away too much of the material would expose the trunk springs and amp wiring. ufmike316's setup with the amp on the side has my vote for preferred installation assuming your amp is of similar size.

Just my tweeters retail for that much but they're worth every penny. The subs are the cheapest speakers in the system because with a pair of 15s you don't need to go as expensive for good SQ.

The problem with the W6 and W7 subs is they need more airspace than what JL recommends. My 12W6s sounded phenomenal when I went with my infinite baffle setup. You gain punchiness, that kick you in the chest punch, very quick transient response, and amazing lows that extend down past the limit of human hearing. Efficiency goes way up as well. A 10W7 only needs 400w to bit full excursion when infinite baffle and the punch and low end is incredible when setup like that.

If you stayed with a sealed setup , as crazy as if sounds for best sound quality, a 2.5-3 cube box is necessary. This is true of most speakers, the manufacturer recommended sizes are usually on the small side for SQ but no one would buy a sub that requires a 3-4 cube box for best SQ so they compromise. Infinite baffle would be better, not only do you keep 95% of your trunk space but the sub is operating in more than 12 cubes.

I would never go with a sealed box as long as the car allows IB. A ported box has it's advantages and can be worth it if you want to give up trunk space but sealed, yuck. It just decreases efficiency and reduces cone control which gives the slow and bloated sound.

"I Hate Cars" can you send the link of your setup with pics. What is the manufacturer and model number of the tweeters that ran you over 2K?

Dynaudio Esotar 110. They retail for $1,900 but no one pays retail of course. Typically they sell for $1,600-1,400.

I also run their 430 3.5" midrange and their MW182 9" midbass in the doors. Subs are Acoustic Elegance 15s that take up very little trunk space. I have 1200w available to the fronts and 1200w on the subs but the subs are so efficient, back when they were getting 250w each they got stupid loud. I don't crank it up often, it was designed to have a ton of headroom for a very dynamic and realistic sound; the 15s barely have any visible excursuion nor do the 9" midbasses. Keeping excursion down helps in so many ways. A 6.5" requires twice the excursion to keep up with the 9s and the typical single 12" sealed sub requires 3x the excursion to keep up with the pair of 15s. On top of that the system draws under 100w total average for a normal listening level but it has a ton of reserve for those peaks. Every component is laid back, hardly stressed. This is the first time I feel like I'm finished, I'm content for the first time.

I used to have a ton of pictures on this board but my host went away. I'll try and get some uploaded.

Did you replace the OEM HU or it the OEM connected to an MS8.

The (3G) OEM headunit is great for a SQ system. The signal is clean and flat. You have to take it before the factory amp, straight from the headunit.

I have a PS8 processor and it has a mixer so I can assign any input to any output or multiple outputs. In my case I take just the front left and right signal for music. The HFL also uses the fronts so I retain the HFL so phone calls now use not only the fronts but the subs too and since it's tuned for a center image and realistic sound stage it sounds like the person on the other end is sitting on the center or the dash. You can't hear where the sound originates from, with time alignment and individual channel eq, it reproduces the sound stage how it's recorded. You can hear where the singer is , where the guitars and drums are, both left and right and front to rear (depth). It's kind of weird the first time you hear it but once you've heard it, it's hard to go back to no TA where you can hear where the sound is coming from (the speaker locations). Even the sub bass has the illusion that it's coming from up front at the windshield.

Almost forgot, I ran the center inputs to the PS8 as well for navi prompts. The muting for the HFL and navi is done in the headunit so it functions normally. I don't know how the 4G is setup but there are enough inputs and outputs and with the mixer, a huge number of configurations l , you can make it work exactly how you would like it to work.

Since the headunit is very low level, maxing out at 1v, and the processor is in the trunk, I used a Rockford BLD line driver to boost the voltage for its journey to the trunk to minimize the chance of picking up noise along the way. A line driver is not necessary with the PS8 and if I had mounted it under the seat or closer to the HU I probably would not have used the line driver. When I had an MS8, I needed the line driver.

