And Your Speakers and Amps, too.
Now we turn to the all-essential speakers. In the same way that there are countless sizes and models that the receiver unit can take, so, too, it is in the case of speakers and their placement in different automobiles.
At What Specs Should I Look?
The first thing we need to be clear be on is that car stereo receivers produce low power, and consequently car speakers have lower impedance and higher sensitivity ratings. With this one fact, car speakers are already very different from home speakers.
But on to the specs:
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Design: The number of individual drivers in a car speaker. What you might end up buying may be a combination of the following: a single driver, a woofer, tweeter, and midrange.
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Tweeter Design: This is the type of the tweeter. Common designs vary according to factors like efficiency, most economical, acoustics, and accuracy.
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Sensitivity: An efficiency or sensitivity rating means how well the speakers turn the power into sound (or, the bigger the number, the badder the sound could be.)
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Frequency Response: The range of frequencies the speaker will reproduce (lowest frequency to the highest in cycles per second, or hertz). The wider the range, the better. Optimal is 20 - 20,000 Hz, the range of human hearing.
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RMS Power Range: The range of continuous power the speaker requires to operate properly. This makes the RMS power range figure a sure way to evaluate different speakers.
Peak Power Handling: Peak power handling refers to the amount of power a speaker can handle during a brief musical burst.
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Impedance: Measured in ohms, this value shows the "load" that the speakers applies on the amplifier. This means that, in one such bad case, low-impedance speakers (less than 4 ohms) or multiple speakers wired in parallel can lead to trouble with amplifiers, since these latter ones are not built to deliver large amounts of electricity.
After the above, only one thing remains: the how-to's of the mounting location for the speaker. It's actually either top-mount and bottom-mount. It all amounts (no pun intended) to getting clearance for your speaker to fit properly. Remember that this is an important dimension to think about if you're fixing your new speakers on a non-factory speaker location.
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