From victora@mda.vnd.TEK.COM Thu Sep 12 21:12:17 1996 Return-Path: Received: from inet2.tek.com (inet2.tek.com [134.62.48.22]) by ursula.ee.pdx.edu (8.7.5/CATastrophe-2/10/96-P) with SMTP id VAA09836; Thu, 12 Sep 1996 21:12:15 -0700 (PDT) for Received: by inet2.tek.com id ; Thu, 12 Sep 1996 21:11:31 -0700 Received: from tektronix.tek.com(134.62.48.24) by inet2 via smap (V1.3) id sma044641; Thu Sep 12 21:10:52 1996 Received: from tekgen.bv.tek.com (tekgen.bv.tek.com [128.181.44.33]) by tektronix.tek.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id VAA28738; Thu, 12 Sep 1996 21:12:31 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Ariel 3 (ariel3.vnd.tek.com) by tekgen.bv.tek.com (4.1/8.0) id AA08829; Thu, 12 Sep 96 21:10:42 PDT Message-Id: <9609130410.AA08829@tekgen.bv.tek.com> Date: Thu, 12 Sep 96 21:13:08 -0700 From: "Victor J. Albert" Organization: Tektronix X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1 (Windows; U; 16bit) Mime-Version: 1.0 To: weasel@interport.net, thunder5@ee.pdx.edu Subject: The Upgrade Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Status: RO X-Status: Jerky, $250? Hmmmm.... Ok, here's what I would do. Take out the Yellow pages and pick out 5 car audio shops in your area. Take a bag of popcorn, a note pad and a writting implement (pencils work great) and visit these shops. Tell every sales person you meet that your not going to buy a thing today. Leaving checkbooks, credit cards, ATM cards and cash at home helps. :) Look at all the 6.5" (please don't go smaller than this unless the life of your mother depends on it) coax's around $100 and amps around $125. Collect literature and make notes of prices, which ones you liked and didn't and anything else you might think about, maybe some prose. Listen to them with and without an amp connected. After you get home look over all your goodies and figure out which set YOU liked best. Check out the max power rating on the speakers and use that to help you decide what amp you'll want to go with them. Off the cuff, polk makes an ex series of coax's that I've heard good things about and rockford's series-1 amps are nice. To give those coax's a little more bang for the buck I always use and recommend the use of a foam baffle. They're a small cup of foam that fits around the back of the speaker. It does three major things. Protects the speakers from moisture, provides a small enclosure that will help to improve the bass you're after and seperates the front of the cone from the rear. As the cone moves back and forth it creates a sound pressure wave in both directions. What happens is that those waves meet at the edge of the cone and will cancel each other out. Bad news. Another handy thing you'll want to pick up is an amplifier installation kit. It comes with all the wires you'll need to do a proper installation of the amp. You can get both the baffles and the kit right out of Crutchfield for about $33. If you have access to the web, once you find the amp and speakers you want, I could send you URLs to some online shops that may allow you to get better equipment at lower prices. Hope this helps, Victor Albert