[17rsvert]

Originally Posted by drfeelgood

I’m sorry if I was confusing, the Kappa 6.5” or 6x9” drivers would be fine for drop in replacement for the sides or rear.

Just to be clear, Infinity Kappa speakers installed in the doors or rear, without any other modifications to the rest of the system, will improve the sound quality? I was under the impression from reading other posts here that the Bose amplified signal is not flat and would not work well with flat- response speakers. Has anyone tried this?

[JaxChris]

If you have the Bose amp, you are better off leaving the Bose speakers in place. There isn't a clean cut speaker only job for the 6th gen Camaro without also replacing the Bose amp due to the system design.

GM and Bose could've gone standard 4ohm, but automakers don't like us owning and customizing our vehicles anymore, so they make everything with a narrow, bespoke set of parameters that give us a headache as owners.

No amp puts out a flat signal to speakers. The speaker always receives the post-processed signal of any tuner or amp driving it. Most coaxial speakers though are designed for dumber systems without much equalization at play and it does all the separation itself with tiny inline filters.

If someone did keep the Bose amp driving aftermarket speakers, I would like to see which speakers and how many they kept active.

Also, a little explanation on coaxials for those unfamiliar. They work the same as a 2/3-way component system but the pieces are stacked within a single frame and the filters prevent overlap in response. By way of these filters, you can combine a 4ohm woofer, 4ohm tweeter and 4ohm super tweeter into a single 4ohm load.

If the load is 4ohm's across all frequencies the amp is sending to the speaker, then each branch will react to their exclusive response range (or band) within that signal while the others ignore (resist) what isn't in their band.

The same can be done with components. You can wire inline filters to each speaker in the set, ensure that there is no overlap in response, and tie them all to the same lead without a crossover. I personally find crossover blocks to be a waste of space unless they are adjustable and offer the choice of 2-way or 3-way connection. Then someone could buy the 2-way set and add a midrange driver later to make the woofer exclusively a midbass speaker.

[17rsvert]

Originally Posted by JaxChris

If you have the Bose amp, you are better off leaving the Bose speakers in place. There isn't a clean cut speaker only job for the 6th gen Camaro without also replacing the Bose amp due to the system design.

So how would Infinity Kappas sound compared to the Bose if put in just the doors for example?

Originally Posted by JaxChris

GM and Bose could've gone standard 4ohm, but automakers don't like us owning and customizing our vehicles anymore, so they make everything with a narrow, bespoke set of parameters that give us a headache as owners.

I was under the impression that speaker impedance affected how many relative amps the speaker will draw from the amplifier. Correct me where I'm wrong with the following statements: The lower the ohms, the more current will be drawn, and higher ohms will draw less amps. If you drive low impedance speakers with an amp not rated to drive them, you can draw too much current and overheat the amp. An amp driving speakers above its ohm rating will draw less current, but may not play as loud, all else being equal. Impedance has more to do with relative loudness and amp draw than frequency repsonse.

Originally Posted by JaxChris

No amp puts out a flat signal...

Please explain. Do you mean this is by design? Or do you mean the designers attempt to put out flat response, but never get it perfect. I'm referring to the amp itself, not factoring in any pre-amp processing.

Originally Posted by JaxChris

I personally find crossover blocks ....

By crossover block, do you mean a passive crossover (coils/capacitors) like what is found in a home speaker?

[JaxChris]

1. Kappa's, if you sealed them up with fast rings might be comparable to the Bose speakers, a blind test wouldn't probably net much difference.

2. In a MOSFET amp, it has clearly defined steps and loads inbetween those will draw and output based on the next step (in most cases). If an amp only does 1/2/4 and you give it a value between or outside those values, you will damage the amp or the load (speakers). You also have the problem of not knowing the exact specs of this Bose amp. Not all amps adjust their input impedance in parallel with the connected output impedance. I'm sure you've seen some amps where 4ohm = 50w and 2ohm = 100w, while other amps may be 4ohm = 50w and 2ohm = 75w.

Here's the issue you could encounter: Let's guess that the amp runs 25w@2ohm stock, but when you place a 2.5-3.0ohm load on it the amp switches to 4ohm@12w. Your 2.5ohm speaker is 30-100w rms. What happens to your underdriven speaker? The amp isn't putting out enough current, clipping occurs, and your speaker dies.

3. Every amp, even when you disable all built-in filters, still imparts its' sensitivity onto the source signal upon amplification. This effect is not consistent across the entire frequency range, especially not across the top and bottom 10% of its' frequency response. If you actually look at an installer tune a system with pink noise, you'll notice that even a known flat source signal, once amplified, is never flat when sampled after the amp. This is why they will auto-EQ only as a baseline and then tweak from there across as many bands as they can control with your system to get the driver output as equally flat as the original source.

4. Yes, I'm referring to the passive crossovers included with most component systems. Inside home speakers you'll usually see similar guts glued or tapped inside the speaker housing. Car speakers (and home speakers) don't need them if you know the power of the source and the resistance of the load. You can calculate the correct value of resistor needed that can be placed inline (just before or after the speaker terminal) to create your desired crossover points so that no two speakers sharing a circuit will overlap and therefore there is no multiplication of resistance when wired in parallel. If you placed a 20-500 4ohm sub, 500-5k driver 4ohm driver, and 5k-20k 4ohm tweeter altogether in parallel, the load seen by the amp would be 4ohm. This is just a rough example. You need to know whether you want to slope or drop each band you've created. By going first order you'll want some space between your bands as they will overlap at a lower value, which multiplied should come back up to your desired resistance. A fourth order will drop sharply and you'll really hear each speaker playing its' role without mixing with the next closest band. I prefer sharp drops on my bass and mid bass, but usually go with a soft slope between the mid range and tweeter so it doesn't break up the low vocal ranges.

[17rsvert]

JaxChris - thanks for your response.