How GOOD is Car Audio? Polk DB652 Speakers TESTED and REVEALED
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- čas přidán 16. 05. 2024
- How good is car audio? I have always wondered how good car audio speakers tested. But never really had the time or drivers on hand to test them. luckily a friend wanted a custom boombox designed using some car audio speakers, which gave me the perfect time to find out, how good is car audio? In this case speakers.
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Did these results surprise you?
Polk usually does pretty good home theater
No^^
Not at all. I've had people ask if they can use car audio for home use, and I've always been dubious about it for a lot of the reasons shown in this video. Esp when some of these drivers are really expensive, but have zero documentation or measurements like traditional drivers for DIY/home audio, just a lot of marketing...
No - However, it is not uncommon to be offered a free head unit and free speakers when a friend upgrades. So, Being able to turn free stuff into a boom box (with bluetooth when the head has wireless input) is a worthwhile project.
Nope. Entry level car audio is not good. Just a small upgrade over non premium stock speakees. Try evaluating some of the mid to high end components. The speakers you tested were more or less $25/driver. I can't think of a home use driver for that little
Most car audio is in a huge door , testing in a much larger box would be great !!
You are always teaching us interesting things! Thanks for that!
Thank you for these would love to see more
I run some Rockford Fosgate R1525X2 in an open baffle config at my desk. It started as a "hey lets try something silly" and somehow it sounded really good. I enjoy them as much or more than the Kef I have used on my Desk. (After DSP correction. Without DSP they'd sound pretty bad.)
For many years I've been using 6.5-inch Pioneer coaxial speakers for the rear channels in my 5.1 system. Does the job just fine. Left Right and Center are custom builds.
Have a warm spot in my heart for the Polk Reference Home speakers 🔊 from the early 90's... the freq's on these 6.5's... no bueno on paper 😮
I wonder how it compares to the separate component version of this speaker DB6502. I've used the DB6502 in multiple cars and always been happy.
Yup, the best thing you could do with those speakers is (1) remove the OEM x-over and put in your own, based on your own measurements and listening preferences and (2) add a subwoofer for anything below 100 Hz.
I'm surprised you didn't measure the t/s parameters for the woofer. I've measured a few and usually Qts turns out to be huge. HUGE.
That’s a good call. I didn’t think to much of measuring the TS parameters since most people are just gonna put them right in a kick panel. So creating a box for them wasn’t of importance. But maybe in the future I’ll do that
The high QTS is likely because they are normally open baffle in a car door. I think my Rockford Fosgates I have are above 0.9
@@JoshM7 I've measured some with much higher Qts than that. Upwards of 2.0....
I have these exact speakers except I have the component version (DB 6502). I suspect components have a little bit better crossover in them, but can't say for absolute certainty. Either way, a couple things resonate with me.
1) Can't say I'm surprised by the measurements on the woofer especially. I've got a 13 band EQ and I've dialed the low mids WAAAY back (like, -8dB neighborhood) because it was just boomy as heck with radio announcers and what not. I also boosted everything below 80Hz about as much as I reasonably could which makes sense because that's exactly where this speaker takes a nose dive. Low end extension is fairly poor, and definitely doesn't reach its advertised rating, but can sorta be compensated for with hefty EQ. Midrange is indeed finicky and I've got that boosted a decent bit right where you found the dip, but overall is fairly smooth with the huge low-mid elephant reigned in. Trebles are actually a fair bit smoother to my ears than your measurements, but I suspect that's because my tweeters have no baffle diffraction at all and I'd like to think the crossover is a little more sophisticated in a component setup plus it also has a tweeter pad (don't remember where I set it). I just got double-sticky tape and taped them to my door sails. I could definitely see how diffraction would make the coax version of these a lot brighter - especially without an attenuator!
2) These being marine speakers, they're made from different materials than 'regular' car speakers. Therefore, on cold days, I have very noticeably less bass extension (seemingly HPF at 150Hz or so if it's cold enough) and gradually, my bass extension returns to normal as the car warms up (and therefore the surround and spider warm up and become more flexible). It's kinda funny, really.
I've got enough EQ, and amp power, on tap to not immediately rip these back out of my car, but I also wasn't very impressed with their performance and probably wouldn't buy them again.
What budget speakers were you able to recommend under $100?
Jbl? Kenwood? Pioneer? Sony?
Your voice sounds normal again; glad you are feeling better!
