Hey all - about a year ago, did an install that involved;

Focal Polyglass V2 - with much much deadener and MDF in the doors. Pretty solid woofer install i think! A pretty basic Pioneer amp running them at about 50w a channel;

Sony HU (yeah, i know its a Sony, but its a fairly high end one);

JBL 2 ways for rear fill off the HU.


I have spent hours and hours and hours trying to get it sound decent - its just never been anything other than harsh sounding with (strangely) too much bass if anything (some of Radioheads tracks have the woofers trying to tear themselves out of the doors!). Its just not nice. I have noticed myself just leaving the thing off when out in the car... Have the tweets under dash about 20cm from the woofers at the mo, which is a whole better than where they started on the dash pointing at the glass, but still not right.

Now i know the Sony and the amp are not great, but they surely cant be the primary souce of harshness. Everyone says Focals are a personal thing, and many find them harsh - i think i might be one of them... Anyway, on to solutions (given a limited budget...).

Ditch the Sony (and even the amp) and pop in an Alpine. I understand these will run the Focals happily by themselves and are the go for SQ.

Or, ditch the Focals and get something else like Bostans or Hertz - something a whole lot softer and smoother!!

Or, try some other tweeters.


Thoughts?

cheers

Lol, Bostons and Hertz are both bright sounding speaker sets imho.

I like Morel and Dyn for smoothness.

have u changed the attiniation on the crossovers? this will help alot put it down to the last setting u can (i think focals can go to -5dB?) that should help if u havnt done that. also u could try putting some grille cloth over the tweeters, this should take the harshness off abit. and if that already done then drop the eq for the tweeters.

while your gear isnt exctly great, its not really on the crap side either. i wouldnt bother changing the amp (unless it is noisey or you want more power). which it dosnt seem like from your posts. the headunit might be holding you back with lack of features (i dont know sony h/u and u didnt give a model number) but it shouldnt be cause harshness unless its the way you have eq'ed it. but i would play around with the stuff i have mentioned, before going and spending more money. if you do end up buying more, make sure u listen to then for a while first. and in-car if possible

Depending on where the harshness is, it is quite possible.

Basically all electronics components (such as head units, amps, etc) all add some form of distortion into a signal no matter how good they are, and as such every single electronic component adds some form of signature to a source signal.

Typically, higher quality components colour the sound less then more basic components, but they all add something - sometimes it's too small to be audible, sometimes it's big enough to be very audbile.

It's very possible to have two electronic components that just don't match well...for example you could have an Amp and CD Player that both produce soft peaks around around the same place (say 2dB at 10khz, for arguments sake). On their own this may be barely noticable to an untrained ear, but with both of the components run together those peaks (being in the same place) can combined to result in a peak of 4dB which is actually very audible and fairly harsh.

On the other hand, you could have two components which match perfectly. The amp could have a 2dB peak at 10khz, the and the CD player could have a 2dB drop at 10khz - so when run together the two essentially cancel each other out and you get a nice ballanced response in the end.

It can be the same with speaker as well. You might have a very nice amp, but that amp might happen to have a modest peak soemwhere where your speakers already have a peak, and as such could exhagerate the speakers' flaws - making them sound worse then they really are.

In the case of those specific Focals, I'm aware that they do have a quite significant peak (around 6dB) at around 6khz give or take. This is enough to cause quite a fatiguing sound, and could be exhagerated even further by an amp / CD player which just happens to not compliment it well.

However, don't think of this as being a Focal thing - different speakers in Focal's range have different characteristics. That harshness is there on the V2 Polyglass splits, but it's not there on their higher end K2P or Be ranges (both of which sound absolutely fantatastic and are brilliantly accurate when properly set up).

In honesty, it's impossible to say here on a forum what the cause of harshness is - it could be the CD Player, it could be the amp, it could be the speakers (or they way they are setup/positioned) or it could be a combination of all of those things. It's really impossible to know from here...as I said the Focal's do have a flaw around 6khz, but there is no way to know if that's the thing causing the harshness you describe.

you didn't mention if you were running a sub or not.

by the sounds of things, it seems to me the focal front speakers (and probably the back ones too) are trying to play too much sub bass and they are not able to do it easily - causing the "too much bass" distorted sound you're hearing.

Do you have a high pass filter on the front speakers? if so, have you tried raising it?

If you dont have a sub, think about getting one.

The focal tweeter issue is another one entirely. More playing with the EQ setting on the crossover, more playing with angles and positions, more mucking around with the EQ settings on the headunit (can you give us a model number?) is probably the key here. if you learn how to make these speakers sound nice with the gear you have, you will learn how to get a great sound out of a more forgiving speaker in the future.

Remember, these speakers have the potential to sound really great with enough dicking about

The HU is a Sony CDX-GT500, and the amp is a Pioneer GM1500 (i think).

No pass filters. Have played endlessly with tweeter position, and assorted foams and clothes as mufflers. No joy - just too sharp, and very tiring to listen to.

Bass is good, and may just be being accentuated because the higher ends are EQd down to take the sharpness out! No bass distortion - just very strong! I would say they dont need a sub. I tune with the fills faded out as well.

The HU does need to be upgraded (probs an Alpine 9886 or 9887 when funds allow) but dont think its the root of the problem. I see Focal have changed the tweeter design from the TN47 i have, and call the new one smooth - aknowledgement of the issue perchance?

But a replacement tweeter set of the new ones is almost as much as i paid for the whole V2 set!! Any hot tips on less extremly priced tweeters that will work with the Focal crossover/woofer? It either replace the whole set or the tweeters, but the tweeters have to go i think. It might even just be a Focal unfriendly car...

