# Is this TOO wide and deep? (that's what she said)



## T3mpest

Just a quick question about horn mounting. I have always heard go as wide and deep as you can as where you mount the horns more or less determines it's staging boundaries. Anyways in my car the side of my kickpanel has a removeable cover. Past that cover basically leads into my front wheel well. I can literally damn near mount the whole horn outside my vehicle interior. I know MOST of the energy from the horn is reflected towards the center anyways, so how far into this wheelwell should I mount them. Half the mouth in half out, or should I stop once the motor gets into the wheel wells and leave all the mouth inside" the cabin


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## Eric Stevens

What car is this? and pictures would help. Measure what the path length difference would be from the compression driver, now versus the revised location.

Reducing path length difference always improves imaging and especially staging. Better depth within the sound stage with more space between the images within the sound stage etc etc. So moving them farther away is a very good thing.

As you move them farther away you can also move them wider without losing the center image.


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## T3mpest

Car is a 2009 cadillac SRX. I can get some pics up when I get off work.


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## thehatedguy

http://www.diymobileaudio.com/forum/hlcd/96245-install-pics-horns.html

Post number 16.

That's about as far back as I was willing to go. The bodies were physically hitting the firewall. If we had the cool neo motors back then that we have now, the actual horn bodies would have gone outside the car some too.

My current car, the minihorns could physically touch the firewall and were as wide as the doorpanels thanks to a little nook in there and how the CD1e bodies have the reflectors...tucks right in there with the motor side of the body pretty much fully trimmed down.


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## T3mpest

thehatedguy said:


> http://www.diymobileaudio.com/forum/hlcd/96245-install-pics-horns.html
> 
> Post number 16.
> 
> That's about as far back as I was willing to go. The bodies were physically hitting the firewall. If we had the cool neo motors back then that we have now, the actual horn bodies would have gone outside the car some too.
> 
> My current car, the minihorns could physically touch the firewall and were as wide as the doorpanels thanks to a little nook in there and how the CD1e bodies have the reflectors...tucks right in there with the motor side of the body pretty much fully trimmed down.


That's kinda where i can get mine too, but I wouldn't have to cut to outside the car.. Kinda like the first picture in the frirst post where you can see that the mounting tab of the horn is behind that panel, not in the cabin. much further out could you space tha tdriver,if you had room, should you stop when the mouth begins to leave the cabin space?


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## thehatedguy

I always got them as far back as I could physically get them. At first in my Accord you could see the horns as they were flush with the edge of the dash, but eventually with that car and my current car they were so far under the dash that they couldn't be seen while you were sitting in there.

Some of that is due to PLDs and some of it was to keep uneducated judges from seeing them and automatically giving low scores because they were horns.


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## Patrick Bateman

T3mpest said:


> Just a quick question about horn mounting. I have always heard go as wide and deep as you can as where you mount the horns more or less determines it's staging boundaries. Anyways in my car the side of my kickpanel has a removeable cover. Past that cover basically leads into my front wheel well. I can literally damn near mount the whole horn outside my vehicle interior. I know MOST of the energy from the horn is reflected towards the center anyways, so how far into this wheelwell should I mount them. Half the mouth in half out, or should I stop once the motor gets into the wheel wells and leave all the mouth inside" the cabin


I believe the midrange and midbass have a larger impact on stage size than the tweeter. Above 2khz the tweeters can be a foot apart or a yard apart and the size of the stage won't vary a whole lot. But put your midranges a foot apart and it's a whole 'nother story.

TLDR : midrange and midbass location is critical, tweeters not so much. This is one of the reasons you can have a soundstage at eye level with tweeters at knee level.


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## T3mpest

Patrick Bateman said:


> I believe the midrange and midbass have a larger impact on stage size than the tweeter. Above 2khz the tweeters can be a foot apart or a yard apart and the size of the stage won't vary a whole lot. But put your midranges a foot apart and it's a whole 'nother story.
> 
> TLDR : midrange and midbass location is critical, tweeters not so much. This is one of the reasons you can have a soundstage at eye level with tweeters at knee level.


I can cross the HLCD's a full octave or more lower than most tweeters though. It's the mini horns, in most of my installs they end up crossed over around 1.2k, give or take 200hz or so.


