Hey peeps

Well apart from angling speakers, what are some other tips and tricks to obtaining a high sound stage?

ambient tweeters on the roof or atleats very high up is what i've seen.

But this makes the sound appear to be coming in between the two tweeters, this made me think, why not mount the tweeter in that spot?

for a high sound stage i would put the tweeters above the woofers in the door. Thats alot higher up than the kicks and nearly as far forward

a pillars are usually a good option - gives a nice high uninterupted pathway...

This article provides a good general overview of ambient tweeters: SQ system set-ups and the theories behind them.

a friends car has, the tweeters in the sail panels, like where the mirroe is screwed on. and the midbass in the door. and its sounds good. however this setup can also sound bad, cuz the tweeter is more distant with the midbass driver. so i guess u gotta play around with it.

You don't really need to bring the speakers up to bring up your sound stage. Ambient tweeters can help but you have to be careful not to screw up your stage and imaging.

If you have your tweeters low, and the sound stage is low, it's because you can "hear" the tweeters. That is, your ears can tell where the sound is coming from. This may sound silly but you need to hear the music, not the speakers. If your ears (or brain) can't tell where a sound is coming from it assumes it to be a eye level. Which is why a good system can have the speakers on the floor and the sound appears to be coming from above the dash. Freaky stuff.

Now just think that if your stage is low because you can localise the sounds, bringing your tweeters up will bring the sound up, but you will still be able to hear the tweeter which may cause other problems in imaging and tonality and the separation will be horrible.

How do you do it? Tell me and we will both win sound off's . Speaker angle and location has lots to do with it. So has speaker quality. Many tweeters going around just sound awful. Other than that, phasing and EQ'ing can help.

Tell me more about your setup. Hope I can help

Using some very HP'd rear speakers, fade them until you can just hear them.... you should be able to hear as they move between aweful and inaudible.

This should add a little height to your front stage, without dragging your staging towards the rear noticeably.

Other things to trial are:

* Feeding them a mono signal
* HP'ing them as well, but on a very shallow x-over frequency - like Soundstream's "rear de-emphasis" on their active crossover.

Ta Double0!!

Ford Falcons have room for the woofer in the top of the doors under the sail panel which means the tweets can be in the sail panels with little seperation evident......

this is probably off topic a little bit, but how about some hints n tips to get a not only high sound stage but also for it to be very broad, ie: extend outside the car..... I have my splits in the door next to the kick panel on the very bottom in pro pods, with the speakers on an angle facing upwards and over slightly....

this is a pretty detailed subject, but basically, what you want to do is get as far back from the speakers as possible (minimise pathlength differences). So, mounting speakers in forward doors /kickpanels, and sliding your seat as far back as possible, both help to create a wide, big and high soundstage.

try it, move your seat/head all the way forward close to the dash, then slide back near the rear seat - and see for yourself what happens to stage height (and also image placement, stage width and ambience).

tweeters in the a-sails or speakers on the dash are cheating of course tweeters up high will only create the illusion of high frequencies being higher as midrange and midbass will still be low (and it is these frequencies that create most vocal images). also, speakers up on the dash will place the nearside speaker very close to you and can create severe listener-side bias (you only hear the channel closest to you), hence collapsing your soundstage - this is very common.

oh and by the way, the best systems image at the middle or upper portion of the dash, it is very rare to get a stage that is uniformly at windscreen height

i was just behind a VL Calais at the drivethru at KFC and I could see he had his tweeters stuck about 3/4 up the A pillars. While this was about at head height and would have given good image height i reckon it would have given pretty shocking separation and dubious sq.

Wouldnt time alignment solve the problem? Seems like tons of HUs these days offer this function.

TA is cheating dude!

Only joking, but I doubt that any time alignment device would have that much scope to allow sound to arrive from 2 meters way arrive at the drivers head at the same time the sound from half a meter away does.

IMO TA should be used as a very fine tuning device, not a bad design fix device, which I also think is what most manufacturers had in mind when they designed them!

The best way to improve sound stage height is by EXPERIMENTATION

speaker positioning, phase, dispersion patterns, their axis relative to the listener and also crossover points are all thing to be considered when experimenting....

There is no hard fast rule for every car......if there was car audio would be boring and easy and we would probably be into something else.......

hmmmmm.....although it would be a hell of a lot less frustrating

What about the DSO- Dynamic Sound orginiser on some head units. That does the exact thing ya after, and it really does work!! Well it does on my sony deck anyhow.

For those with EQ's try adding about 2db gain at around 8-10K it helps to increase apparent sound stage height, just dont go too far or your car may end up sounding way TOO BRIGHT....

DSO was great with my clarion splits, but when I got my morels DSO totally killed the sound. was too harsh, tinny and trebbly (that is a word).