Well, I'm back in the world again, after a pretty intense 6,000 mile cross country trip. (Intense? When I hit Canada, I bought a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a two litre bottle of root beer, and for the next two days meal time meant slowing the car down from 75 MPH to about 60 to facilitate throwing the chicken bones out the window. They're biodegradable, right? One day I went well over 1300 miles, about 2100 kilometers.)

Rob, I'm afraid I won't be much help to you in this area -- Dominic at Cambscar would be more useful. I have not done any of my own installation work -- I leave that to the pros. Instead, I rely on what I unabashedly consider to be a very good ear to determine what is right and what is wrong with my stereo. I know quite a lot about what to do to fix the problems if it involves tuning and equalization. But hardware and wiring problems I don't get into. My IASCA competition disk has a track on it specifically designed to demonstrate out-of-phase problems: it is a vocal track with a woman saying "My voice is in phase now, and should sound coherent and be placed in the center of the sound stage. My voice is out of phase now, and should be diffuse and difficult to locate. In addition, it may lose low frequency response." or words to that effect. When she goes out of phase, if your system is properly set up, you can really tell. On cars with speakers out of phase, she sounds the same both ways. Another useful track on the IASCA CD is a series of seven drumbeats that pans left to right across the sound stage.

Having always relied on professional installers (I pick the equipment and tell them where I want it installed, and they do the grunt work) I have never had any sort of wiring or phasing problems, so don't know exactly how I'd deal with them. But you are probably on the right track (or was that Tony) by swapping wires and seeing if it makes things better or worse. Another thing you might be looking for could be phase cancellation -- you get a pair of speakers pointed at each other and if you are unlucky... what am I saying, you already know far more about this sort of thing than I ever will, I think, judging from some of your posts and emails.

What size subwoofer did you install? I have found that a single 10" works very well indeed. No, lets see, in the Netherlands you don't use inches do you? It's pounds or liters or something... I've got it, a 10" speaker is exactly .0039665404 furlongs in circumference, or to put it another way, about .000012521043 acres in cone area, give or take a few kilograms. That should allow you to easily visualize the size speaker I'm talking about.

Say Hi to Henno for me...

tanstaafl.











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