Project "Mini Mother Thumper"

[Dr. Apex]

I finally finished my little sub project. These cars have so little depth of sound with the door speakers I wanted to put together a small sub setup but wanted big sound from it. While there are slim designed subs and boxes to go with them I want as much sound as I can get from it. Taking a page from home theater I decided to go with a passive radiator setup but do it on a budget.

I picked up a brand new Alumapro Alchemy MX 10" for $25 from my landlord who'd been sitting on it for a while, never using it and just wanted it gone, winning!! I picked up an Earthquake SLAPS M10 passive radiator for $99, these are nice quality pieces but very affordable. Next was an ARC Audio XXD2080 class D amplifier for $150 from woofers etc, its not very powerful but is efficient, well made, and affordable. I used a Stinger SK6681 wiring kit for install, picked up a Vari loc for the speaker input and used binding posts to make it easily removable for track duty. Threw a friend a few bones for helping install and I'm out the door about $400.

So far it sounds pretty good and has a lot of depth but I have a lot of tuning to do with the cars settings, amp, and radiator weights.

 

[TaylorFade]

Nice.

What's cool about the passive is that the depth is so shallow it opens up lots of mounting options. Namely... a very shallow box that would go under the false floor.

What I'm struggling with right now is the lack of low frequency signal from the OEM radio. It pulls a lot of signal in the sub bass region (as not to damage the stock speakers), so I've been messing with crossover setting to try to compensate for it, but it isn't going well.

Bottom line is that without some sort of processing, we're kind of stuck with very little output below ~ 40hz.

 

[Dr. Apex]

^Very true. I looked at doing a box under the false floor but wanted something easily removable for track duty, this was the best balance. That radiator has 2" of excursion so as long as you have that underneath it you can make a very slim setup limited only by the depth of the sub.