and “custom” audio our involvement and help can go as far as providing you with a great
RAW DRIVER and this manual and the rest is down to installation.
The first part to learn about is the “baffle plate” – the actual mounting plane you are going
to screw the speakers to. In a car, this is normally the inner metal door panel via a plastic
adaptor.
In an ideal world the baffle plate would be infinitely strong and free of any vibration
reaction to the speaker itself. A typical car door panel is of course nothing at all like this.
Installations where the speakers are mounted into wooden rings or into the floor panel or
kickwell area via custom solutions are normally at a terrific advantage to a typical door
installation from the very start.
Benefits to firming up the baffle plate are enormous – from deeper, richer bass to sweeter
midrange and high end performance there will be nothing that isn’t improved. In fact the
difference between a well installed driver and a badly installed on is absolutely, absolutely,
absolutely game changing and unrecognisable that the sound is produced by the same
physical product.
You can use fiberglass resin, bitumen or butyl based sound deadening, wooden structures
or even metal reinforcement panels to help stiffen things up.
Secondly, you should pay attention to the area that forms the effective “enclosure” around
the back of the speaker. If we remember my example earlier of the home hifi speaker unit
that would generally have a neat and thick wooden enclosure with carefully positioned
Dacron wool. We potentially have a tin car door with a glass window and a tonne of wire
and rattly mechanism to play with. To say we are at a disadvantage is understating it!
Our advice is to stay out of the doors as much as you can but I have to concede that so
many times you have no choice. So if you are faced with a door install the plan for the
backwave is to work hard to sound deaden the door card itself and the metal shell of the
door. Modern products are available that can even be sprayed into the door shell to achieve
this aim as well if not better than traditional soundproofing material. Finally, take care to
work out where any water ingress will affect the installation, and loop any cables at a low
point under the speaker so droplets form on the bottom of the cables and drip down into
the door drain. If you suspect that the speaker will be subject to water from above (apart
from waterproof speakers obviously) we recommend that a simple hood be made and
fastened above the driver to protect it as constant attack from the elements will eventually
damage the speaker. Also pay attention to the mounting depth of the speaker to make sure
that the window can pass behind it as it drops, if applicable.
