Audiofrog GB15's - perfect tweeters for our sail panels

josby

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Honda Civic 10th gen Audiofrog GB15's - perfect tweeters for our sail panels gb15-1 Honda Civic 10th gen Audiofrog GB15's - perfect tweeters for our sail panels gb15-2

I just finished installing these Audiofrog GB15 tweeters and, despite having made a bunch of measurements before I bought them, I was still surprised by just how well they fit.


Honda Civic 10th gen Audiofrog GB15's - perfect tweeters for our sail panels g898GB15-o_profile
They have threads on the outside body of the tweeter as part of their mounting system.


Honda Civic 10th gen Audiofrog GB15's - perfect tweeters for our sail panels tweeter-pod-mod
So, I just took a Dremel tool and shaved a little plastic from inside the holes in the sail panels, as pictured above, until they were just the right size for the threads on the outside of the tweeters to screw into, and it worked almost perfectly:


Honda Civic 10th gen Audiofrog GB15's - perfect tweeters for our sail panels gb15-3
There's a little metal ridge at the top of the threads that kept them from QUITE screwing down all the way, but you really have to look to notice it I think.

Despite being a larger tweeter, I had no problems with clearance behind the tweeter, and the nice thing is that the factory tweeters still snap back into the sail panels despite grinding that plastic out, so I can easily undo this when I sell the car in the future.
 
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josby

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Besides being a great fit, why else are these a great tweeter for our car? Because we have 6.5" mids in our doors and there's something called beaming.

Honda Civic 10th gen Audiofrog GB15's - perfect tweeters for our sail panels beamin

The higher a frequency a speaker plays relative to its diameter, the less the sound emanates from the speaker in all directions (left side of pic above) and the more focused it becomes straight out from the speaker (right side of pic above). In other words, it turns into a beam.

If you're sitting where the speaker is pointing at you, that's not much of a problem, but think about how much of an angle your ears are at to the mids down in the front doors. You're nowhere close to being straight out from the speakers. Especially the one in the door closest to you.

The solutions are to either aim the mid toward you (not easy in a car), or use a crossover that keeps the mids from playing frequencies too high and let a smaller speaker play those frequencies instead.

The general rule is to cross the speakers at a frequency where the wavelength is 1.5 times the diameter of the speaker cone (or lower). So, what's the cone diameter of a typical 6.5" speaker?

Honda Civic 10th gen Audiofrog GB15's - perfect tweeters for our sail panels speaker-diameter

About 5 inches. The speed of sound is 1125 feet/second, or 13500 inches per second. 1.5 times our 5" cone diameter is 7.5. 13500 divided by 7.5 equals 1800. That's the frequency where the wavelength is 1.5 times the cone diameter. So we should cross our midrange speaker over at 1800 Hz (or less if possible) and let other speaker(s) handle what's above that. Andddddddddd the recommended crossover frequency for the GB15 is: 1800 Hz!

Compare that to some of the top-selling tweeters on Crutchfield. Most recommend a crossover frequency of 2500 Hz or higher. Most component sets don't list the frequency their included crossovers use, but from what I've seen, it's usually 2500 Hz or higher too. Because smaller 1" and .75" tweeters generally can't handle playing lower than that. Tweeters that need to be crossed higher make your 6.5" mids have to play higher, which means farther up into the range where they're beaming.

Some mids have a phase plug in the center that help raise the beaming point, but I haven't seen details on just how much of an effect those can have.

A better solution is a 3-way component set, where you have a speaker sized between the 6.5" mid and the tweeter so you can keep all speakers below the point where they're beaming at all. But if you're not willing to find a way to mount that third speaker in each door or want to keep a more factory look, this is a good compromise.
 
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josby

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Incidentally, beaming is also the reason Honda points the tweeters toward our ears. Guessing the factory tweeters have a 0.75" cone diameter, the 1.5 times diameter beaming point of them would be 12,000 Hz. Since they need to play up to 20,000 Hz, and they're small and easy to aim, they're aimed toward us to get our ears inside of the sound beam coming out of them above 12,000 Hz.
 
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Wow, $400?
 
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josby

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I got an open-box set for $300 :)
 


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How are you liking these tweets josby? What mids did you pair them up with? Active I assume?

Audiofrog is less than 45 min from me and am thinking about giving them a call or stopping by. I have read some great reviews paired up with their GB60 mids.

Let me know your thoughts. I will be running an active setup with 50w per channel and all processing will be done through the Mini DSP 6x8 and REW.
 

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GTO19T tweeters fit perfectly (with a little finessing) in the sail panels. They really bring the music to life.
Honda Civic 10th gen Audiofrog GB15's - perfect tweeters for our sail panels IMG_20170219_150508
 
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josby

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How are you liking these tweets josby? What mids did you pair them up with? Active I assume?

Audiofrog is less than 45 min from me and am thinking about giving them a call or stopping by. I have read some great reviews paired up with their GB60 mids.

Let me know your thoughts. I will be running an active setup with 50w per channel and all processing will be done through the Mini DSP 6x8 and REW.
Yeah, mine are paired with GB60's, with MS-8 DSP crossing between them at 1800Hz 24 dB/octave. They sound great - I would definitely recommend you trying to get a demo, particularly if you can manage to hear the Audiofrog president's Mercedes because I've heard it's amazing.

I haven't put my amps in yet so I'm only running them off the 20W per channel that my DSP puts out. I think 50W will be good. Even 20W is good much of the time, though I do hear some distortion on some songs when I really crank it that I believe is due to not having enough power.
 

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Yeah, mine are paired with GB60's, with MS-8 DSP crossing between them at 1800Hz 24 dB/octave. They sound great - I would definitely recommend you trying to get a demo, particularly if you can manage to hear the Audiofrog president's Mercedes because I've heard it's amazing.

I haven't put my amps in yet so I'm only running them off the 20W per channel that my DSP puts out. I think 50W will be good. Even 20W is good much of the time, though I do hear some distortion on some songs when I really crank it that I believe is due to not having enough power.
I talked with the president Andy last night and he invited me to come demo his car. Now I just need to decide if I want to spend that much money or not.
 


 


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