I have to say that the EJ's are a great bunch of people, it's why I frequent the area and try to help when I can.

John, you are an old timer here on the forums and I'm sure you have answered the same questions 40,000 times and that it has become frustrating to you. I'm also sure that if the search function were working properly and that people would take the time to read the FAQ's your job would be easier.

I am relatively new to the s2ki, but there are times when I read a thread I think to myself, wtf! But I try to put myself in their position and do my best to help.

My knowledge of the S2000 is limited and I read these forums to learn about the car, and when I see rides like yours, I am amazed at what can be done.

So to John, Modifry and the other EJ's thank you for being here to help.

-Chris

 

Hey People-

My name is John. I live in Tallahassee FL. I am graduating in 2 weeks with my degree in Accounting, and have been building and inspecting houses for the past 2 years. I am sort of a "Jack of all trades" kind of guy. I can wire, I can frame, I can plumb, but I cant really do any of it spectacularly, but can do all pretty well. And now.....I can do your taxes! Just started with a local firm here in town. They are paying for Grad school, so no arguements here. Looking to take out loans to pay for the rest of school (what job will not pay for....fees, etc.) and to fix up the Stook. (Cant decide if I want to save for wheels, suspension, Hard Top, or S/C kit......decisions decisions! )

I am more of an electronics hobbyist than anything else. I do not have a lot of practical expeience, other than "what makes sense" to me (funny how physics works that way). I, like Modifry, got all "A's" in physics and calculus, but never studied. In my spare time in highschool, I made various projectile weapons, including a potato gun that could launch a spud 1/2 mile (measured on a golf course one night).

I have a MY00 S2000 that I purchased in May of this year. Thus far I have added an INJEN CAI and a Comptech Cat-back exhaust system. I have tinted my windows (32% up front and 20% "static cling" on the plastic rear). I have replaced my stock HU with an Alpine 9851 (w/ Modifry DCI), installed Blaupunkt ODCa-660 components (6.75" with 3/4" tweets under the A-pillars). I have a Clarion 10" sub in a flush mount box in the trunk with an Infinity 7520a pushing it. My bud Travis helped my install everything (he is the soldering guy.....RC car background). He is also teaching me about the engine mechanics as well (really smart when it comes to mechanical stuff).

Everyone on this forum has always been helpful. I have learned SO much stuff just by reading everyone's posts (and even researching some old MacGyver / Modifry posts). I now have a MUCH greater understanding of car audio, and am looking to get a little more aggressive (change from a hobby to a passion).

Everyone on this board, from Modifry / MacGyver / PJK3 / NFRs2000NYC / Darkknight1999 / etc. has been nothing but helpful. Great forum, and I will be a member for quite some time to come....

I kind of understand the tone of late in this forum. I have noticed an abnormal amount of Troll activity. Sometimes people just have a short fuse. Accept it and move on. I know certain people on here have more knowledge than I do, so I do not debate it. I also know I have more knowledge than some people, and when they question it, I just sit back and say "OK....dont trust me."

John

 

Hi - my name is Alan and I am a recent convert to the S2k world after a string of 3 Audis. I used to be a hard core post whore in the AudiWorld forums (esp. the B6S4 forum) before abandoning my heavy German sports car so I could have a lightweight roadster for my track toy instead. I have been an electronics nut ever since I was a kid and and for the past 28 years have been a computer and network administrator which allows me to play with electronics hardware every day.

While I used to do a lot with aftermarket sound systems in my older cars (dating back to 8 track tape systems), I never touched the built in systems in the Audis other than to augment the sound proofing some. I confess to being truly amazed at what has happened in the world of car audio systems during the last 5 or 6 years.

I have been a audiophile for quite a number of years now and the combined value of the audio and video systems in my house is easily double the cost of a new S2k. My favorite work tunes are delivered by a set of Sennheiser HD580 headphones driven by a X-cans (tubes) headphone amplifier and fed from an iPod that contains Apple lossless recordings only.

I never considered a car to be a worthwhile acoustic environment to try to set up a high end system in, but as I have played around with the S2k I have changed my mind about that. I started out on the S2k just trying to add some minor improvements so it wouldn't be so offensive when I tried to listen to something I liked, and it has snowballed into something else entirely. The S2k has been great for responding to almost every minor tweak I have tried and fiddling around with the results has turned into a fun hobby now. I have posted that I built a system that is done now and the end of my journey, but also have to confess that I have been tweaking it just about every day ever since I posted that

This forum is an incredible gold mine of useful info that reflects the discoveries and experiences of tons of folks who have played with the S2k before I got mine and I sometimes spend days chasing through search results learning how others have come up with solutions to making things sound better. I hate seeing wheels reinvented and when the forum search engine is working, I give it a pretty good workout for just about everything I have tried to date.