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## Patrick Bateman

T3mpest said:


> I can cross the HLCD's a full octave or more lower than most tweeters though. It's the mini horns, in most of my installs they end up crossed over around 1.2k, give or take 200hz or so.


True.

I like the way that Mic Wallace set up his car, with the horns way back against the firewall.

It's a catch-22 though. If you push the horns back against the firewall, far and wide, then you limit the vertical directivity.

I wonder if it might be possible to get the best of both worlds by using a crossover point of about 2khz with the underdash horns, then put a midrange in the optimum location (far and wide) and then put a midbass in the optimum location (wide.)

So basically you'd have an underdash horn in the 'normal' location, but the midrange location would be critical. Basically the depth and width of the stage would be determined by the midrange, and you'd use DSP to line it up with the horn.










This is all conjecture though, I've never seen anyone do it  Mic Wallace has a two-way IIRC, and his car's dash is particularly nice for horns because it's shallow.


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## Mic10is

When I won IASCA Finals with that set up it was a 3way. Horn, Midrange and Midbass. When I won MECA Finals it was a horn and a single 8, but also had a 10 up front.

Its hard to tell bc the kick panel blocks part of the horn, but the compression sits inside the fender area. Its how I have always mounted horns. get them as deep and wide as possible.
There is 1/2" of the outer horn mount left to mount each horn.


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## Patrick Bateman

Mic10is said:


> When I won IASCA Finals with that set up it was a 3way. Horn, Midrange and Midbass. When I won MECA Finals it was a horn and a single 8, but also had a 10 up front.
> 
> Its hard to tell bc the kick panel blocks part of the horn, but the compression sits inside the fender area. Its how I have always mounted horns. get them as deep and wide as possible.
> There is 1/2" of the outer horn mount left to mount each horn.


Badass! Would love to hear it.
Is that the pic from the MECA setup or the IASCA setup?


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## thehatedguy

IASCA.

That setup had Scan Revelator 5s and some custom made Image Dynamics 8s in there. From what I remember, Eric said the XO point was pretty high when he tuned it...it was somewhere around 2k from what I recall.


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## thehatedguy

http://www.diymobileaudio.com/forum/hlcd/96245-install-pics-horns.html

Second picture in the thread is behind the grill of the kick.

The 8s were some that Matt made for him using the motors from some blown Illusion Nd-10s that I had...or might have been 12s, I would have to go re-read the thread.


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## T3mpest

Mic10is said:


> When I won IASCA Finals with that set up it was a 3way. Horn, Midrange and Midbass. When I won MECA Finals it was a horn and a single 8, but also had a 10 up front.
> 
> Its hard to tell bc the kick panel blocks part of the horn, but the compression sits inside the fender area. Its how I have always mounted horns. get them as deep and wide as possible.
> There is 1/2" of the outer horn mount left to mount each horn.


That's what I'm working with as well, I can mount the compression driver of my mini's in my feder as well as most of my horn if I tried, figuring out how much is too much horn to stuff into the fender for the sake of getting it wider. Sounds like you did "decent" with it setup like that


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## Patrick Bateman

T3mpest said:


> That's what I'm working with as well, I can mount the compression driver of my mini's in my feder as well as most of my horn if I tried, figuring out how much is too much horn to stuff into the fender for the sake of getting it wider. Sounds like you did "decent" with it setup like that











Here's Mic's car

















Here's a Pyle PH612, which is a clone of a JBL progressive transition waveguide

If you wanted to do something like Mic's setup, the Pyle might be a little bit shallower than the Image Dynamics horn

The termination of the waveguide makes a HUGE difference. And Mic's car is unique in that the top *and* the bottom of the waveguide is terminated; with most cars you're only terminating the top.

Sound wants to 'wrap around' an object; even with highly direction speakers like waveguide, the sound will wrap around. For instance, with the Pyle PH612 the sound will wrap around beginning around 2khz. *This means that in one of the most critical octaves, 1khz-2khz, the directivity of the device breaks down.*

Mic's setup fixes that.

BTW, this is also why the roundover on the bottom of the horn works. But a roundover is a band-aid, while full termination into a baffle is a fix.



