I am looking to spend around 3-4K on a full system every tiny from a head unit to audio treatment, 2 12” sub and everything but I have no idea what I am doing haha I want to go with a full rockford Fosgate setup, any help is much appreciated the shops by me refuse to sell me Rockford lol
What would y’all suggest, all opinions are welcome.
ps I drive a 2018 Toyota Camry SE

 

It really depends on what your trying to get out of the subs.. what kind of sound you want. Do you want to build your system specifically for as much SPL as possible, or do you want the best Sound Quality possible? Do you want a tight punchy bass or a bass that hits super low frequencies? Or maybe you want the best of both words.. a sub that can do both depending on your settings. All of these are important to consider before attempting to decide on what brand of Subs you want. Rockford has a very long history of making extremely good quality speakers. However, With speaker technology forever changing, there are definitely other subwoofers out that can achieve the same quality, or better for less money.
I would say my over all favorite subwoofer brand would be Sundown Audio.. personally. However there are others I would recommend, such as Def Bounce (The apocalypse series is great!), CT Sounds, Crescendo, American Bass, PSi, Massive, Memphis, Skar, Focal, JL Audio, DS18, Soundcubed, NVX, Blackbrick, Kicker, and of course Rockford Fosgate Every single one of these manufactures make awesome quality subs that wont disappoint. But again, it comes down to personal preference.
What I would do if I were you is go to some car audio competitions and/or meets and get some demos of other peoples systems. see what they have, get an idea for what speakers sound like what. Which speakers have what qualities. And then it would be a lot easier for you to make a solid decision on getting the exact kind of speaker you want. That's what I did and still like to do.
Especially with what some of these subwoofers and amplifiers cost.. you really want to make sure you get exactly what you want! If you are hell bent on Rockford Fosgate, I would recommend looking at the Powe 12" T1 2-Ohm DVC Subwoofer T1D212. Let me know what you decide to do, or if I can help in any way.

 

I used to sell Rockford, and I'm STILL a fan of their amps. I nearly bought RF Power T-series amps for my current system, and I almost regret not getting them. They still have legendary amp engineers, clearly. Their standard Punch amps would be more than good enough for a beginner, I'm positive. But I wouldn't necessarily be so brand loyal - on a budget, you don't want "X brand" logos, you want "bang for the buck".

I especially say that for their subwoofers. The last time I was at CES was over a decade ago, but I was there and/or SEMA every year prior for a decade. I don't remember the exact year, but it was at a time when linear motor technologies were coming out and revolutionizing subwoofers (Adire and Resonant Engineering with XBL^2 - I worked with Dan Wiggins to license it for a couple small brands I worked with, Better Audio and Pro Tech... at the same time JL Audio had come out with the W7 series that had a cross-drilling of the pole to achieve the same XBL^2 effect - and JBL had their wildly complex but so-cool and equally expensive DDD motor with the twin opposite-wound/opposite-field coil motor structure that had the side benefit of physically preventing overexcursion).
Rockford decided to bring three cutaways of their then-new P1, P2 and P3 subwoofers - what a mistake! Inside all the plastic magnet covers they are known for was... like looking behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz... holy crap, nothing good. Totally basic motor architecture, all three are just standard, cheap overhung motors, and sure they were cutaways but the suspensions were already sagging.- there was nothing special about the clearances, the spiders - nothing. Doing a cutaway is great to show off your technology and be able to explain "Look at these tricks we pulled off in here - you can tell your customers about that!" but even the reps were avoiding the cutaways, they were just sitting in the booth. Normally when you look close at ANYTHING at ANY booth in CES, you get a rep immediately talking to you - they were quite literally avoiding that area. Really - I'd avoid the subs. There's so much out there that gives truly great bang-for-the-buck, so much more displacement (loudness), so much less intermodulation (distortion) - it makes no sense to buy truly midgrade subs with plastic costumes housing recycled old-school designs, for high prices. Worse (or, insultingly) it implies that someone higher up in the food chain was impressed by a cutaway THEY once saw somewhere, and said "we should do that!" without realizing that it would actually be insulting to their customers, their buyers - kinda saying 'We know you don't know what you are looking at here" to them... and really exposing that the person who made that decision had no sense of what level of mildness was going on inside their own subwoofers.
Since they did create a P1, P2, and P3 - that basically makes the P3 "OK", the P2 "worse" and the P1 "avoid", IMO. Even that "good, better, best" marketing strategy for retail is old-school, today.
...and I'm also not saying "traditional overhung motors can't be good". I'm sure the P3 is decent. Lots of other subs are as well. But it's the same old traditional trade-offs - limitation mitigation, rather than limitation overcoming.