I put two of my amps under the seats and one in the trunk but hidden between the carpet and outer body panel. I made up my mind I would spend whatever it took to build the best system I knew how to build but I could hear no difference between the mid level JL HD amps and the ultra high end amps like my McIntosh so I went with the JL amps since they are efficient and fit under the seats and I saved a few bucks. I've found that there was a much larger improvement in sound quality from running lots of power for headroom than a $4,000 amp. I'm not recommending buying a Boss amp for your SQ system but I would use lots of power and a good mid level amp.

I used a MS8 and didn't like it. I'm now using an Alpine PXA H800 and it's controller. Would love to see pics. Especially the 3 way setup you mentioned up front.

It's not much to look at, I went for the stealth approach. The mids are in the factory modified kicks and no one ever notices there are speakers down there. They take up nearly zero space in the foot wells. Having them down there definitely widens the stage and makes it possible to have decent sound in both seats due to less path length difference. The 9s are in the doors behind the stock door panels. They were only 3" deep so instead of using an MDF ring to mount them, I flush mounted them to the door which made using the stock door card possible. The subs are infinite baffle so with a piece of cloth draped behind them you can't tell the car has subs. The tweeters are the problem, they're 4" in diameter. I still haven't installed them permanently. They're sitting in the sail panel which is tiny on the 3G and this definitely sounds better than on the dash facing up at the windshield or on the dash on axis for the driver but I'm not sure how hard it's going to be to make them fit and look factory. The only evidence of a system with it all put together is the tweeters and they bother me every day. Luckily most thieves aren't likely to recognize the brand.

The MS8 was hard to get good sound out of. Initially it made the system sound thin and weak. I found that it's extremely sensitive to phase and when doing a calibration I learned to activate the lowpass filter on the sub amp at 50hz and turn the filter off once calibration was done. That made all the difference, lots of good sub bass and mid bass. It never really imaged that great though. I did hear one guy's car who used the center plus rears and it does some really neat stuff in order to get a vast front sound stage using all speakers to achieve it. For me, the PS8 has worked well, it has more adjustability than I could ever use. It takes a while to get the hang of TA, that's why I wanted the auto tune of the MS8 at first but now that I tune manually I don't think I could go back to auto tune.

I admittedly took this thing too far. I went from enjoying the music to pulling out the lap top nearly every time I drove the car because of something stupid like my center image was a couple inches off. Now I leave the laptop at home and just enjoy the music and not the system.

The main reason why I chose the PXA-H800 along with the controller was to manually tune without the need for a laptop. I also manually TA. A correct staging minimizes the need to make drastic xover and graphic/parametric EQ adjustments. The PS8 did not have a controller so I ruled it out. The Bit One controller adjustments were too limited also.

I'm interested in seeing your 9 inch location to get an idea what I could gain if mimicking your location.

That's a definite downside of the PS8. If I want to do something as simple as turn the subs up or down I have to get the laptop out. I originally bought the PS8 right before it was released because at that time the controler was supposedly not far away. To my knowledge they still haven't gotten one to market and when/if they do I think it's around $400 on top of an already expensive processor.

I'll get some pictures up as soon as I get home. I had to work this weekend or else I would have put them up already. It was almost as simple as cutting the hole in the door larger in order to fit the 9s. I got some simple metal braces and screwed them to the door to pull it flat and strengthen it a bit. The window track had to be spaced out about 1/4" to clear the magnet when it was rolled all the way down.

These particular 9s are only 3" deep and have a small profile. The voice coil is 4" but the magnet sits inside the VC so the back side is pretty small.

Morel also makes a good 9" that's about 2.5" deep with an even smaller profiile than the Dyns. They only have about half as much excursion but if you're not trying to cross them really low or use a ton of power they should be fine. They do start to fall apart when really pushed hard where the Dyns never sound stressed, and will sound "perfect" all the way until they hard bottom.

I had one of the best 6.5" midbasses on the planet, the Dyn Esotar 650 and I absolutely loved it. However, there's something about the larger midbass, all of the ones I've heard, that's hard to pinpoint but they just sound more effortless and natural. I technically took a step down to a cheaper midbass when I went to the 9s but since they only play 65-800hz it's not a big deal. If this were a 2-way and had to cover the upper midrange I would have stuck with the 6.5".

