Add car subwoofers to Home theater (1 Viewer)

Hi,

I have 2 10-inch subwoofers with built in amplifiers for my car. I want to add these to my Home Theater. Could someone give me details about how to go about this. I need to know which converters, wires/ or any other instruments that I may need for this project.

Thanks,

Red

....it is easy...first you have to buil an acustic place for the speakers...

First you would have to tell us what exactly they are, and what exactly you want to connect them to.

Oh nevermind that.

Use the red wire...

Good luck

Brac

Hi I have a pair of Bazooka 10', with built in amp. My home theater is an Onkyo 5.1.

Thanks.

OK, here is a question for you...

Why?

Sell that to some 16 year old kid for his 89 Geo Tracker and buy a Home Theater sub. One that is in a box and designed by professionals to sound good in your room. You will be much happier with the resulting sound.

Just to help clarify...

Auto subwoofers, especially the prepackaged ones like the Bazooka tubes are designed to work in a very small, enclosed space: i.e. a vehicle. If you tried to use them in a home theater, a substantially larger space, they would not be able to move enough air to create the bass necessary to provide a satisfying home theater experience.

The above suggestion to sell them and purchase a home subwoofer would be your best bet.

I personally like Paradigm subwoofers for their cost/performance ratio. I have a PS-1000 in my current setup and am very happy with it. Used ones can be found on e-bay in the $300 range, a good investment in my opinion.

DonC

I use 2 Polk Audio Momo MM1200 12" subwoofers in my home theater. They are ran with a Sony HT 200x2 Amplifier from a previous Home theater in 95. These subs sound awesome and i am working making a concealment cabinet for the subs and all the equipment. I have had several people with High dollar subwoofer setups say mine were very tight. they are in sealed boxes. i have included a picture of how they are stup right now
http://www.hometheaterforum.com/gall...serialNumber=2

I have a couple 15" Rockford’s that I use as my low base. They work great, but I only used them because I had an extra amp that could run them. I couldn't imagine setting up a Hi Phonics Zeus amp and converter in my home and being happy about it. I also had to build the boxes for lower frequencies than a car subwoofer enclosure would have. They would only fit in a van now. This is only due to the specs of the speaker. That brings up a whole new forum...

This thread is dead fella's, the last post the original poster made was in March. His only two posts were on this thread.

for the record, i have a two twelves (made for a car) in a sick setup; 1100 watt bandpass system with lighted/mirrored interior with chrome sub covers hooked up to my (living room) sony audio/video control center and it is completely, entirely, ridiculously, and obscenely loud with bass that literally rattles the fuck out of my 6 unit apartment building to the point where you can hear it a few streets away! if you have a sick setup and a decent receiver that can power the subs GO FOR IT!

Like gldnbz1, I also use car subwoofers and I am very pleased. I use a Dennon receiver for my regular channels and a massive professional PA amp or the subs. In 4Ohm mode, it puts out 800 watts RMS X 2 and it weighs 150lbs. It is powering a pair of 15" SVC Cerwin-Vega Vega Series 154's. I did a lot of tuning and tweaking using enclosure calculators and settled on 3.98 cubic feat per enclosure and a single 6" side firing port tuned to 43Hz. I have them setup in very flat boxes (magnet only clears rear of box by 1/2") behind the couch because it was the only place I could hide 8 cubic feet of speaker cabinets in my living room.
I have found that using car audio subs is difficult but possible. It is somewhat uncharted territory so it requires a lot of fine tuning to get it sounding right. I enjoyed the project and the end result. I especially like having something that no one else had. An added bonus is that by placing them behind the couch, a movie explosion provides a bone shaking visceral experience.
Good luck with whatever you decide to do.
Jack

I did a lot of tuning and tweaking using enclosure calculators and settled on 3.98 cubic feat per enclosure and a single 6" side firing port tuned to 43Hz.

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43 hz? That is way too high unless you have a subsonic filter set at 40 hz. If you do that you are missing at least one full octave of LFE if not two on some movies.

I have found that using car audio subs is difficult but possible.

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I've covered this a few times before - there is no such thing as a car sub. There is no such thing as a home sub. Those are marketing terms. There are just subs and their Thiele/Small parameters sometimes (but not always) dictate the environment that they will work better in. I use a pair of TC-3000 15's in my home theater - http://web.archive.org/web/20070402025330/http://www.tcsounds.com/tc3000.htm . As you can see, they don't mention car audio or home audio. They have an optimal small box and an optimal large box in the enclosure suggestions. Thilo has never limited his drivers to a single environment. Soundsplinter started marketing to the car audio crowd but once they were tried by the home theater guys, they really started selling. Fi Car Audio is really becoming popular with the home audio market even though they have "car" in their name. And since you brought up CV, I used to run the older V-Maxx subs (orange surround/chrome cone) in my home theater. Great subs. I wished I had picked up eight 15's instead of just 2.

The ports is tuned to 43Hz, not the total enclosure system. Working with Cerwin-Vega tech, I use interchangable ports for different applications. They can extrude under the couch so that enclosure volume can still be maintained. It is counter intuitive but 28Hz port tuning offers a better flatter frequency curve for music and 43Hz works better for movies. LP works best at 60Hz for movies and 80Hz for music and sub-sonic is in the ball park of 18Hz for both applications. With power to spare in this application, I was not worried about efficiency. I did find, not surprisingly, that factory recommended enclosures for automotive applications do not necessarialy function well in a home environment. With your TS paramaters, you can design for any frequency curve you wish. Being able to interpret the graph into real world sound was the only difficult part.

sub-sonic is in the ball park of 18Hz for both applications.

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Since you are aware of T/S parameters and all things associated with sub building, then you do know that when watching movies with the sub tuned to 43hz, the driver is unloading between 43hz and the 18hz high pass filter. Have you modeled in WinISD or Unibox to see how little power is required to reach xmax in that range of frequencies? I'm surprised you haven't bottomed out the driver yet. What types of movies do you watch?

It is counter intuitive but 28Hz port tuning offers a better flatter frequency curve for music and 43Hz works better for movies.

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How are you measuring your response curves?

I pulled these out after 10yrs in the basement, I built them in college and I'm 33 now so I am a little rusty on the details. Originally I used a 1 piece box that was the height and with of the back of my couch. The volume was achieved with proper depth. I tuned that to 37Hz by tweaking CV's "high power enclosure" recommendation". It was great for movies but too deep for music (and weighed 250lbs. I then used those same parameters to get the frequency curve to peak at 43Hz and that is how I got the current volume in the two separately enclosures.
Since I am no longer in college and not going for max dB when playing music, I have been playing with specific port tuning maintaining the box volume of 3.98 cubic feet. I was using a port calculator and a speaker box calculator separately when I switched to 43Hz so there is a variable that I didn't know how to work out. When choosing the frequency curve, I would just change the dimensions by trial and error until I got the one I was looking for.
If you know of a more advanced calculator, I would be more than happy to try it. I am actually thinking of going with sealed enclosures. CV recommends 2 - 3 cubic feet mut I also need to run that through a calculator to see what I think I want. As I always do, I will use my existing enclosures to fill n and prototype the next ones. If you can't tell, I enjoy tinkering with it. One of these days I will settle on a design and actually put a nice laminate finish on a result I am satisfied with.
Any thoughts you have would be appreciated.

As I said earlier, WinISD and Unibox are the two most popular design programs. WinISD is a stand alone program while Unibox is an Excel spreadsheet. I like Unibox better but that is just my opinion.
Those are great but they don't give you in-room response. I use a Radio Shack SPL meter, a test tone disc and a spreadsheet to properly plot my sub's in-room response. I'm looking at upgrading to Room EQ Wizard soon. My manual method takes about 30 minutes to complete. REW will take seconds and allow me to update my sub's equalizer on the fly. I can even store different responses in memory banks for different situations. Flat for critical listening. Music, movies or demo response curves as well. I think I have 8 presets to work with.

ok you can hook these up and get killer bass in your home, your going to want a band pass enclosier to begin.... then judging the brand and size of the subs you probably only need about a 400 watt amp, this will probably have a fuse indicating a 25 amp max rating.... you can start off with a power supply for a game cube or ps2, they have ac/dc converters in the power cords, next you will need a capacitor to store enough amperage to power the amp in high demand situations ( usually when listening to music, or watching movies with continuous bass lines) the part about the dirty dc power noise is tru, but you can pick up a noise reduction filter in the car electronis aisle at any walmart.... put all that together and you should be ok.... {afer this is all said and done, it would be much cheaper to get on amazon.com and buy a powered woofer made for home theater}

Ran across this via google search for another topic, but just wanted to let you guys know that when I worked as a pro-installer in the early 90's at a car audio shop in Ruston, LA. I met the owner of SAS (southern audio services) who was from Baton Rouge, and he actually informed me that his original intention for the Bazooka tube was for home audio as he wasn't interested in car audio. Pretty ironic when you think about it.

Just wanted to let you know that I've got a single 4-ohm 10" bazooka being driven from a carver mono-block amp and it sounds amazing. It's placed in the corner about 6" from the wall with the woofer facing into the corner - as intended. When I watch a concert, it feels like you are there.