Planning Stereo Upgrade

@carbo

Speaker surface area is like engine displacement as the saying goes, there is no replacement for displacement. Lets break this down.

You have to double the wattage to a speaker, in order to make an audible difference. You have to 10X the wattage, in order to produce the twice the output to a single woofer. So in your scenario, you would have had to go from 250 to 500, in order to hear the a difference from your original single woofer. To make it twice a loud, you would have had to jump to....well, you get the drift. Your woofer would never handle that amount of wattage.

In your original setup, you had one (1) 10" woofer driven by 250W. You now have two (2) 10" woofers driven by a total of 330W. The thing is, the two woofers are now dividing that 330, for a net of 165W each. In reality, that a drop of about 35% to the original woofer. That would not equate to an increase in output.

So, we are back to the added surface area. With the 2nd 10" woofer, you now have 2x the air moving as before. This is an increase that you can never get by increasing amp wattage.

Hope this makes sense.

so Wylie, please explain this: I replaced the 10" 4 ohm single voice coil sub in my salon with a Rockford Punch dual voice coil sub and then wired the 4 terminals on the dual voice coils together. That brought me down to 2 ohms and even though there is still the same cone coverage, the sub is much louder as a result.

Carbo,

I am happy to explain. To start with, you had previously posted twice, that you added a 2nd, identical 4 ohm woofer, bringing your amp load to 2 ohm. I took issue with this because you clearly stated the woofers were wired in series. This is 100% impossible. Two 4 drivers in series, is 8 ohm, not 2. Sorry, cant cheat ohms law. However, two 4 ohm woofers wired in PARALLEL would = 2 ohm.

You stated that the increase in bass from one woofer to two woofers was from the bump from 4 ohm wattage to 2 ohm wattage. Again, fact is, your increased output was NOT from an increase from 250W to one woofer to 330 to two woofers, but from the 2nd woofer. The net wattage to each woofer actually dropped, not increased.

Now, you are saying to swapped from a single 4 ohm SVC 10" to a single (1) DVC 10". Ok, this still says nothing. With a DVC, you absolutely have to wire both coils. This can be either series or parallel.

Since you seem to be confident that you had a 10" 4 ohm single voice coil and now have a 10" DVC and the final load at the amp has dropped from 4 ohm to 2 ohm, then it must be a 4 ohm DVC wired in parallel. Again cant cheat ohms law.

This would have net a wattage increase of 80 watts rms. Again, 250 rms to a single 10" 4 ohm woofer to single 10" 2 ohm woofer. So lets break this down:

From one 10" to another? no difference in output unless the new woofer had a crazy amount of excursion over the original, the alignment (enclosure) was changed, or the wattage was doubled.

From 250W rms to 330W rms? No audible difference. You would need 500W rms to hear a difference. 2500W to make it twice as loud.

Im not dogging your system. Adding a 2nd 10" woofer as you stated would give you the increase in bass for sure. Sadly, an 80W bump from 250 to 330 to a single 10" woofer, would not, unless you went from a sealed to a ported box or went from a 10" to 12" woofer. 80W would not make a difference unless the original woofer was not tuned properly.

Again, not dogging your upgrades, just want those following along to understand how real world upgrades = audible differences.