I am off tomorrow and am going to be tweaking out my system all day.
MrBill- I have the same headunit, what do you have your HU crossover tuned too? and what about the timecorrection and eq? any help would be great. Do you use the MX feature? I haven't had this HU long and am still trying to set it the most accurate.
They did the time correction for me at the boom shop, so I haven't had to mess with that. I only have the 5.25 hexes running now untill I find time to mount up the midbasses, so I am running my x-over at 100hz with the slope set to 4. I NEVER use the mx function because it EQs the hell out of the sound. I have my eq set to +3 at 250 hz with a Q of 1. That helps bring up the midbass some. I set my high eq to 10khz and am running that -3 with a Q of one to ease the tweeters off a little bit. My car tends to resonate around 100hz, so my sub slope is really steep from 100 down. I took care of that by setting my bass eq on the amp to +12db at 38 hz with a Q of 1.1 and my infrasonic filter at 20 hz. I know most people do not use the infrasonic filter with a sealed box, but with my boost set so high I didn't want to waste power on subsonic ques.
I am really happy with how it is set now. I use the sub controll on this HU all the time. I like to set sub levels so they blend well in classical music at +6. This gives me 9db of headroom to pump it up when I want to turn heads with some ghetto and the option of dropping the sub -6db so I can hear how my comps are doing with the bass.
Also, this HU starts clipping around 29 on the vloume knob. I tuned my amps to max unclipped signal with a 0db sine wave with the volume at 27 and the sub set to +12 according to JLs amp specs. I have yet to turn it up past 24 because it is quite loud at that level and very clean (and I am still breaking in my new tweeters). I also found that when I used those specs I ended up with my gain up about half way with the gain switch set to low voltage. Your amps will be different, but don't treat the 4volt output rating as scripture....
If you are running this HU at volumes past 29 the signal from your HU is clipping. All a line driver will do is amplify an already clipped signal.
If you really want to tune properly, use ohm's law. From an amplifiers rms power rating and the load you are going to drive off of it, you can tell how many volts you should be driving to achieve the max unclipped power.
This page makes it easy, just type in your amp's RMS rating in the watts field and your speaker impedance in the ohms field and click ohms law.
Use
NCH tone generator to make a wav file of 1khz for 2 minutes at 0db attenuation. Play this track with out your speakers hooked up and a digital AC voltmeter hooked up where the speakers would be. Do this without any equalization and your HU at 27. Adjust the gain on your amplifier untill you hit the target voltage. (ie, for 100 watts onto a 4 ohm speaker adjust to 20 volts, for 150 watts at 4 ohms use 24.4 volts). After you do this you will know what unity gain is for your HU and amplifier. NEVER take your gain past this point as you will be clipping the amplifier. I would also never run my volume past 27 after this. This should tune your comps and amp so they are at max volume cleanly at 27.
You can do the same thing for your subs, only you want to use a 50 hz 0db sine wave and your sub controll at +12. Again, make sure all EQ on the HU and amp are turned off prior to setting the gain. After you tune both amps this way turn your bass eq on the amp back on and listen to see how the balance is. If your subs are way too loud, turn the gain down on the subs. If your comps are way too loud, turn the gain down on your comps. Just remember, NEVER adjust your gain higher than what this tuning method gives you.... consider that a hard cap.
Hope this helps //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif