So I sold my stuff a little while ago and have been cruising around with only ~50 Hz plus in my car. My girlfriend Kim and I were talking last week and realized she had her old amp and subs sitting at her mom's just collecting dust. So I hooked it up tonight and it sounds decent for what it is. It's two 12 inch phoenix gold QX124's in a sealed box. The amp is a MTX 251D. I tested the voice coil on each and both read 4.25 ohm. My question now is about setting the gain. The amp does 160 rms at 2 ohm on 12.5 volts and 250 rms on 14.4 volts. Playing it in my car my voltage is sitting at 13.9 volts. How much power is the amp producing on 13.9 volts at 2.125 ohm? I'm asking so I can know what to set the gain at. I guess this set up will make-do while I save up for a new install.
GF who supports car audio? I bow to you sir. lol. All of mine have hated my trucks, stereos, etc... anything getting more attention/money
Now to answer your question, i don't say this often but the best way to go about it here may just be to do it by ear... its not much power difference you're talking about and mtx are not the best quality amplifiers in the world so you should hear the clipping fairly easily.
Yeah she always enjoyed my system. The stuff she had was in an Integra she had bought years ago when she was 18. The subs and amp seem to be in pretty good shape, the box is questionable though. I'm going to look it over tomorrow and see how "sealed" it is or isn't. I might take a crack at making a new box for them this weekend. Shouldn't be too much and going sealed shouldn't be too difficult. I'm guessing the amp will be doing around 200 rms at that voltage. I'll fool around with it and see how it looks.
As far as what I'm thinking of running in my car.. I'm fairly certain of running either a 15" or 18" Fi Q sealed and running it on 1k rms. I'm going to just work on getting all the parts seperately over a course of time. First thing on my list is going to be a bigger alt, then the amp, then the sub and last an enclosure. For the enclosure I was thinking about using birch and doing some sort of stained finish. Do the rounded edges on it and have it look really clean. I'll have Dustin do the enclosure for me, but nothin is set in stone until I have the sub sitting in my house. Having something in my car for the time being will be nice. Something is better than nothing.
Hook em up and play some bass heavy music then just use your hand to feel around the box seams for leaks... i don't think there will be any but if there are they will be obvious