"I'm curious about you running a non-crossovered sub free air - I can't imagine this ever being a good idea yet you obviously know what you're doing..."

You're right, Jeremy, I can't imagine it being a good idea either. But for some completely inexplicable reason, it works in my particular installation. It may have something to do with the acoustics of my station wagon. Just putting the rear seatbacks up ruins the sound. The speaker is sort of enclosed, but not really - that spare tire cover is not air tight, and the cavity in which the spare tire is mounted extends quite a ways forward and back of the spare. The space-saver spare is turned around backwards and the speaker magnet just barely fits inside the dish of the wheel.

As for your second point, no, I don't really know what I'm doing. I just kept pushing buttons and turning knobs until I got it to sound the way I wanted.

The part that works is a great deal of unusually rich mid-bass coming from that 10" speaker. Due to a freak of acoustics, all the sound of that speaker sounds like it is coming from the base of the windshield even though it's eight feet behind the listener and maybe double that distance in sound path as it zig-zags back and forth across the car on its way to the front. When I turn on the 90Hz crossover on my amp, all of that richness goes away. There is a slight improvement in overall crispness of sound, but not enough to compensate for the loss of lower midbass.

I tried a free-air type speaker for a week or so, but didn't like it. The bass was punchier (not a lot, but some) but again, I gave up too much mid-bass, whether crossed over or not. The free-air speaker did not respond to being run full-range as well as the original Orion. Maybe the Orion being dual voice coil has something to do with it?

Interestingly enough, in competition if I tell the sound quality judges that I am running the speaker free air and not crossed over, I do not score as well. Under those circumstances, I think the judges start to hear what they think they should hear, not what is actually there.

All of the people who know more about car audio than I do (just about everybody on the planet) tell me that what I'm doing won't work. Then they listen to it and can't figure out why it does work, any better than I can. Can you say the word serendipity?

Go figure.

tanstaafl.


"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"