This is a build log for my 2014 Ram 1500 Limited. I have been working on it for a few months already. I am replicating at least part of it over here to be able to point to it from within this forum. Compared to others on here, this is pretty "Plain Jane".
Here is the shiny new truck from May.
My previous ride was a 2004 Tundra that had been modestly enhanced with an Excelon HU, less than $100/pr upgraded door speakers, modest 4ch amp, 300W old school RF Punch mono driving a pair of 8" Comp VRs under the rear bench in a Q-Logic enclosure. It sounded very good to me. Bass was deep and tight.
Stepping into the RAM with the "Premium" Alpine system with a 8.4AN HU was a clear step backwards sonically. The fundamental issue for me was boomy, muddy bass.
I bought a calibrated mic and took a bunch of measurements with REW. I characterized the factory system pretty well.
After a bunch of reading, I opted for the JBL MS-8 over the Rockford Fosgate 3Sixty.3 because of two reasons:
1) MS-8 has an8 channel amp that drive the speakers allowing me to upgrade in slowly in measured steps rather adding new amps and speaker all at the same time.
and
2) The auto tune features are probably smarter than I am. I can always tweak personal preferences after it does most of the heavy lifting.
This is what I consider to be the problem that I was fixing.
For reference the measurements I took are located here:
Factory Measurement
Here is the shiny new truck from May.
My previous ride was a 2004 Tundra that had been modestly enhanced with an Excelon HU, less than $100/pr upgraded door speakers, modest 4ch amp, 300W old school RF Punch mono driving a pair of 8" Comp VRs under the rear bench in a Q-Logic enclosure. It sounded very good to me. Bass was deep and tight.
Stepping into the RAM with the "Premium" Alpine system with a 8.4AN HU was a clear step backwards sonically. The fundamental issue for me was boomy, muddy bass.
I bought a calibrated mic and took a bunch of measurements with REW. I characterized the factory system pretty well.
After a bunch of reading, I opted for the JBL MS-8 over the Rockford Fosgate 3Sixty.3 because of two reasons:
1) MS-8 has an8 channel amp that drive the speakers allowing me to upgrade in slowly in measured steps rather adding new amps and speaker all at the same time.
and
2) The auto tune features are probably smarter than I am. I can always tweak personal preferences after it does most of the heavy lifting.
This is what I consider to be the problem that I was fixing.
For reference the measurements I took are located here:
Factory Measurement