I posted on this during the install a year ago and generated some debate, and i got to a point then when i was happy. But it didnt last.. they are just too much hard work to listen to, and i hardly use it anymore. Not good - it should be making me want to listen to music not the other way around! A year of fiddling with EQs is enough of a trial to know it just isnt going to work!

sell the lot, get something else

go have a listen to some Dynaudio splits, they're supposed to be laid back

however, if you've got EQ and still complain of too much bass from your speakers, something is telling me its the sound of that bass that you dont like, and I have a feeling its cause you're asking too much of them at too high a volume

are you sure your amp doesnt have any crossovers on it? I couldnt find the model on the net...

Pioneer GM3100T... Not great...

Have been thinking for a long time its time to start again. Just hard to justify on a car that does about 300km a month! Has to be done eventually though

Have been thinking a 9886 and some JBL (or something not too expensive) might be in order....

So - who wants some not very used V2s and a Sony ?

well the amp has a low pass filter, but seemingly not a high pass one. interesting

so unless you have crossovers at the headunit, which you dont yet, then that might be one of your issues there.

My honest opinion would be:

upgrade your HU first, to something like the alpine 9887.

trade in your current speakers for something you like the sound of

get a 4 channel amp and a sub.

I have to say, I listened to the Focal 165V1 Polyglass splits a while back (probably about a year ago) and wasn't impressed.

The peak I mentioned earlier (around 6khz) is very strong and in a couple of minutes of listening I had to ask to have them turned off as it was that unbearable.

Focal build some very nice speakers (K2P's and Be's come to mind) but those Polyglass splits (from my experiences) isn't one of them.

Don't know if Dynaudio would be to your taste...from my listening expereinces (in back to back listening tests) they have flaws of their own and are quite heavy in other areas (midrange in this case). Not as unpleasant as the Polyglass Focals I heard, but i couldn't bear listening to these for long periods of listening either.

If you want a speaker set that's very 'plain' and don't want to spend too much, the Nakamichi's may be worth looking into. They sound a little dull to me personally, and don't seem to really excel in any areas, but at the same time they don't do anything offensive either. Likewise the Alpine Type X - somewhat lifeless, but entirely unoffensive.

If you don't mind spending a little more, and want something with all-around brilliance I have no hessitation recommending the Focal 165K2P (if you can still get them), the Oz Audio Matrix Elite, Morel Supremo and Boston Z6 (in that order). They are all impressive speaker sets, and they all provide impressive neutrality and finesse without the harshness. Also worthy of mention are the Seas Lotus Reference and Hertz Mille, although I found the above four models to be more better overall systems.

If you don't really want to spend any more then what you have now, then I'd look towards Hertz (HSK) or Morel (Tempo, Dotech). Both are very nice given their price point, but obviously are no match for the higher end speakers mentioned above.

Don't discount the importance of a good head unit and amp either - both can have a fairly significant impact on the sound, although it's still the speakers that will typically affect it the most.

Did 2 things on the weekend - dropped into a car audio specialist and asked "is this what Focals are supposed to sound like?" The look of immediate pain told me probably not!

So, then i got an old and basic Pioneer HU i completely forgot i had lying about and quickly plugged it directly into the Focals - an obvious and fairly significant improvement!!

So - step 1 is ditch the Sony!!! Think it will be an Alpine or Pioneer with iPod/iPhone direct connections. I really dont use CDs anymore, and dont use the car that much either - music is mostly listened to on the iphone on the train every day, so thats what is current and what will be easiest to take with me in the car.

Any comments on pros/cons of these?

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi...rksid=p3907.m29

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Alpine-iDA-X100-Rec...oQQcmdZViewItem

my first question is.. why ebay?

my first suggestion is.. for SQ, alpine will be better than pioneer.

get a new amp, keep the speakers .
Why would anyone think that the greatness of focal is hinged on people buying their entry level speakers and then being scared off focal for the rest of their audio life?.That doesnt fly with me .

Having looked at both those two units i came to the conclusion the Pioneer is better for my use (USB large capacity HDD).
Alpine 9886
+ It's an Alpine
+ Good tuning potential, even more so with the Imprint unit attached (costs extra)
+ Nice solid build
- No more Alpine motorised face
- Navigation through lots of files is painfully tedious, i mean 2-3 minutes to scroll through 120 folders
- No directory structure; it removes all file tree's and dumps all folders on the same level (useless if you sort your music by Artist>Album>... like i and most people do!)
- File & folder limits unspecified by Alpine; i'd estimate it to be ~650 folder maximum whilst demoing the HU with my 70gb collection.

Pioneer 6050
+ Very fast USB scan speeds (~10-15 seconds on first plug-in with ~70gb of music!)
+ Good tuning potential, about the same as the 9886 without Imprint
+ Very quick and neat file/folder navigation with rotary commander (knob) or you can push the knob in the direction you want (ie. up/down to browse, left and right to go into and out of folders)
+ Quick file navigation (~30 seconds for 120 folders)
- 15,000 file limit & 500 folder limit at any file tree depth (ie. 500 folders total)
- Backlight only comes in blue
- Stupid Pioneer animations... thankfully you can switch them off

I'm actually just waiting for my cash flow to improve and a Pioneer 6050 will be heading my new system.

wot about the IDA X100 though? Apparently much better at file access etc than the 9886, and the better SQ of an Alpine. Basically a higher end unit at a lower price for those that dont use CDs anymore.

sorry to say but the whole SQ thing is wasted when you start listening to the mp3s...especialy of low bit-rate