I was fighting it, but definitely much better. Thank you so much.
Great video. I actually believe it, those speakers were quite poor. But how different would the JL AUDIO C3-650 C3 SERIES be? May be a completely different result.
I use four of these in my truck, Walmart clearance them out for $40 a set. The real world experience is well described by your graph, still sound decent for the price. I added two Orion component sets in the sail panels that seem to have a flatter response and fill the gaps. Bonus, these are durable… my kids knock into them getting in and out of the truck and no damage after a year.
Finding a good one at 5-6Ohm for parallell usage could work for the postcard class D amp crowd :)
I did similar measurement video on coaxial driver 'MTX Audio TX640C : crossover : dolbyAtmosCeiling speakers' and the drivers are measuring pretty good if you put tweeter out of center to the box, hard even surface.
What about testing JBL GX602 and also check if the pattern on the tweeter will do something with the Edge Diffraction!?
That's an interesting analysis. Could you do the Infinity Kappa 6.5 inch 2-way which operates in the 2 ohm range to see how those compare? Thanks.
Interestingly enough, I have some infinity C Kappa two-ways I could test some time
The best performance increase in car audio always seems to be adding soundproofing in the doors and such. 6.5's would typically be door mounted low. and would have some obstruction like a hard plastic grill.. I've always had seperates with tunable crossovers (coustic) ... A car isn't a living room...
That interesting. I put 4" polks in the dash they sound good with alpines
All full range card audio speakers are designed around free air settings where the door or trunk size is the box. Testing in a sealed box might color the response.
That would only affect the low end.
Would have been really nice to see a comparison test. 😂
That’s a good idea.
I would like to see the performance of some car audio component speakers with a dedicated crossover.
That’s a good idea
interested in how to correct this
Toids. I made a pair of home speakers using a car 5" cerwin vega xed as the midrange and sounded less sensitive than JBL but had a fuller sound specially in the percussion made the snare drum sound more natural
Cool ! Please try Infinity Reference 6532ix. They sounded exceptionally flat and detailed to my ears (didn't exaggerate/overblow the car rumbling frequency range). I'd get them myself but not easy to get them to my country.
good video i would like to see new crossover if possible
Would love to see same test with components sets in a bookshelf box with the passive crossovers . Recoil audio premium component, they look like a nice dyna audio woofer clone
I like the idea of components such as well. Because then you can also see where you should probably cross over the drivers at. Especially if you’re gonna be using an active set up.
@@Toid yes!!! I love the idea of this series and hope it catches on i already shared the video a couple the fb car audio groups .
@@paulgood2218 thank you. I appreciate it. I hope it does. I’m really interested in doing more.
These were really made for marine/atv/motorcycle application which is why they're massive rated
This channel should be re-labeled to "Toids Ruins Everything." I actually had these on my shortlist of possible replacements for stock audio. Now...not so much. Very informative and interesting.
Haha! That’s hilarious. On a serious note, I got these on clearance at Walmart and thought I scored big. I was super stoked. Not so much after testing them….
Aftermarket speakers typically wont have much bass output, and even if they did, your doors would just rattle. You'll need a sub for bass. Adding a sub to a stock system is often the best solution.
Absolutely true! It is the reason so much car adio is adding bass.@@xxxYYZxxx
Well I was expecting different type of measuring the thing. First I would do measurements of individual drivers from 1cm and without filter. I would be courious if the drivers ring somewehere which can be seen in waterfall. Then I would like to see T/S or impedance measurement. And after I would apply crossover to individual drivers to see where exactly is the point. And I would like to see time alignment.
A waterfall would’ve been nice. And definitely something I would’ve done on a component set. I’m not sure I would test the T/S parameters since these are designed to be in a door so you’re not usually building an enclosure for it. But I definitely like the idea of doing a waterfall
@@Toid Well T/S would be just in the case producer show some on the box. But Fs would be nice as well so at least impedance curve...
@@peterpida1840 I’ll keep that in mind if I do any more videos like this. Assuming this does well then I will. And I will definitely add waterfall graphs, as well as impedance which will show FS
Hi!
I'm 52. What can i say with my experience about car loudspeakers...
They are build for max power and active filters like autoradios tone control!
Baxandall and loudness at start, now DSP...
Hight end is needed to have anything good in a car.
Only a little high quality car subwoofer can give anything good in HiFi!
My best from France!
