It is currently running open-air with no enclosure, resting on the car floor.

Speakers need the proper enclosures to sound their best. As soon as you can, make sure that all of your speakers are properly enclosed. Of course, they have to be made to go into enclosures. Some are designed specifically for open-air use, but when they say "open air" what they mean is that the unit shoud have the cone facing into the vehicle and the back of the cone facing out of the vehicle (for example, mounted to a sealed baffle board with the back end facing into the trunk or into the door frame). Open-air woofers depend upon there being a seal between the inside of the car and the outside- with the pressure difference between the two supporting the woofer's ability to create sound.

Low-frequency speakers have to be able to move air, you see. If you have a speaker just "sitting there", then the air behind the speaker is getting moved just as much as the air in front of it, and since it's the same air, it doesn't get much of a chance to make noise (at least not the way it was intended). If you put it in an enclosure (properly sized, of course), then the enclosure resonates properly and provides backpressure on the cone, and the front of the cone moves the air to your ears the way it was intended.

It's amazing how much better a properly enclosed speaker sounds than a speaker that's just "sitting there". A properly enclosed speaker will play louder, deeper, and tighter than you might think.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144