Midrange speaker pods: step #1

    When I started to upgrade my car audio system, one of the most important part was speakers. Every normal sound system has at least two-component frontal speaker system. By default, midrange speakers are placed in doors (near legs) and tweeters (high frequency speakers) are placed on the front panel or in the upper part of the doors. As you might seen, I have already posted 3 steps on how to create tweeter pods in front pillar trims so that tweeters would be higher than built-in factory tweeters. This time I'll describe how I created midrange speaker pods in my front doors. 

   Audi I own, has original 13cm speakers in doors which were not enough for my system. The most popular speaker size for audio fans is 16.5 cm. These speakers are bigger and able to produce more bass frequency, are louder and more powerful.  

   So the goal is - 16.5cm speakers. As I said that original space allows to setup only 13 cm speakers, so it is necessary to make modifications in the door trim/panel. Before you do this you must understand that this will ruin your original looks of the car interior. But you have to make sacrifices in the name of high quality music in your car.

   The first step is to disassemble the door trim/panel and soundproof the inside of the door. It is very important, because bigger and more powerful speakers produce bigger vibrations. Doors are made of quite thin metal so they tend to resonate creating unnecessary additional sounds. Also from vibrations door metal moves forwards and backwards, so the volume of doors are changing (not much, but still) and it distorts the sound.

I used vibroisolation material that can be bought in specialized car audio stores. Vibroisolation roughly consists of bitumen layer and thin aluminum foil layer. This vibroisolation is quite heavy as its purpose is to make door metal heavier = harder to move.

In the following picture you can see how I isolated my front door from inside:

   This particular isolation material is easy to apply, you just have to peal of the paper which protects the adhesive side and stick it to the metal.

   As you see in the picture above, I have attached plywood form that will support the construction of the speaker pod. This is necessary to have a surface to which I can attach pod construction. 

Preferably metal would be used instead of plywood, because the inside of the doors gets moist in bad weather so wood can rot in these conditions. However, I have these pods installed for about 2 years know and everything is OK. If you use wood, it would be best to apply a coat of protective paint.

   I think everyone knows that speakers can work only in boxes. Well, they CAN work without boxes, but they sound really crappy without boxes. As for midrange speakers, they are made for approximate volumes that usually car doors have. As you should know, the best box for speakers is hermetical. Unfortunately we can't make doors hermetic but we can do our best. So I applied vibroisolation for the outer side of doors (much more sense will occur after looking at the picture below). Don't forget to cut small holes for the wires!

Next posts will follow!