Some parts of the linearity might be positive if you only have a «flat» bluetooth amp. It has the cassic dip in the 900-1100 hz range many put in, and also the hump in low and top end contributes to the «average person» eq settings? I guess parts of the 10db variation was to please the cheap end customers.
Measure the Freqquencyresponse without Crossover, design a new Crossover and the result might be good.
Cheers
Nik
Gotta test some cerwin Vegas and give them feedback on what they have done to their once epic products.
Oh yeah. I used to love Cerwin Vega. They had some fantastic speakers. Honestly though I haven’t heard any of their new stuff.
Well, the car door speakers are not technically in an enclosure. I always found Polk to have a unique sound to them. I like the higher grade Polks, but they do tend to be more of a mid-range and hi speaker. However, being out of phase is def a problem. I’d like to see more of your vids on more car audio speakers with analytical testing etc.
You go for cheap car speakers. Very often there is only one capacitor on the treble.
My first impression of car speakers was the sinus live 2 way composite system with Audax treble. This was the end of the 90's
sound quality was incredibly good with minimal eq adjustment.
You must choose something that
DLS Performance M225.
or equivalent.
I have used both old TV speakers and car speakers, but only in 2-way with separate treble
Car audio wise...Polk in the 90's ❤ Polk in 2000's and up 💩. I haven't bought a set of coxial speakers in forever but will be testing some on my own here shortly.
I feel like you jumped into the scummy end of the pool with these homie. Lol
I’m looking forward to seeing your tests. And based on the measurements, I think you’re right. 😁
You'd need to measure these off axis and in a typical car setting. If you measure headphones like this, it will also be wonky.
What differences do you expect to see? Every car is different and reflective. You’re not going to solve the off-axis issues by putting it in a vehicle. You might gain some low and due to cabin gain, but you still won’t be able to solve the major issues that are going on with this speaker without re-designing a passive crossover, or removing it and going active.
@@Toid Oh the point being that a car's interior and where a 6.5" driver would typically be installed in a kick panel is a much different scenario than a simple on/off axis response. No speaker manufacturer would model a speaker according to typical room conditions for a car so you bet they would have sampled at least a few different car interiors and taken measurements after considering cabin gain, reflection off assorted surfaces..etc.
While true many cars are different, the location of the door, where a speaker would go in, the foot well, a channel for the center console..etc are pretty typical in most cars so they would not need to test every vehicle to come up with a response that would be remotely linear in a car setting, for the listener.
So to do a proper test of a car speaker, it would be best to toss it in the kick panel and take measurements from the listener position to see how much different it is vs measurements in a room (gated or not). That would be the proper review of a product released for car use.
@@Toid The output of a dead-flat speaker inside a car will be totally whacked out of proportion anyways, so it doesn't much matter that the Polk measures poorly. Even the dip at 1khz isn't really bad, as most listeners will boost bass & treble anyways.
@@xxxYYZxxx I think you’re misunderstanding. The drivers still need to be in phase with each other. If not, you cannot properly fix that area no matter what. That was the whole point of doing the off axis. If they were in phase, then you’d be correct, you could just fix all that with EQ and it wouldn’t matter. At that point in time while we would want to look at, is the waterfall graph and the distortion graph.
@@svtcontour at that point in time you’re measuring the car and not the speaker. Your distortion profile and off-axis issues aren’t going to change. But this particular one I made sure to show you the vertical off axis because you have some major issues in the crossover region. It doesn’t matter when you put it in the car you’re still going to have the exact same issues. Putting it inside the door isn’t going to change those issues at all. You still can’t fix those issues that you’re having with this speaker with EQ. Now if those issues weren’t present then you could fix those with EQ.
Why don't you make your own crossover for them? to see if they can be redeemed.
I actually thought about it, but I needed to send the project out before I could get to that. In the future, I think that’s a good idea.
TBH while car audio can be good you are paying more for a speaker designed to handle the extreme swings in temperature and humidity in cars, so for the price a regular driver would probably be cheaper. If you have a set why not use them thought im building a set of speakers using my Focal car audio speakers that i have had for 10 years now they do last had them in 3 different cars now to!
Starting at, hey, those are half the price of the components I've been looking at for my rear doors, I hope there good! To, well, shit...
These are typically mounted on a door and very much off axis, not in a boom box. Aftermarket car-audio customers should note that door-mount speakers typically have weak bass. You're not likely getting better sound than stock, just louder music, and you'll need a sub for bass.