For your mains, component sets - I haven't heard their components in years, but I also used to sell Focal, and at that point Focal's Polyglass sounded better than the equally-priced RF, Kicker, and Diamond component sets that we had, quite noticeably. Then, the K2 Powers were double the price which put them a bit over Kicker and RF's prices, but they were appropriately better quality as well - I've always been a Focal fan. I've also always been a JL fan, even though I never sold it - I had a JL XR set that I ran stealthily behind my stock door panel grilles back then, because the rubber damped aluminum dome tweets really struck the right balance for me between "harsh hard" and "soft soft" domes back in the day. To be fair, I bought those before we sold Focal, I likely would have ended up with the Polyglass or K2Power.

Typically each company has things they are known for, are best at - and then each company IS a company - they exist to sell products. So, they'll make products to round things out, so that their dealers can sell products. I'd be more than happy running JL or Kicker subs powered by RF amps powering Focal or Morel or Dynaudio components, fronted by a Helix or MiniDSP signal processor. That's leveraging what each company is known for - and even if you were a budget shopper opting for their entry-level gear, you'd leverage the best of what each company truly has expertise in.

TL;DR- Avoid "all _____ brand" as a purchase strategy.

 

So if you don't mind, back to the starting line. Get brand names out of your head unless you want to double your budget to achieve the same output and quality. Specs matter when they are measurements and not lies, so it DOES pay to rule out certain questionable brands, but that's where I'd draw the line, personally.

With $3-4K as a budget, I'd start with a simpler system - for these reasons:

• Front component set. 6.5 in the front doors, tweeters in the factory locations for now - starting, right? You need a baseline - and you absolutely CAN make nearly all factory locations sound great. One thing you want to decide at this point is if you want to go "active or passive" - meaning, do you want to simply use the passive crossovers that come with the speakers, to send the highs to the tweeter and the lows to the midrange? They are engineered by the factory so they should be fine, it's just you don't have adjustment. Or - if you go "active", you need to power the tweeters separately from the mids (so 4 channels, rather than 2), and with a 2 way component set there's not much overlap between the tweeter's low frequency capability and the mid's high-frequency capability, so your choice of Xover point is pretty limited anyway. The real advantage to going "active" these days is to allow you to use a DSP, which offers tons of tuning options beyond just Xover points. Of course, you could always add two additional amplifier channels and a DSP later, ditching the passives that you use for now - but you do need to decide what your initial install will use as it will impact your budget - 'active" is inherently and unavoidably more expensive.
  As for the install consideration - factory door locations are usually acoustically terrible to start with though - and speakers need baffles or enclosures to work, so....
  
• Front door treatment. That means buying sheet metal and self-tapping screws from Home Depot, a package of an economical damping material (just enough to do the doors: inside of door skins and inner door structures. Maybe some CCF - optional for "Starter system", you can always add it later. It just absorbs reflections, makes it a little acoustically better inside. You'll use snips to cut the sheet metal to shapes that cover the big openings and gaps that prevent the inner structure from being a "baffle", and use the self tapping screws to secure it to the door structure - be carefuly not to send any screws into window motors or wires, and make sure you use short screws so nothing rubs when you roll the windows up and down.. I've taken to cutting my metal, then putting damping material on one side, and CCF overextending the panel on the other, to serve also as a gasket when I screw them down. Then, I like using silicone to seal up any little holes that clips snap into, except for your door panel clip holes (since you need to pop that door panel back on). If you are adding CCF, try to line the door as much as seems logical to absorb reflections, while not blocking the water drainage weep holes at the bottom of the door, and again not getting in the way of moving parts.
  Even if you didn't replace your stock speakers, you'll hear an improvement as your doors will be working fundamentally better as baffles.
  