Cool stuff.









I made some super-shallow waveguide for the *top* of my dash, and they worked well too. There's an AES paper documenting that shallow horns are preferred by listeners to deep horns.


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## Patrick Bateman

I probably had too much coffee this morning, but it seems like you could achieve the same results without cutting into the firewall.









You want the minimum depth possible, so you can push that waveguide as far back as humanly possible. *The source of the sound isn't the compression driver, it's the waveguide, so you can put the compression driver IN FRONT of the waveguide and make it sound like it's not.* Easiest way to do this is with a W bin.

So basically the compression driver would fire *away* from you, and INTO the waveguide, and then the sound would exit *towards* you. *The sound would expand radially and make one 90 degree bend.*


















This is similar to how sirens work. Yes, I know sirens sound like, well, "sirens." But if you keep the number of bends down to *one*, and you terminate the waveguide carefully, I'll bet it would sound good. Keep in mind that almost *everyones* car audio HLCDs already have a bend in them. So this would have a bend in about the same spot, we're just flipping the compression driver to the other side.

Not to go off on a discussion of bending sound, but basically you want the bend to be at a point in the horn where the dimensions are as small as possible. That's why the USD and ID HLCDs have the bend right near the compression driver. A siren has *two* bends; it's that second bend that probably makes sirens sound harsh. Zero bends is ideal, one bend is fine as long as it's designed properly, two bends is pushing your luck. Sound is a wave, but it's not as easy to bend sound as it is to bend light, due to HOMs and the large size of the wavelengths in question.


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## Patrick Bateman

I made an illustration of what I described in post 16.









Here's Mic's car again









Picture a waveguide in the same spot that looks like this. Compression driver has been flipped to the other side, it's in FRONT of the waveguide now.









The waveguide is 12" wide, just 4" deep(!), and the compression driver in the center is the same dimensions as a Celestion CDX1-1445, which sells for $90 a pair at Parts Express.









You could make the waveguide out of wood, similar to this

















By far the easiest way to make the waveguide is to go looking around at Pier 1, Ikea, and Cost Plus for a bowl that has walls with straight sides. Then just plop the compression driver into it. You want a gap of one half centimeter between the compression driver and the bowl. (Found this out in my Paraline experiments.)


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## Patrick Bateman

If you're wondering where to put the midbass, you could bolt them right to the waveguide, and now you have a Synergy Horn. Pyle PDMR5 is $15, so you could have a full range front stage in a foot print that's 4" deep by 12" wide. (All of the illustrations in this thread were made to scale, this isn't a guess, you could actually build this.)

If 12" is too big, you could scale everything down, similar to what Jason did when he made a Synergy horn for his door. If one used a neo compression driver and 3" midranges you could squeeze this down to a size that would fit in a car door.

You want the midrange taps about 5-8cm from the throat of the horn, so the mounting works out nicely.


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## Mic10is

Patrick Bateman said:


> Here's Mic's car


thats from MECA finals. It was Erics Mini bodies which I have always used. Ive never been a full size horn body person. using the Ultra/Selenium driver

and a Thiel 8 that was on clearance for awhile through Thiel. The Thiel is pretty flat from about 55-5khz. Poly cone so it isnt as affected by moisture and the elements making it much less temperamental and easier to tune, than a paper cone driver.
It also has a very nice warm tonality which can balance out the sound of the horns.


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## subwoofery

@ Mic, 
Strange, never noticed but did you flip the passenger's side horn upside down? 
When you look at your pic, it seems that the flat side (inside horn) is aimed towards the center console while the crossing side is aimed @ the passenger's door. 

Guess it's only an illusion. 

Kelvin


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## Mic10is

subwoofery said:


> @ Mic,
> Strange, never noticed but did you flip the passenger's side horn upside down?
> When you look at your pic, it seems that the flat side (inside horn) is aimed towards the center console while the crossing side is aimed @ the passenger's door.
> 
> Guess it's only an illusion.
> 
> Kelvin


uh...no.. its an illusion from the way its sanded. I sand down the body of every horn to remove the mold markings and make it as smooth as possible. 
When the pics were taken I hadnt bothered to repaint them yet.