Agreed. That’s why I didn’t talk about the bass. Instead, I focused on the crossover region mostly.
I think that this is not a fair comparison.
Bad choice of a speaker in the beginning. A coax Polk audio speaker!
I am running in my hobby/test room a three way Ground Zero Plutonium GZPC.3 SQ three way with a Focal 10WM subwoofer. All "car audio".
I don't have to measure it to say that my setup sounds better than a lot off "home audio" speakers.
When you want something good, don't use those. A speaker chassis is a speaker chassis, the quality matters.
They are made to be installed in a car, not a hobo boom-box played in a room!
If you think about it, 2 6.5" coax speakers including "crossover" and some weatherproofing* for 99$ is just amazing to exist. (*they are designed to survive harsh temperature swings and moist in car doors)
If the measured the response is based on the Dana enclosure you show, I'm not surprised with the bad response. You've created a video about baffle step compensation, but didn't do the measurements on the intended use baffle, and a car door is practically infinite baffle. I'm not sure if its fair to draw conclusions based on this situation. (unless the conclusion would be it's not ideal for home/boombox use or so)
Also I can't imagine the 3/4" tweeter having enough output @950Hz to cancel the woofers output so I would be more inclined to think that the dip is coming from another reflective surface such as the table, or due to the diffraction of the box design (a lot of equidistant edges). You could check that by measuring the woofer/tweeter separately.
Polk is an extremely bad car audio brand. Never ever heard a good sounding car audio speaker from them and I would rate them as one of the worst I have used and worked with. I have been in the car audio SQ game for many years including, building, importing, judging comoeting and retailing.
Choose a proper brand and better speaker brand dedicated to car audio SQ and you will see proper results.
Even an entry level driver from a proper SQ car audio brand will give good measurements.
Morel?
Most car doors are open cavities on the backside. Not disputing your measurements. But 99 percent of the time these drivers are not placed in a sealed enclosure. I would have rather this test been performed in the environment there designed for. Or at least on a car door removed for testing purposes. Polk is bottom barrel in car audio imo
You dont measure car audio speakers because they are built for infinite baffle in a highly resonant door cavity in a noisy chaotic acoustical environment. Its tuned specifically to counteract the natural dips and spikes in car acoustics. We RTA speakers all the time in car audio sound quality competitions and a majority of the times it still doesn't work the way its supposed to either lol. Most serious cars use raw drivers and an 8 channel digital signal processor running 3 way active network setup controlling crossover points and slopes and type of slope in order to deal with the horrible acoustics of a car along with sound treatment and deadening custom fiberglass work to keep things on axis.
Yeah car audio is a shit show 😂
When you use raw drivers you have a lot more leeway to add delay and choose your crossover point. When one is already installed there are things that need to be in place for you to be able to DSP them properly. With these, the premade crossover is so bad with phasing you cannot fix this the ways you normally would. Another thing to note, is that you have no idea how those speakers will interact any vehicle. Just putting them in a different location would give you a completely different response. So you have to look at underlying issues, such as distortion and phasing issues first. If those are a mess, there’s no fix.
yes they are specifically engineered to perform off axis in a door cavity. they will perform better than they would in a speaker boom box for the most part, That is why they design it so peaky at certain frequencies with dips naturally. Car audio speakers will never measure flat in a sealed box because they never translates well in the acoustics of a car door Just saying even with focal's lead team of engineers for their 5 figure cost of focal utopias, they arent anywhere close to measuring flat for a good reason. Again this is not home audio, you cannot compare them the same.@@Toid
@@Jeffdachefz once again, we’re not talking the response. The response will be different in every vehicle and every place you put them I have plenty of friends that do some quality builds that actually win. The issues that are you seeing with this aren’t frequency Response related they are distortion related and they are phase related. Those you cannot fix with the way these are designed. And no, you cannot know where those dips and peaks are going to be in a vehicle. Every vehicle will be different.
Why not test GOOD car audio? Lol
I’m sure I’ll find some. But you won’t know until you test it.
I hope that wasn't the box and car audio receiver he used for testing, lol no wonder they had shit specs regardless of make of component speakers.
This sounds like a cool thing for you to do but with much better speakers. Try some Focal, or other top of the line two and three way speakers not coaxial.
To be fair those are really, really cheap speakers.