Subwoofer question

07Latitude · **Posted:** Mon Apr 09, 2007 10:44 pm

Any audio gurus on here? I have a quick question:

Can a Home Audio 10" subwoofer be used with an automotive amp/box? Is there any differences (aside from material durability) between a Home 10" and a Car 10"?

hyedipin · **Joined:** Thu May 11, 2006 10:20 am **Posts:** 1667

First thing comes to mind is the power.. You would need 110 volts of current to power home subwoofer, to start with-- i assume..
Plus they would go flat after a few times offorad since they meant to be stationary, not moving..

gopherbeats · **Posted:** Mon Apr 09, 2007 11:35 pm

If your talking about taking a 10" driver out of a home sub assembly and powering it with a car amp, then yes.. you can do that. As hyedipin said you can't just move a sub intro your truck and plug it in. they have onboard amps that need to be plugged into your ac outlet.

I would imagine the driver to be fairly robust and it may work in the car enviroment. If its from a reputable manufacture it should be made of good materials such as polyproplene, or other synthetic materials.. If its paper, it will not hold up long in the truck. Besure to install it in an enclosure similar to the one you pulled it out of since all the acoustic math has been done for you.

warholamo · **Posted:** Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:23 am

Also, if you are taking it out of a powered enclosure, then you need to power it. Most home speakers are between 6 and 8 ohms. The standard in car audio is 4 ohms down to .5 ohm or something. If you hook an 8 ohm speaker up to your 4 ohm amp, you are cutting your power in half by doubling the impedance. If you had two 8 ohm speakers out of a pair of towers, you could hook them up in parallel, and cut the impedance in half, down to 4 ohms.

Then you have to deal with pushing 300 watts from a car amp into a speaker with a paper surround that can only handle 100 watts, and is rated to run at 8 ohms. You'll burn out the voice coils real soon. Plus, the subs out of a tower usually are crossed over at a higher frequency than a sub meant for car audio.

07Latitude · **Posted:** Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:38 am

It's a high-level audiophile-grade subwoofer. Unpowered, etc. It was used in a custom-designed audiophile-quality cabinet, so I'd run some numbers to get a reasonable box for it. I just wanted to make sure using a car amp on a home sub was acceptable. I figured it was.

I also have a material to coat the cone (paper) which will work well for the auto environment.

EDIT: These subs will handle an extreme amount of power as well, so I'm not worried there.

gopherbeats · **Posted:** Tue Apr 10, 2007 12:44 pm

by all means.. give it a shot if you got the time.
Careful about coating the cone, that will drive the natural frequency of the driver down, then you will not have any idea where the acoustical parameters lay... and If its not a uniform coating, you will destroy your driver. I would not worry about coating anything, just run them how they are.

07Latitude · **Posted:** Tue Apr 10, 2007 7:11 pm

I'll give it a shot. I had 2 12"s in my old vehicle, but that was overpowering there and is going to be overkill here too. I can get a 10" box cheap, and I know at least in home terms what the freq. range of the 10" driver is, so I figured, all I need is (maybe) wiring and i'm set. I'll use my amp from the 12s, so it's a cheap project to help boost the (lack of) low freqs with my Infinity system.

Subwoofer question

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