Car Subs for Home Theater?
 

I'm thinking of building 2 subs for home and using car speakers.
I need stands to go under my front towers anyway, so putting a sub under each makes sense to me.

has anybody done this? I have two CVR-15.2 and an old Pioneer Elite. It says continuous power, both channels driven, 135rms per ch @ 8 ohms, 20-20,000 Hz. But it also lists Dynamic power for 2ohm/4ohm @ 450W/330W.
So, with my CVR's hooked up at 4 ohm, I figure i'd get 330w for each. Would generic ported trunk boxes work?

Thanx in advance,

Tom

for home theater you want an enclosure tuned low, somewhere around 25-30hz. so i'd suggest like 3 cubes @ 30hz for each woofer.

ya, it works when done rite....
 

ive been running my old dr. crankinstien high voltage 15" for years in a custom oak box in my home theatre setup.works beautiful.last year i bought a velodine dps 12"? powered sub from fs. and that old setup of mine put it to shame on every level so....depends on your setup.(seperate oldschool "ar"amp dedicated for sub use only)
good luck.....it does/can work :)

i've done it with 1 crappytire 12, 2 kaption 12s 1 kicker 8 and 1 kaption 15 and all worked great i even used car audio amps to power them all to get the most bang for my buck. just had to buy some av to dv power sources

If you put the front speakers on the subs, there may be a lot of vibration and rattling. Another thing, you do not hook up the subs to the receiver, cause it is not designed for that. It will not supply enough power and the receiver will get hot and fry, and the bass will be really bad not to mention how are you going to cross the sub using LPF. Unless I am off track here you're heading for a disaster.

You need a separate sub amp driving subs only. This could be done with plate amps built into the sub enclosure, or you can get a standalone rack amp, and you have a choice between a monoblock or a two-channel. I have a standalone Class AB Dayton 1000, which is a mono amp and does around 1000wrms at 4 ohms. To that I have hooked up two 12" Kicker L5's in original ported Kicker enclosure, and I have so much crystal clear bass, I put some nightclubs to shame.

Do it right, what you're doing now is ghetto and will not work well at all, but then again it may not be your fault, casue you may not have been aware what it takes to get the job done correctly. Good luck.

Oh, and you say you want the subs near the TV up front. I am assuming you have the new technology TV like LCD or something, cause if you have old design TV, you will have problems unless you shield your magnets. Magnetic shielding is mostly needed if your TV is CRT based (tube), because the magnetic waves from the speaker's driver can affect the picture, if placed in close proximity of the TV, especially if you place larger subwoofer size magnets too close. New TV's will not give you problems.

Not even sure if you can accomplish your plan properly with that old Pioneer - depends how old. You could run small speakers at like 4 ohms, and amp may be ok, but if you try to push subs at that impedance, everything will burn up. And if you do it my way, I am not even sure, you can hook up the sub amp properly to the receiver.

Go for it. Your pioneer will run your subs just fine. It's spec'd at 20-20k and 135 watts is enough power. Like you said you should get even more power at 4 ohms. Like Jalat said you will want to use a box tuned lower than standard automotive types. If your HT receiver doesn't have a dedicated subwoofer line output, you may have to add a low pass filter in-line with the pioneer input. At subwoofer frequencies an active setup is best. You could use a pro audio crossover or an automotive one on a 12V wall-wart power supply. I have used this setup with great results before.

When I worked retail many moons ago some pricks would come in and do that on purpose.

The magnet screws with the phosphorus coating on the inside of the screen iirc. If you drag a big 8lb sub magnet over it I think its pretty damn hard to fix, although with a computer monitor you could alway degauss it.

To the point though, I have set up "car" subs in home as well, but listen to Sasha. There is a reason even fairly high end systems come with amplified subs.

The plate amp is a great idea, like this one from eD (no affiliation, I just like them)
http://www.edesignaudio.com/gallery/312_large.jpg

Thanx for all the advice. The Elite amp i have will go down to 2 ohms. It will be driven by the sub line out of my brand new VSX-1018 7.1 AVR wich has full sub crosover, level and EQ.

Let us know how it works out. I am very curious.