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## subwoofery

Guessed so lol 

Kelvin


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## thehatedguy

Did it have the sub infront when you won IASCA? I thought it did...but maybe it didn't.


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## subterFUSE

My horns were mounted as far back and as wide, and as high as we could get them. The drivers are on top of the horn, firing downward. Some of the carpet and padding had to be cut away to get them tucked further back, and the OBD port had to be relocated because it was originally right above the driver's dead pedal.

I used Eric's full size bodies with the Ultra drivers.


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## Mic10is

thehatedguy said:


> Did it have the sub infront when you won IASCA? I thought it did...but maybe it didn't.


No sir. just the horns, 5s and 8s and 2 Fiteens in the back

oh and "tweeters" in the apillar


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## thehatedguy

Ah...the kicks look the same, then noticed the sub in front but didn't remember when you did that.


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## cajunner

Patrick Bateman said:


> If you're wondering where to put the midbass, you could bolt them right to the waveguide, and now you have a Synergy Horn. Pyle PDMR5 is $15, so you could have a full range front stage in a foot print that's 4" deep by 12" wide. (All of the illustrations in this thread were made to scale, this isn't a guess, you could actually build this.)
> 
> If 12" is too big, you could scale everything down, similar to what Jason did when he made a Synergy horn for his door. If one used a neo compression driver and 3" midranges you could squeeze this down to a size that would fit in a car door.
> 
> You want the midrange taps about 5-8cm from the throat of the horn, so the mounting works out nicely.


this was a nice idea, Bateman.

I hate it when I post something I think is just a cool idea and nobody gives any thoughts on it.

I would have issues with the wave wrapping around the compression driver's plastic bits, and maybe try to direct the wave over some kind of shroud there, but overall it looks like a workable model.

You can get highs out of a La Scala, more or less, and if you look at the D2 by JBL, it has a few bends in it, but as you move past the 1/3 wavelength, horn throat "guideline" I think some funky stuff starts going on, that HOM thing...

still, as a shallow mount, large format, low frequency playing image driver, it may find a place in the foot-wells after all.

couple that with your bandpass Synergy idea, and maybe throw it in a Paraline, and hell, you might just deliver a new baby!

I can see it, in my mind's eye...


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## Patrick Bateman

cajunner said:


> this was a nice idea, Bateman.
> 
> I hate it when I post something I think is just a cool idea and nobody gives any thoughts on it.
> 
> I would have issues with the wave wrapping around the compression driver's plastic bits, and maybe try to direct the wave over some kind of shroud there, but overall it looks like a workable model.
> 
> You can get highs out of a La Scala, more or less, and if you look at the D2 by JBL, it has a few bends in it, but as you move past the 1/3 wavelength, horn throat "guideline" I think some funky stuff starts going on, that HOM thing...
> 
> still, as a shallow mount, large format, low frequency playing image driver, it may find a place in the foot-wells after all.
> 
> couple that with your bandpass Synergy idea, and maybe throw it in a Paraline, and hell, you might just deliver a new baby!
> 
> I can see it, in my mind's eye...


I was on a roll!


















Probably the best shape would look like a large version of a bullet tweeter.
Those things have response past 40khz, so getting to 20khz with my contraption shouldn't be difficult.
The main thing you want is to keep all the path lengths equidistant. And a circle accomplishes that. If the path lengths aren't equidistant, you get comb filtering, which will set an upper limit on frequency response.

But, again, circle solves that so the thing should work fine.


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## thehatedguy

You would get a notch in the FR, probably pretty bad one at that. And you would want to have the compression driver loaded into the beginning of a horn, and then have that horn be reflected back to the other horn.

I think it would be a lot of work for low fidelity sound.


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## Patrick Bateman

thehatedguy said:


> You would get a notch in the FR, probably pretty bad one at that. And you would want to have the compression driver loaded into the beginning of a horn, and then have that horn be reflected back to the other horn.
> 
> I think it would be a lot of work for low fidelity sound.












Why would you get a notch? It's a ninety degree bend - no worse than any other HLCD.

Paralines have multiple 180 degree bends, and they play out to 20khz.

I imagine that the only reason that no one's done this is that the depth of a horn usually isn't a problem, the size of the mouth is.


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