Previous owner made some serious sound upgrades to my car.

Obvious to me when I bought it, the head unit is an iDA-X305S and it has a PXA-H100 Alpine Imprint. So far so good.

The one thing that I thought was noticeably missing (or magically hidden, as it turns out) is a subwoofer. I go out and get a subwoofer enclosure, with a JL W6 (version unknown).

Pulling the amp out into plain sight required taking the passenger seat out (some cables are way too long, like the read cables, others rather short...) resulting in my seeing a subwoofer cable that seems to run to the passenger foot section...

So, first off, if there is a member in the NOVA/DC area that could help me fine tune my set up, I'd much appreciate a little hands on help!

At any rate, I think I figured out how the wiring is supposed to go and what changes to make to the amp settings to ensure only subwoofer freqs are sent to the subwoofer(s), the mid and high levels to the appropriate front and rear speakers, etc. Still need a sanity check.

There are 6 outputs, 3 channels, from the PXA-H100 Alpine Imprint. These go to the 6 inputs on the amp, and are labelled as Channels 1, 2, 3 and 4, plus two subwoofer inputs. The outputs of the PXA go as follows: front L+R go to the amp 1+2; rear L+R go to amp 3+4, and sub go to amp 5+6.

My 3 areas of concern are:

First, setting the input sensitivity to ensure correct voltage. I think I can crack that nut with my voltmeter and downloading the sine waves, but I'm a tad leary of screwing things up...

Next, should the rear and front inputs/outputs be swapped? The rear speakers are more high range, while the front section has the mid range (and of course a set of tweeters to mess things up...). Channels 1&2 have different filter modes from 3&4. 1&2 has "HP filter mode off|x1|x10" while 3&4 says "Filter mode off|BP|HP"
So, should the front speakers go to channels 1&2, or 3&4?

Next, the rear speakers have a filter/crossover set up (see pic), so any channel I put them on I would leave the amp filter mode to off. So do the front speakers. Front has Alpines C5-650 and rear has C5-525. So, if I am correct, the second question may be moot as I could leave all channels on Off?

And then there may be something I haven't considered at all, of course...

 

By the way, yes, those are C5-525 and C5-650 speaker sets, the 525 in the rear, the 650 in the front.

 

HP stands for "high pass", meaning only frequencies above the filter are allowed through.
BP means "band pass" meaning that frequencies within a range would be allowed, with highs and lows
filtered out.
If you are using a sub, you usually want a high-pass filter on all the other speakers so they don't
see the lows that the sub gets. A band-pass filter would normally be used when you are using separate
amp channels for the mids and tweeters, so you'd want the mids to neither get the lows that are going
to the subwoofer, nor the highs going to the tweeter.
In your case I'd run both the fronts and rears high-pass, and the sub would have a low-pass filter.
Just to add a wrinkle, the Imprint processor likely supports filtering at the headunit level, so it
may be you just want to leave the amp filters off.
HTH.

 

Yes, I was wondering about the imprint throwing that wrinkle in there. So, the front speakers should (if anything) be using band pass, while the rear speakers (being right behind my grape and smaller) should be using high pass.

I'll play around with that, and removing all filters and letting imprint do its thing.

thanks for the input.

 

You want to use high-pass for both fronts and rears. Band-pass would only be used if you were using
channels 1+2 for the front tweeters and 3+4 for the front midwoofers.
If I had a headunit/processor that supported the filtering, I'd use the headunit's filters rather than
the amp's filters as you can set them up/adjust them more easily, in which case I'd set them to "off"
on the amp.

 

I'm wondering the HU with imprint changes things as far as filtering. Need to research this one further.

 

PM Sent via s2kca

NFR_AP1

 

any filters in the HU turn off. trn the front & rear to flat not HP or LP but in the middle. looking at the crossovers on the speakers they should have a roll-off in 12db incrments below 80hz (or so) as far as the sub goes run away from JL Audio if not using a hard top. A JL sub is not capable of keeping up with that setup and you will blow it. check the PM I sent you on S2kca from NFR_AP1. we dcan discuss the whys. and if you need to tune and double check things you can come by for a sanity check.