Yeah, fuck the passengers LOL.
Looking good. To bad those 8's are so deep, I'm looking for some 8's for my Samurai, not enough space.....
That's funny.
Andy from Audiofrog was giving a class at KnowledgeFest. It was about tuning.
The entire class went through steps to tune for the driver's seat. The reason for this is that DSPs (Processors) will allow you to adjust crossover, output levels, EQ, and time delay for each channel. A graphic popped up that showed where a proper "stage" in the car is placed and where center stage should appear to be - out over the hood near the center.
There was also a graphic that showed improper placement that some folks think is right where center is directly in front of the driver. This results in a compressed left/left of center/center stage and a very wide center/right of center/right.
So Andy is going through the class and talking about how great the car should image for the driver.
Someone in the class asked "What about the passenger seat?"
Larry Fredrick (was with Electtromedia, Audison/Hertz at the time) said "Fuck the passengers! They didn't pay for it."
We laughed, but that's the reality for a LARGE portion of cars that have been built like this. They're optimized for one seat - the driver's seat.
It doesn't have to be "fuck the passengers", though. The processor that is in the truck, the
Alpine H-800 (which has to have the
RUX-C800 to function) will take a 2-channel stereo signal and upmix it to a 5.1 signal like Dolby PL II. With left, center, right, and rear speakers and proper up-mixing and processing, you can get a car to image fairly well for both driver and passenger.
A lot of the guys that compete say SQ (Sound Quality) is hard. They're referring to single seat judging.
SQ2 is two seat judging. It makes single seat look easy. Getting a car to properly stage and image from both seats (a judge in each front seat scoring at the same time) is infinitely more difficult.
The Camaro I built got 2nd at World finals in SQ2 and I pulled a championship win with the Chevellle in SQ2+, which is a separate class from SQ2 that allows stuff like horn-loaded compression drivers. That Camaro also competed in SQ, RTA, Install, and two SPL events.
What we didn't tell anyone is that we ran two processors in that car piggy-backed on one another.
The Alpine H-800 had two tunes loaded into it. Preset 1 was simply a stereo pass-through that sent signal from the head unit into the Helix DSP PRO MKII processor.
With the Alpine set to preset 1 we could run all of the single seat events (SQ, RTA, SPL) by selecting the tune for each event in the Helix.
When it was time to compete in 2-seat SQ we'd switch the Alpine to Preset 2. That preset gave use Dolby PL II up-mixing. At that point we were running 5.1 into the Helix. The Alpine was used for up-mixing to 5.1 and we did everything else (crossover, EQ, time alignment, phase adjustment) in the Helix.
This car was in MECA's 2nd lowest class of competition (Street) and punched way above it's class level.
Anyway, those tweeter pods that are aimed towards the driver instead of say...at the center between the headrests...don't really matter. Time delay and individual speaker output level matters more.
For the driver's seat you'll always have the left side driver's with reduced output levels when compared to the right. That's because with them at the same output level even if you've already entered time delay the fact that the driver's side speakers are closer and will appear to be louder than the more distant passenger side drivers. A mono pink noise signal should appear to be in the center of the car. Without reducing output levels for the driver's side that mono pink noise will be over the steering wheel. So you HAVE to reduce the driver's side drivers.
After doing that when you sit in the passenger seat you're in the "bad" seat. Time delay is optimized for the driver and the driver side has been reduced in output level. So...from the passenger seat what you hear is mainly the right side speakers.
At that point it doesn't matter how they're aimed. Output levels and time delay have already ruined that seat because, well...fuck the passengers.
![Laughing :laughing: :laughing:](https://data.irate4x4.com/assets/smilies/laughing.gif)