Current setup - Alpine 9851 HU with Sirius and iPod interfaces, Diamond Audio D661s speakers in front and Kenwood 5 1/4's in the rear, JL Audio 300/4 AMP, and a wired modifry DCI. Xtreme dynamat in the doors, trunk area, and the floorpans topped with 3 coats of QuietCoat in the trunk and the floorpan area under the carpets. The soundproofing is a little more weight than I originally intended to add given the car's track focus, but no more than around 25-30 lbs total. That's still a tiny fraction of how much sound dampening goes into an Audi, so I still have an enormous weight advantage over my older cars. The soundproofing makes a huge difference especially when I have my hardtop on and makes the sound system perform far better than I ever thought was possible when I first drove my car home from the dealer.

This forum has reintroduced me to the world of aftermarket car audio and I am delighted that I started regularly checking it out. It's now a rare day I don't look in at least 4 or 5 times and frequently far more often than that.

 

Hmmm. Either John (the darkknight John) has been reading the Vintage forum too much lately, or I've missed plenty of stuff here despite crusing by now and then. But if there's been turmoil here, well, know that you all aren't alone. (And if you really want to see something, check out the arguments that one of the moderators of the "Street Encounters" free-for-all has been getting into. Now, THAT'S an intemperate Moderator.)

I'm always impressed by how much work these COs and Mods put into these forums, especially because I know I just couldn't pull it off. We all owe them our thanks for keeping this place going.

And it's been invaluable to me, as I got my S (05, Silverstone) only last August. These wonderful little cars have their quirks and a place like S2Ki to learn those quirks (instead of having to reinvent the wheel for every little thing) makes owning one all the more pleasurable.

So hang in there. And maybe the search feature will start working again. That would help, even if you only are able to yell "Do a &^&%$ search!" at the goofballs. HPH

 

My name is John (another one) and I live north of LA in Moorpark Ca.
The hottest speaker on the market when I first got a car, was the Jensen Triaxial .

Like Alan I dabble in home audio too, but my system is built for live concert DVDs, which arent always audiophile recordings By the way, the new Green Day concert DVD "Bullet in a Bible" is an out of this world rock show! (Also a great director, but AV quality is average). I also like to go to concerts.

My experience with car audio is all personal, and I try to balance

Quality Audio
Good Usability
Reasonable power requirements ( I have never upgraded the battery or alternator).

With the S2000, I have another requirement, size. I want my sub/amp system to take up very little space, since I haul stuff daily in my S2000 (single father).

BTW, Darknight we have had our technical disagreements over little things like cables, but I respect your carwork immensely, its far above what I have ever done.

 

Alan I am building a system similar to yours, have it all on order, but have yet to start the install. I have a question if you dont mind.

Front speakers: I will have some good MB Quart seperates up front, thats settled.

Rear Speakers: I have those shallow Kenwoods ordered for the back, and my plan is to run it with an amp that has bass/treble controls for the rear speakers.

Question: do you think its a good idea to basically turn those 2 drivers into woofers, by turning the treble down (and bass up) on them?

Question: From an audiophile perspective, do you get a detached bass sensation from having the subwoofer in the trunk? Or is it close enough in the S2000 that its hard to localize the bass?

I am considering using smaller subs, but having them closer to the cabin..

Or maybe the key is to just tune the sub to handle the lowest frequencies .. like 25-55hz...

My last car with a subwoofer in the trunk ... I honestly think it sounded more musical with the subwoofer off ... thoughts?

 

John -

I have never had a subwoofer in a car beyond the OEM subwhiffers that Audi and BMW have offered in their so called premium systems. Both examples I have worked with on those were/are in wagons (my old Audi S4 Avant and my wife's current BMW X3), so nothing quite so detached as a trunk.

Bass frequencies are always tauted as non directional and I have frequently heard the claim that you can put a home theater subwoofer anywhere in the room without consequence. If you have played around with this one much in your home systems, you already know that is an almost laughable claim and while you can sometimes make detached bass sound like its better integrated with sound in front of you by flipping the phase of the subwoofer that still doesn't match the sound of a subwoofer that is close to the source with the center/front channels.

As I listen to the bass I am getting now, it's quite clear that the real bottom is missing at the moment. I also realize that it's a difficult proposition to insert that portion of the music into a car that is as noisy as the S2k so it's workable both when the car is sitting at an intersection and when you are at freeway speeds. The cabin noise when we are at freeway speeds is not perfectly smooth pink noise and even with my soundproofing efforts I measure roughly 85-90dB at 65mph, so anything you do to make it sound great at 60 might be a little strange to listen to at 30-35 in slow traffic.