Are you the one running the Focal 3-way setup?

I found a couple surviving pictures of my setup still on this board:

This was test fitting the 9s. It looks so much better now that it's finished but this was the first fitting, there's even wood behind the 9s to try and seal it up quickly because I had to take a quick listen before they were permanently installed. All of the Dynamat you see had to be peeled off, at least near the speaker and it's now finished in Second Skin and all black. I had the seat moved all the way forward to make working on the door easier. I wish I had moved it back for the pictures. It makes the foot well look crowded but I lost zero space with the mids in the kicks. It's obviously with the grills off of the mids which completely hide them:






Attachment 107993


The 15s with the back seat removed. These are a very low inductance, very low moving mass, and high efficiency 15. They are one of the most punchy and articulate subs I've ever heard and they dig below the human range of hearing with ease.

Attachment 107994


Here's the trunk before I was done putting the carpet in permanently and the all weather mat it usually has. This was right after the first rain of the year where the covered parking at work dumped a bunch of mud on my car. It's usually clean lol. It's hard to tell, I used to have better pictures but I only lost 7" of trunk space where the magnets are. I recently took a couple tires down to the tire shop to be mounted in the trunk. Tons of space still.

Attachment 107995

Some Esotar 12s IB:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7087/7...3427fd21_b.jpg


Here are some IDMax 12s. This one has a false floor which is why they appear so close to the floor.

http://i460.photobucket.com/albums/q...a/b3a781fb.jpg

There was another one that used the same subs and looked identical to mine from a better angle that showed just how much trunk space is saved. If you look at the one with the Esotar 12s, those are the same depth as mine.

Ironically, the JL W6 and W7 subs were the best sounding in IB in my opinion, better than my dedicated "IB" subs. I'm still thinking about doing a pair of 13W7s in the same configuration.

No Focal 3 way. I have 165-WRCs up front and KRX2s in the rear. They are powered by a JL HD 600/4. One 10W7 sub powered by JL HD 750-1. I connected my processor after the amp so I needed to sub the front/rear/sub signal. I replaced the JL summing device with an ARC Audio SRI. I'm having small issues with my processor so going to replace with same model.

My system is very clean and can run most people out of the car before I max out the volume. I can only imagine what you system does SPL wise.

I would like to get it metered. It definitely wouldn't impress the SPL guys but it's fairly loud to the average non enthusiast. To tell the truth, for the first year or so I wouldn't push anything toward it's limit because I was already feeling guilty for spending so much on audio. Then one day I accidentally played a test tone CD with the volume all the way up (don't ask lol). I also learned why you should never make 20hz your first test tone, start with the high frequencies first. So the subs survived about 1,000w at 20hz even though it only takes 200w to hit xmax at 20hz. After that I got more brave.

I eventually took the tweeters down to 1,600hz, the midrange to 150hz with a 6db highpass, and the midbass down to 35hz with 300w to each. The most impressive was the little 3.5" midrange. I did not know they were capable of that much excursion. Back up to my normal crossover points I realize I don't have enough power to blow these speakers so I'll really crank it once in a while. To be completely honest if I had it to do over again, I would run more power to the midbass and midranges. Right now it's 300/150/150 to each midbass, midrange, and tweeters. I think it would be cleaner with more power. It's hard to believe at one time I was running the midbass off of 75w and that got loud but it wasn't as clean and didn't have the dynamics it does now.

I find myself having to explain and defend myself each time a stranger or a co-worker asks what size subs I'm running and how much power it has. They look at me as a bass head (mostly engineers and professionals) and I have to explain the large subs and fairly high power are there for sound quality,not to be heard around the neighborhood. Anyone could go out and run a $100 amp on some pro audio drivers with a ported 15 tuned high and be just as loud as what I have but it's a lot harder to get loud but super clean and detailed.

That's a very nice combo you have. You might be surprised, I doubt our systems are that different. I've found you get to the point of diminshing returns quickly in car audio. Double the price of your system and it might sound 15% better or 3db louder. I would have been more than happy with a $300 JL C5 component set on a single 900/5 and a 12W6 but I wanted to go all out just once.