Vote for your favorite 6.5" subwoofer

[Fosters]

I've always liked the small subs for some reason, I'm sure I'm not the only one... I'm going to end up building a box for this thing, and want to see people's take on the little guys. I've had a box with 4 tang band W6s in the back of a regular cab pickup before and that thing amazed everyone who saw it/heard it. Very accurate, very loud, only downside was designing it for the very long/big ports... Came in handy as it's now hiding underneath my couch in the living room after selling that truck though.

So, what is your favorite 6.5 in sub/sub brand? If you vote other, post up what it is.

 

[neeqness]

I've always liked the small subs for some reason, I'm sure I'm not the only one... I'm going to end up building a box for this thing, and want to see people's take on the little guys. I've had a box with 4 tang band W6s in the back of a regular cab pickup before and that thing amazed everyone who saw it/heard it. Very accurate, very loud, only downside was designing it for the very long/big ports... Came in handy as it's now hiding underneath my couch in the living room after selling that truck though.

So, what is your favorite 6.5 in sub/sub brand? If you vote other, post up what it is.

How big was the box?

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[Fosters]

The box for the 4 tang bands was based loosely off the Boogieman project off of Parts-express. I've used roughly the same volume but messed around with the ports and shape; box was 3/4 in mdf, most of the cuts were done by home depot out of a sheet of 4x8 (which is actually 49" wide). dimensions were 49x16x5; so the cuts needed were basically: 2x 16" and 4x 3.5", 2 of them went top and bottom, the other two were cut to make the ports and the sides. It was tuned to 29hz. Fit perfect behind the 40/20/40 reg cab superduty.

 

[neeqness]

Never done anything like this before but that box looks fairly large for the speaker size. What would you say are the advantages of using a bigger box vs a smaller one with the same number of smaller subs.

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[Fosters]

Best I can explain it is maximizing low end response. My biggest issue in this case was doing it out of 3/4" MDF, I could have gotten away with 1/2 quite easily. A smaller box will have to be tuned for a higher frequency at which point it will bump up the response at that frequency and drop off sharply below that - it's what causes the 'boomy' sound 90% of the time (the other 10% of the time are cheap bandpass boxes). A larger box will give good response that is linear down to your tuning frequency (the lower the tuning frequency, the lower the overall line will be but it will lift low end response basically, and no bump up in response at the tuning frequency. A good enclosure will make a crappy driver sound good (up to its mechanical and thermal power limits), whereas a bad enclosure will make even the best drivers sound like crap.

Another pro of a big box is that it makes it easier to make big long simple ports like mine. Had I made mine a small 10x10x7, I would have used 1/3 of the MDF, but not only would the internal volume push the tuning frequency way higher, but the ports would have had to be all sorts of convoluted and twisted inside. Those can complicate things more than anything, because it makes it harder to calculate the port volume/length needed so that you don't hear the port noise (happens when your air speed goes over ~0.14 mach if I'm not mistaking - somewhere in the 120-130 ft/s). When that happens you have to slow it down. each driver will move a certain amount of air when it flexes, so one way to slow down the port velocity is to make the port bigger, or add another port... so it gets tricky trying to fit (I think these were 32" long) giant ports inside a small box.

One of the advantages of the 6.5" subs is that they move at lower power, which makes em more accurate - an 18" sub will likely not make much noise/spl under 50w. But it also tends to make the ports a bit bigger from what I've seen. I'm no sound guy, but I do spend countless hours in WinISD trying to make everything sound as good as it can...

 

[neeqness]

Wow, very interesting...thanks for the info! Feel like I should copy and paste this!

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[Gimlet]

I don't have experience with 6.5s, but I had an 8' Earthquake in small enclosures under each front seat in my previous car; it was stealth, and the sound was incredible. I had a small factory space to work in, so certain frequencies hit better than others, but overall, it was a very nice compliment to the factory system. I am thinking of doing something similar for the FiST.