Rear speakers will give us the best interior boost down to the usable frequencies that mids can offer, but if we are lucky we can get something workable down to the 50-60hZ range and it still leaves the 20-50hZ range on the table. The biggest problem with the rears as bass boosters is the lack of a useful enclose to properly tune a driver to reproduce those frequencies. It's hard to make an amplifier compensate for the lack of a good enclosure unless you have built in servos on the voicecoils like a high end Velodyne does.

A critter called the jl stealthbox has caught my eye in doing a lot of searches, but that leaves me asking the same question you are - can I really get what I want/need out of something that far away from the rest of my speakers?

 

Aye, bass is gonna be a challenge. Those Kenwoods cant have any extension as shallow as they are.
I have almost the equivelent of the JL Stealthbox sitting in my garage.
( Same driver, similar sized cabinet). I will probably compare its performance with my mini-sub plan, but I have a feeling both will be lacking.

The last JL Audio I had was a 12 inch, in the back of a roomy Toyota Avalon, and all the "bass-in-trunk" did was basically annoy me.

I think the tiny Tang Bands at the bottom of this page are the answer:
http://www.partsexpress.com/webpage.cfm?&D...&WebPage_ID=144

... maybe dual 4-inch drivers (tuned to 55hz-100hz) underneath the dashboard, somehow worked in so they don't interfere with your feet. Any ideas on how we could do that Darknight?

Then tune a sub in the trunk that does 20HZ-55HZ .. and maybe then we would have directionless bass ..

Hah who knows ...

 

I too, like others, am happy we are trying to bring it back to the old school days, where personal attacks and misinformation was non-existent in the Electronics forum. IMHO, this WAS THE fastest forum in terms of help, meaning your problems would be solved in less than 24 hours.

Im Dave, and I am a *takes deep breath* Hotel/Restaurant/Bar/Club/Casino manager. I am currently switching jobs to work for Marriott, and hopefully, will have more time to participate here. I have helped MANY members, and so have the key EJs (you know who you are) that made this place possible.

In order to keep us on the right track to the olden days, I ask one thing.....

Before you post, this section is full of electrical engineers, and people who are professional in car audio and electronics in general, make sure that if you are posting opinions, say so, and if its a fact, make damn sure it is one. PLease do not start arguements. Most of the time, youll get proved wrong, because the talent on this forum is immense. If you believe someone made a mistake (everyone's human) just point out in a nice manner that a mistake has been made, and it will be corrected. Like me, John hates to make mistakes, and if one is made, it will be fixed promptly. EJs hate misinformation floating around, so we try to keep all the info reliable.

Now, the biggest problem that made me hibernate for a while is....

IF YOU ASK FOR AN OPINION, BE ABLE TO TAKE IT.

Example....

*Hey guys, Im about to purchase some Funkey Pups because I want my car to sound better. I got a great deal on them....what do you think.

*ANS* They are garbage, dont waste your money.....

There are plenty of posts like this and people get offended. If you are NOT going to listen to advice (people here can take apart an s2000 in 20 minutes) and are going to get offended, DO NOT ASK A QUESTION. If you start a stink, NOONE WILL HELP YOU later on when you need help.

It is a phsycological fact that people to not like to hear that SOMETHING they HAVE sucks. If I stated Alpine is a POS company, and they make fisher price quality electronics, people like John would obviously get upset, along with everyone who owns an Alpine product. Thus, do not get offended. Many people here have been around for a while, and have tried almost everything that has been on the market. If 5 people say Pioneer is better than Alpine, LISTEN. There must be a reason. Noone here is just spitting out info, so there is something behind it.

Hopefully, we can all together start to be the EJ family, learn from each other, make fun (in a good way) of each other, and have a good time like we used to. Thanks for listening, now....

"We're going streaking!"

 

Hey guys, my name is Alfredo and I live in Miami, Florida. I work for a big insurance company as an auto claims supervisor.

I have a 2003 sebring silver that I have owned since 03.

I too have noticed over the last 3 years that the forum has changed, but hey thats life. People have other priorities, so its to be expected. John, I can really see where you would be frustrated, and you have every right to be, answering the same questions over and over is like chinese water torture. I know every time I have ever had a question, your always there to answer it, and I truly appreciate it. This forum is very invaluable source of information. Over the past three years, the Key EJ's as Dave calls them, have helped me through installing two sound systems, as well as any audio related question which might pop into my head.

(PAS2KNUT, FLITHCROFT, Dave, John, Modfry and any others) Thanks for all
your help.