Superb Bee
Well-Known Member
OK, so putting dash boards together I have always played with the idea of a small hidden unit that can just be out of sight, super cheap, sound decent, and easy to use...
So playing with the 70 chargers dash, I couldn't bring myself to cut a radio into its rallye dash, instead I said better time now than ever to throw something together.. So to the bench I went, I made a small amplifier (out of left over parts from building many many sure amplifier kits, if you like soldering and are into audio devices and electronics, go to partsexpress and look into their amp diy kits, I have built many, they are fun and work forever, plus you build a nice little 30w amp for $15...).
Now my first idea was a plate that fit into the factory speaker location, In the center of the plate I installed a 4" peerless sds woofer, then on each side a 3" dr driver, then I powered it with the amplifier I made which was 3 channels, 2 summed channels going to a 40 watt class D circuit with a -80hz crossover, then 2 stereo channels going to a pair of 15w mono tripath amps, with a 80+ crossover (crossover simply is like a check valve, it doesn't let signal above 80 or under 80hz through or what ever level you choose, I crossed on the line input side since using small amps and crossing on the output side what kill my decibel levels).
So on paper that made a bunch of sense, the amp fit on a 7x8" board and even with mosfet heat sinks standing up was only 3" tall... It worked..
BUT heres the problem, it sounded terrible, since there is much more to making something sound good when mixing speakers than just bolting it all together in some aluminum plate I hole sawed to fit the components...
SO I FAILED.... And when I do this I normally revert to the KISS method, Keep it Simple Stupid
I went to amazon, I bought a dual voice coil 4x10
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VWH3LU6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s02?ie=UTF8&psc=1
and I bought a drok amplifier all built already...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0181Z4M4A/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I also added a cheap Bluetooth receiver I had laying around and it works awesome, its super easy to wire up any you don't have to use Bluetooth, you can simply run a 3.5mm headphone wire to your phone and use your phones volume control.
To wire you wire it to 12v on with key, the speaker has 2 voice coils so you get stereo sound out of a mono speaker, so it has 2 pos and 2 neg on the speaker just like the amp, pretty easy to hook up... Sounds good, the charger has a pypes exhaust and you can hear it over the exhaust...
There are other amp choices that are closed in a case but larger, like the lepy 2024 (or what ever they changed the numbers too) and Dayton make some others all about 4 times the cost of the drok unit...
PS I put an inline 3 amp fuse on the amp (just in case, so a $11 amp doesn't cause car B Q..
I took some pics but not sure how to add them here? I have a pic of bench testing it with db meter and it shows how to wire it and what everything looks like..
Just figured I would throw this out there incase anyone was looking for an idea about how to have a bit of tunes, another positive is you can run this amp for about 300 days before it kills your battery lol...
So playing with the 70 chargers dash, I couldn't bring myself to cut a radio into its rallye dash, instead I said better time now than ever to throw something together.. So to the bench I went, I made a small amplifier (out of left over parts from building many many sure amplifier kits, if you like soldering and are into audio devices and electronics, go to partsexpress and look into their amp diy kits, I have built many, they are fun and work forever, plus you build a nice little 30w amp for $15...).
Now my first idea was a plate that fit into the factory speaker location, In the center of the plate I installed a 4" peerless sds woofer, then on each side a 3" dr driver, then I powered it with the amplifier I made which was 3 channels, 2 summed channels going to a 40 watt class D circuit with a -80hz crossover, then 2 stereo channels going to a pair of 15w mono tripath amps, with a 80+ crossover (crossover simply is like a check valve, it doesn't let signal above 80 or under 80hz through or what ever level you choose, I crossed on the line input side since using small amps and crossing on the output side what kill my decibel levels).
So on paper that made a bunch of sense, the amp fit on a 7x8" board and even with mosfet heat sinks standing up was only 3" tall... It worked..
BUT heres the problem, it sounded terrible, since there is much more to making something sound good when mixing speakers than just bolting it all together in some aluminum plate I hole sawed to fit the components...
SO I FAILED.... And when I do this I normally revert to the KISS method, Keep it Simple Stupid
I went to amazon, I bought a dual voice coil 4x10
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VWH3LU6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s02?ie=UTF8&psc=1
and I bought a drok amplifier all built already...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0181Z4M4A/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I also added a cheap Bluetooth receiver I had laying around and it works awesome, its super easy to wire up any you don't have to use Bluetooth, you can simply run a 3.5mm headphone wire to your phone and use your phones volume control.
To wire you wire it to 12v on with key, the speaker has 2 voice coils so you get stereo sound out of a mono speaker, so it has 2 pos and 2 neg on the speaker just like the amp, pretty easy to hook up... Sounds good, the charger has a pypes exhaust and you can hear it over the exhaust...
There are other amp choices that are closed in a case but larger, like the lepy 2024 (or what ever they changed the numbers too) and Dayton make some others all about 4 times the cost of the drok unit...
PS I put an inline 3 amp fuse on the amp (just in case, so a $11 amp doesn't cause car B Q..
I took some pics but not sure how to add them here? I have a pic of bench testing it with db meter and it shows how to wire it and what everything looks like..
Just figured I would throw this out there incase anyone was looking for an idea about how to have a bit of tunes, another positive is you can run this amp for about 300 days before it kills your battery lol...
