[JohnnyTwoTone]

Once you've completely deadened the car doors themselves (the metal door... you know what I mean) do you need to add deadener to the plastic inside door panel? You know the actually panel you are touching that has the arm rest, speaker grill, map holder at the bottom, etc.

I never did for my car but I just saw I pick on a car audio site (could have been this one, I can't remember) and the guy deadened the inside panel. It doesn't seem like you would need to.

 

[RMAT]

yes it helps to deaden the door card as well.

 

[capnxtreme]

If it resonates, it will be beneficial to dampen it. The door card definitely resonates in my experience.

 

[michaelsil1]

I did mine.

 

[sdsport92064]

If it can vibrate, it should be dampened.

 

[JohnnyTwoTone]

Cool. Okay, well I have a bunch of dampener left over so I guess I now know where it's getting put.

 

[gijoe]

If it can vibrate, it should be dampened.

That's pretty much it right there. If the panel is vibrating, you want to stop that. You can use deadener if you want, or strategically placed foam can usually take care of most of the problem.

 

[pontiacbird]

using thick foam in certain areas prone to the vibrations....which is usually unsupported open spots in the door panel.....as it's usually pretty thin, the midbass usually vibrates the crap out of it...

 

[straightpiez]

yep, big help. Nice solid feeling when the door shuts as well.

 

[azncarjunkie]

how important is it to completely separate out all the holes in the door panel?

 

[straightpiez]

Not sure what that means.

 

[zed:head]

test

 

[michaelsil1]

how important is it to completely separate out all the holes in the door panel?

If you mean cover the holes; very important!

 

[FoxPro5]

If it can vibrate, it should be dampened.

In general, I think that's a pretty good way to look at it, but as a hardcore rule it think it has a lot of holes in it.

Thing is, there's more than one form of structural damping and there's many ways to treat these problems - damping mats are just ONE of them. If you really study what CLD mat is and is supposed to do, I think you'll learn that it has limited application in a moving, noisy, vibrating vehicle...not unlimited. It's definitely not a fix-all and is way overused by car audio peoples IMHO.

Having said that, you can significantly silence a resonating door panel with nothing more than foam. This would be vibration isolation structural damping (ie decoupling).

I must have doubled, maybe even tripled the mass of my door card with CLD mat, liquid damper, NHMC, etc all in an effort to make the door skin and trim panel function as one dead mass together. Here I chose to use vibration damper + mass loading to couple resonance and "kill" it. So I didn't try to isolate (decouple) the surfaces, I coupled them. Again, the panel still moves/vibrates but doesn't give away the location of the driver due to resonance unless it's really really pushed hard (at which point the bolts in the chassis are starting to sweat.)

 

[azncarjunkie]

If you mean cover the holes; very important!

yup, meant that. thnx

 

[digitalhifi]

You should always try to cover all holes into the doorskin to increase the effectiveness of the door as a baffle. Also mass loading the plastic door panel is never a bad idea, especially if you have the material laying around.
Cheers