• Subwoofer enclosure design. I mention this first, because your choice of subwoofer comes AFTER deciding this. YOU decide - How much bass do I want? How clean should it be? If you want bass you can hear for blocks away, you will want a vented box and need to be willing to give up lots of your trunk/hatch. If you want it for SQ purposes, you could use a smaller sealed box, and that generally takes up less space - but Google Hoffman's Iron Law because it rules all in subwoofer land.... you can't have a tiny box that plays low and also is loud. Those are three variables you can't avoid - you trade off one to gain the other two. So now you can shop for your subwoofers:
  
• The subwoofers that perform well in vented boxes (low Qts, long Xmax not especially needed) don't perform well in vented boxes. Subs that perform well in sealed boxes (higher Qts) and have low intermodulation and higher output (high Xmax) don't particularly excel (and are wasting some of the benefit of that motor/suspension you paid for) in vented boxes. So you might wonder why those Rockford subs have not particularly low or high Qts, and have recommendations for both sealed and vented options? Ah, not optimized for either! See what I mean now about maximizing your bang-for-the-buck? I mentioned previously a sort of high-tech linear-motor technology that emerged a while back - those are subs (W7, Adire XBL^2, CSS SDX 12... less so the SDX 10 and some others) that have SUCH long throw that they can get as loud as normal subs can in vented boxes, but in sealed boxes. And at the same time, they keep the BL (motor strength) even across the whole excursion, reducing intermodulation, which is the most audible distortion there is. So, you get the best of both worlds, which I love, personally. But - you do pay for it. A 12W7 is over $1K... Adire has a new release of subs (under new management, and boy are they expanding, with Dan Wiggins help), and I still think the CSS SDX 12 is a huge bang-for-the-buck at about $400 if I recall. Pretty sure the Brahma 12 is about the same.
  
• The amplifiers. Why do I choose these last? Because I've just made a bunch of other decisions on equipment, and decisions on how much space I'm willing to give up, so I should now know how much power I want to buy, for the sub, and for the speakers - both how much power and how many channels I need.
  If you are going with a single sub, 400-500w (RMS, always!) should be fine. Even if you buy one of those 1000+ watt super-subs like a W7, Brahma, or SDX-12 - 500 is fine. 1000w at the most - power is cheap these days so don't be buying some 4000w amp that's going to kill your electrical system and require extra batteries and alternators - it's SO much easier to make your sub system more efficient (remember when I said "Google Hoffman's Iron Law"?) than it is to brute-force through inefficiency with amp power - even if it is cheap, the stuff you need to support it isn't.
  For the front speakers - are you going active or passive? If passive, a 75w (RMS, always) x2 amp should be fine. Maybe 100x2. If active, a 50x4 or 100x4 amp - somewhere in that range. 50w is my minimum for good midbass, 100w is actually pretty risky for blowing your tweeters up, so somewhere in between is the sweet spot... Maybe I should invent a 5 channel amp with 1000x1, 100x2, and 50x2? Hmm....
  There's some really compact options out there these days. Those T-series RF Power amps take the cake, IMO. I almost bought those. The standard Punch aren't large either, and are probably half the price. Then there's some decidedly mid-grade brands like Toro and NVX (SonicElectronics house brand) that have some compact AND great bang-for-the-buck options. Class D used to suck for anything but subwoofers, but there's some really fast switching mechanisms where that's changed over the past 10 years, and these are decent and inexpensive. It's actually getting harder to find Class A/B amps - but if your goal is SQ purity, maybe that IS something you want to seek out - now, remember when I talked about space? Class A/B amps will have double the footprint, if not more - so you need to figure out where it's being installed (and please don't do a 'smash and grab' theft-target system, mounting the amps on your box - ugh).
  
