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Originally Posted by makkan00
^^^ Useful comment and certainly will help many to setup their sound system better.
@ Taibnal, I agree with you that after allowing MS-8 to do its job, we should not play with amp gains and that is how I would do it, if I ever go for MS-8.
I wonder if you upgrade front and rear speakers and set the amp gains before calibration of MS-8 (lets say to 9'O clock position if 7'O clock is the starting point). Would that not sound better compared to rear OEM speakers hooked directly to MS-8 and front (upgraded speakers) coming from amp?
Or it does not really matter?
Also I would appreciate you comments on these two setups both with MS-8.
A) Front are upgraded speakers inlcuding upgraded central speakers. All fronts are connected to amplifier and rears are OEM speakers connected directly to MS-8. After calibrating MS-8, owner increases the gain to all drivers at the front on equal basis. But since rears are connected to MS-8, you can't increase the gains to rears. (unless you play with MS-8 menu and settings)
How does this system sound? Would it not be too front staged?
B) Fronts are upgraded speakers and central is L7 mid range driver. Rears are also L7 mid range drivers or lets say any upgraded drivers.
Front and rear are hooked to amplifier via MS-8 whereas L7 is connected to MS-8 only. Owner increased the gains for front and rears before calibration of MS-8. Owner calibrates the sound system and after MS-8 doing its job, owner does not play with gains any further.
How does that setup sound?
I may be wrong but comparing setup A to setup B, setup A may have better SPL but sound staging will be poor.
Whereas setup B will have better SQ, sound staging and timing however that may compromise on SPL.
What do you think on this?
And lastly to make things slightly more interesting, if you were to add trunk sub (JL W7) with both setups, ie A & B, with which setup, trunk/boot sub would sound better?
or it does not really matter?
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A lot of this will be speculation based on research and keeping up with the th read on diymobileaudio audio...but here goes
In situation A, I wouldn't describe it as too front staged as ANY ms-8 based sun stem is going. To try and be completely front staged...but, referencing my post above, the front staging effects may not be optimal.
In situation B, you're essentially paying for amplifier power that you're not using. Because the in-amped channels are the lowest common denominator, the ms-8 will try and tune down to those.
I think your comparison on sq vs spl is accurate though
notes:
1) your center speaker should be just as good as your front doors
1a) power to center should be just as good as front doors
2) if you have equal power to all channels then it's theoretically ok to play with amp gains, but in that case just calibrate ms8 at lower volume then turn ms8 volume up.
3) there is another trick to getting more spl when rears are not amped....it is based on using the rear fader to bias the ms8 in favor of rear then turning front stage up. This is the most "pure" of the amp gain trickery options.
4) fwiw, so far my best tune has been with an xd 600/6 and only front stage amped...not rears OR center I'd say I had 95% of available SQ. i didn't like that I wasn't really using much of the available power from the xd so I decided to change the amps to a 2x hd setup(so far only able to get back to 85-90%sq). However it's not an apples to apples comparison. My previous tune used the kaigoss mod whereas my current tune has the sub on its own ms8 channel. I think that is the difference and I am going to go that direction with it. I should be able to get 98%sq from this or that's my goal anyway.
5) rears should have some type of tweeter, coax or separate.
6) based on my experience, I've been recommending more all or nothing approaches...either amp all your channels, or not. I redo mended to quiksr20 to run ms-8 with efficient front speakers (dls r4) and no extra power, except for midbass and sub....his install is still in the works but I expect the final result to be great
7) if you do want amps...a good cost efficient and pretty option for our cars is the alpine pdx v9 (5ch) and PDx 100.4, which will give you equal power to all channels plus good sub power.
8) as to yoour first gain question, the ms8 behaves better when it has less matching to do...this is why I gave mob17 the guide to ms8 setting advice which he posted. The ms8 is designed to set and forget gains but it does much much better when it doesn't work as hard to match.