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- Bryan
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Just wanted to share some thoughts and findings from my base system upgrade. It’s slightly unconventional to what others have done.
Equipment of choice
Also for reference, I played with all Forscan settings prior to making my final decision. I can confidently say that there are equalization settings that do help sound, but there are none that remove the factory crossover signal to the rears. BUT…this can actually play to your advantage. The below is a RTA of the rear channel feed. You can see the bass roll off to the rear from 300hz down in the below photo.
With this is mind, I decided to take advantage of the factory 300hz crossover for all of the 4 inch speakers, making good use of the factory rear crossover. This was accomplished by running the Rear Channel High Level Speaker signals into the Main Output Channel of my LCI7. The wires going to the rear pods are both under the left rear (behind the driver) door sill. They look like this.
From the LCI Main Input they flow through the Kicker Key Front Channel Inputs and then I have parallel wiring going out of the front two channels of the KEY to both front dash 4 inch and rear pod 4 inch. Since this signal already has the factory 300hz crossover applied, no additional line filters are needed. This is the perfect crossover point for the 4 inch to play as midrange/tweeters. The KEY handles the parallel wiring of the smaller 4 inch drivers well. No issue with heat or clipping at this point.
For the Kick panels I took the front Speaker level input that used to be split between the front dash and front kick and ran that input to the Channel2 (Middle Input) on my LCI7. I decided not to use channel summing because the 4 inch cannot handle the full range signal at volume without distortion (I verified they could not). That's why the factory crossed over the rears, because they distort at higher volumes if they get full range signals. Again, from the middle channel of the LCI7 I routed the signal through the KEY rear channels and set the crossover on the KEY to 80HZ. This allows the front two kick panel speakers to get a wider range signal they can handle, which adds nice mid bass, and also allows me to set the gain of the larger speakers independent of the smaller 4 inch. This worked perfectly to balance the system.
Next, I used the AutoMode feature of the LCI7 to send the full range signal from Channel2 to Channel3 output on the LCI. That signal goes to the Kicker CXA400.1 Mono Sub Amp that I have set the low pass crossover to 80HZ.
I set the rear line level source output (channel 1) on the KEY at around 1.5v for the low level signal conversion. I have the full range source output signal (channel 2)that is going to the kick speakers set at 3.85V. For the mono amp, due to the power and amount of bass that I now have, I have the source output for channel3 turned down to about 1v. I have the noise compression enabled, EQ enabled, Time Delay enabled on the Kicker KEY amp.
I set all of the Level Sources on the LCI7 using 1khz 0 DB Pink Noise file loaded into the USB flash drive. I verified voltage with AC Meter and also verified distortion watching the "maximized" light on the LCI7.
Lastly, I let the Key works it's DSP magic (with the subs disconnected per Kicker's instructions).
All I can say is wow...such a full clean sound with any genre of music all the way to full volume.
I just wanted to share this approach and that it works very well with the proper equipment. Good luck for those who want better sound.
Here is how I installed the amps and LCI7 and also the downfiring box I custom built to fit. For those curious the KEY is mounted behind the panel I made that you see the Mono Amp and the LCI7 mounted too.
Equipment of choice
- Alpine S S-40 Dash
- Alpine S S-65 Kick Panel
- Pioneer TS - G400 Rear Pods
- AudioControl LCI7 6 channel line converter
- Kicker Key 200.4
- Kicker CXA400.1 mono amp
- Custom built downfiring sub box with 2 Kicker 10" Dual Voice coil subs wired for 1 ohm load
Also for reference, I played with all Forscan settings prior to making my final decision. I can confidently say that there are equalization settings that do help sound, but there are none that remove the factory crossover signal to the rears. BUT…this can actually play to your advantage. The below is a RTA of the rear channel feed. You can see the bass roll off to the rear from 300hz down in the below photo.
With this is mind, I decided to take advantage of the factory 300hz crossover for all of the 4 inch speakers, making good use of the factory rear crossover. This was accomplished by running the Rear Channel High Level Speaker signals into the Main Output Channel of my LCI7. The wires going to the rear pods are both under the left rear (behind the driver) door sill. They look like this.
From the LCI Main Input they flow through the Kicker Key Front Channel Inputs and then I have parallel wiring going out of the front two channels of the KEY to both front dash 4 inch and rear pod 4 inch. Since this signal already has the factory 300hz crossover applied, no additional line filters are needed. This is the perfect crossover point for the 4 inch to play as midrange/tweeters. The KEY handles the parallel wiring of the smaller 4 inch drivers well. No issue with heat or clipping at this point.
For the Kick panels I took the front Speaker level input that used to be split between the front dash and front kick and ran that input to the Channel2 (Middle Input) on my LCI7. I decided not to use channel summing because the 4 inch cannot handle the full range signal at volume without distortion (I verified they could not). That's why the factory crossed over the rears, because they distort at higher volumes if they get full range signals. Again, from the middle channel of the LCI7 I routed the signal through the KEY rear channels and set the crossover on the KEY to 80HZ. This allows the front two kick panel speakers to get a wider range signal they can handle, which adds nice mid bass, and also allows me to set the gain of the larger speakers independent of the smaller 4 inch. This worked perfectly to balance the system.
Next, I used the AutoMode feature of the LCI7 to send the full range signal from Channel2 to Channel3 output on the LCI. That signal goes to the Kicker CXA400.1 Mono Sub Amp that I have set the low pass crossover to 80HZ.
I set the rear line level source output (channel 1) on the KEY at around 1.5v for the low level signal conversion. I have the full range source output signal (channel 2)that is going to the kick speakers set at 3.85V. For the mono amp, due to the power and amount of bass that I now have, I have the source output for channel3 turned down to about 1v. I have the noise compression enabled, EQ enabled, Time Delay enabled on the Kicker KEY amp.
I set all of the Level Sources on the LCI7 using 1khz 0 DB Pink Noise file loaded into the USB flash drive. I verified voltage with AC Meter and also verified distortion watching the "maximized" light on the LCI7.
Lastly, I let the Key works it's DSP magic (with the subs disconnected per Kicker's instructions).
All I can say is wow...such a full clean sound with any genre of music all the way to full volume.
I just wanted to share this approach and that it works very well with the proper equipment. Good luck for those who want better sound.
Here is how I installed the amps and LCI7 and also the downfiring box I custom built to fit. For those curious the KEY is mounted behind the panel I made that you see the Mono Amp and the LCI7 mounted too.
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