• A DSP unit. Only IF you are going "all active" is this really an expense. Not that you can't use one for the EQ in a passive system, but it's not typical at the starting point. So this might be a little "advanced" for a beginner, but you can start simple. Do you want to learn to tune your system? Honestly, you could start with a head unit that has some DSP tuning built into it - the only real downside I see is that you need to run an RCA cable for each speaker pair that you are powering. Even for a 2-way component set and a single subwoofer, that's three RCA runs. Factor that into your budget if you do that, but you could save money if you aren't buying a DSP. I'd start with an inexpensive DSP - MiniDSP has models with different channels, that are affordable and easy to use, and everyone in car audio is familiar with them - home audio too, for that matter, so finding info on how to tune will be pretty easy.. A Dayton or MiniDSP 4x8 is under $200 - tough to beat. Or - $0 if you aren't going active from the start!

Do some shopping around - here's my thoughts on budget for the above:

• Component set - $200-$400 will get you something good. Even at a local shop. Good opportunity to feel them out in your area. Select these with your EARS, especially if starting with passives. What you like won't be what I like, so this is a personal decision of YOUR taste. Do bear in mind, your car is a different acoustical beast than the showroom floor - you really are listening to THE SPEAKERS, and as a beginner it may be hard to know how that translates into your car interior - the salesperson should be able to help you there. But even $200 is a healthy starting point, and $400 for sure you can find a midgrade or even upper midgrade set.
• Front door treatment - $100 will buy you plenty of damping material AND CCF. Maybe another $50 on sheet metal and 1/2" self tapping (drill tip) screws and a tube of silicone adhesive (Goop works but it's too runny IMO).
• Sub box - $100 will buy you a sheet of MDF, 1 5/8" course drywall screws, a Ryobi or DeWalt convertible drill/countersink and screwdriver bit (clever piece, I love it), and a bottle of glue. If not you, someone you know has a table saw and can help you cut your panels - you'll want to measure your trunk (and trunk opening) height and width and depth and decide how much space you want to give up, figure out how big of a box you want to build - remembering to subtract 1.5" from each dimension because 3/4" MDF doesn't count as 'airspace' - just what's INSIDE those walls. 4" PVC for a port if you want to go the vented route, or you could do a slot port if you are thinking big and doing a pair of vented 12's. Any way you slice it, $100 will get you there....
  ...unless you really can't do your own sub box, then you'll want to buy a prefab sub box that's GOOD - which is surprisingly hard as most are crap. Really. You need it to fit in your space, yet give you enough air for your sub (again - Hoffman's Iron Law!), and to be built from 3/4" MDF - not 5/8" particle board. Sealed ones are cheaper - also still ringing in about $100. If you want to do a vented box, shop for slot vent boxes - they are inherently self-braced. You want to know the tuning frequency, if it doesn't say - it's a sign of a high-tuned one-note-wonder crap box. Some of the companies that do the bed-liner painted boxes aren't bad - but some of them are also in the one-note-wonder SPL-box category. Probably about $150 should still do it. Personally, I think "as a beginner" here's a good beginner project to DIY and have fun with. Then it also fits your car, you custom built it. Cool. Anyway - $100-$150.
• Subwoofer - Single 12 sealed? I worry a beginner might be disappointed with a single 10 sealed - I'd go with a Brahma or SDX 12, for $400 or $500 and blow people's minds. Or, if you want to go vented - also don't cheap out. Maybe two 10's or one 12 in that case - two really good-for-vented 10's will probably also ring in at about $400-$500 total, and one really-good-for-vented 12 will probably be in the $200-$400 range - bear in mind there are some trade-offs with SQ when you go vented, there's a risk of creating a one-note-wonder that SLAMS on some songs that have THAT frequency in it, while others are just "meh" unimpressive. With the sealed subs I mentioned you won't have that issue provided you give them a reasonable size enclosure (What? Hoffman's Iron... OK, I'll stop), and they'll even chase the vented subs in SPL, so I'd lean that way - but at any rate - you have budget no matter which way you go here.
• Sub amplifier- Depending on what brand you go, a 500w-1000w sub amp can be found from $200-$500, easy. RF Prime are entry level but not bad, 500w is $250. The punch is a step up, 300w (probably 400w) for about the same price. Their full-size Punch 1000w is about $500.
  - OR -
  A Toro MR3 is tiny, 800w, decent, and under $200.
  An NVX NDA103 is 1000w (at 1 ohm) and only $150, and decent. Big price difference from the Punch 1000w.
• Front stage amplifier - here's a potential for a big difference in price. I'd say 100x2 or 50x4 (again - RMS, none of those flea-market "1200 x 4!!!!!" claims) class A/B should be similar in price, budget $150-$250. Alpine still makes great ones, and they have some cheap ones. If you go Class D full range you can find some really tiny amps if needed (again - how much space? Where are you going to build your amp rack?), and also are less expensive. I've never owned that Toro brand, or NVX for that matter - but the cosmetics don't look cheesy, you can buy a matching sub and front stage amp, in either brand. Same with the Alpine, which I have run for more than 20 years (before my no-reason-for-it switch to DLS about 10 years ago). Kicker is more known for subs, but they've upped their amp game as well. I used to sell them and even 20 years ago their amps were great. But you'll certainly pay more for those brands - I think Alpine has historically done the best balance between "brand name" and "bang for the buck" so maybe see what they have now. I bet you can fit those into a budget here as well, might even fit a sub AND front stage amp in under $300.
• DSP - ignore the "Helix everything" crowd. You are starting, there's easier options, and you'd never appreciate the detail - hell, MOST of the "Helix!" crowd doesn't appreciate it. I'd start with a MiniDSP or Dayton 6 or 8 channel DSP, if you are going this route, because they are the best bang for the buck, and easiest to learn. And you can find them under $200 with enough output channels to cover your front component set and a subwoofer. I'd buy an 8 channel personally, in case you decide to go with a 3 way component set down the road - you could just buy a pair of 2.5" widebands and another two amp channels, and plug it right in. Tweeter, mids/midbass, sub now.... and later maybe Tweeter, wideband, midbass, sub. You'll be covered with $0 extra dollars. C-DSP 6x8 is $305. Dayton DSP 408 is under $200. Either option will be good - the MiniDSP is more popular than the Dayton.
  

So what's that add up to....400+100+150+500+500+300+300 = $2250 if you picked the most expensive everything that I listed? So that leaves you with some additional budget for trim, cosmetics - or for paying a shop (or installer on the side, if shops try to play the "we only install what we sell" terrible-sales-strategy game) to install some of it.

And I also just remembered power wiring - picking up a cheap 1/0 gauge kit isn't a bad thing. Even CCA wire would be fine in that size for a sub-1000w system, the cheap RCA's they come with are usually fine, the cheap distribution blocks are usually fine - I wouldn't be too picky - but the solid oxygen free copper ("OFC") IS better, and likely will be bundled with better RCAs as well. Even the OFC kits, the complete amplifier installation kits that come with the cheap RCAs, should be about $100, so plenty of budget to not skimp on that.

One more thing to bear in mind - installation.
As a beginner, if you want to learn, to DIY - there's your price tag. And it's valuable to learn, to know what's in your system, how your car came apart, how the job was done, etc, IMO.
However, if you are buying at a shop, paying at a shop, having a shop install for you - first off, good for you - shop wisely, pick a good shop, you want competence. Labor isn't free, so that $2000 in product budget that I arrived at up there, could be another $1000 or even $2000 pretty easily, depending on their quality of work and customization you want. Just a custom-built version of a pre-fab sub box alone will cost you probably $400-$500 and that's not the least it unfair when you factor in the same materials you would buy, plus a couple hours of labor at $100/hour or so (split between installer pay and tools/equipment/facility, it's actually fair), and then another $100 for time/materials to smooth, carpet, paint, or wrap it.
Your own time is not free either - if you do DIY the job, you can deposit that money in savings. You literally earned it.