Saw this. Great choice/I have them.

http://www.crutchfield.com/p_1086022...omnews=7268777

I just compared the specs on both and it looks as though, on paper, the Polks win: Higher sensitivity, Higher power handling and wider frequency response.

Go for it!

 

Dammit Max, stop posting links to these speakers!! I have Infinity Reference units in all six locations in my daily driver and love 'em..... I want these in my Crossfire but I've been spending too much money on other crap lately (taxes included).

 

Hey Max (and whoever else knows more about speakers than me)

What do you think of these:

Polk Audio db651s 6-1/2" 2-way shallow-mount car speakers at Crutchfield.com

How do they compare with the Infinities that you posted?


I'm also considering this set of components (but they're twice as much money)

Polk Audio db6501 6-1/2" component speaker system at Crutchfield.com

 

Polks are very highly regarded speakers, just as Infinity, MBQuart and many others are. The problem with asking for advice on speakers is that speakers are like so many other personal things - what sounds good to me might not sound good to you. Do you prefer Prime Rib or a New York Strip? Blondes, brunettes or redheads (or, like me, all three )?

 

I have to go with Mike's answer on this. Very subjective as to preference. However, I can say that the Polks are very high quality too and I'm sure will serve you well.

See if there is an auto sound shop in your area you can visit and listen to both? Just buy where you can find the best price.

I push the Infinity's because of the high quality and very nice extended range. The tweeters in these are wonderful. I can't see the need for a component set. Great mid-bass to boot.

I just compared the specs on both and it looks as though, on paper, the Polks win: Higher sensitivity, Higher power handling and wider frequency response.

Go for it!

 

Thanks fellas!!

I'm not an audiophile, but I do want my stereo to sound better.

I think I'll put a set in my MINI. If I like them, they'll go in the Crossfire too!

 

I am getting close to ordering Polk Audio db6501 for my 2004... will I be able to just connect the speakers and tweeters using existing wiring and existing Infinity HU and amplifier? Was worried I will need more power... also, just use the factory crossover settings or? My passenger door speaker is blown so instead of replacing it I thought the Polks would provide a better over all sound experience...

Thanks,
Michael

 

Been a while...I think I remember it just plugs in.

 

Best Buy and another installer said if my amp is 2 Ohm these Polks will not sound right... having trouble determining if the factory amp is 2 ohm...

 

Factory amp is feeding 2 ohm to each front channel. Door speakers are 2 ohm components. Amp is feeding 2 ohm x2 to each rear (woofer) which are dual coil. I.E. 2 ohm to each coil making the woofers 4 ohm each (2 x2 ohm).

You also have to watch out for the size of the cage and magnet on aftermarket speakers. I installed a set of JBL 2 ohm component speakers and had to trim the metal door mid speaker opening because of a slightly oversized cage and magnet. The Infinity components I installed in my other Xfire fit just fine with no modding.

 

Which Infinity components did you purchase?

 

Having spent over a decade at Harman (Infinity's parent company) I can tell you after hundreds of speaker evaluations and true double blind tests that there are many brands that don't come close. Now with that said, I approach this from a scientific angle that correlates speaker performance measurements to subjective evaluation. So when I see people making claims that it is what you like/sounds good to you I cringe! From an insiders perspective I got to see the factories in asia pumping out garbage drivers with some highly "well known" names. Notice I did not say "top brands", because when you look at the sales data for the industry many of the so called "highly regarded" brands don't even register on the chart. On the other side of the coin one would suspect that brands that are more mainstream (sony, pioneer, ect.) are the big sellers, not so. In fact when I was with Infinity we held the position of number one in sales for several years 8 out 9 hole sizes (pioneer wins the 4x10) with a third of the distribution the number two brand Pioneer had. Number three brand was not even close in sales. That is the reality of the biz.

Remember brands that are "highly regarded" in the 12v industry typically came up through the retailers that are what we call "specialists" (this by no means is an indication of technical talent or audio know how - many are just as bad as mass merchants) and as such the brands take center stage and are promoted as being better because of who sells them. It is really a crock of ****. Where the brand is sold is a function of a marketing strategy and their ability to supply the market along with the financial and technical abilities to do so. Go down the list of those "highly regarded brands" and ask yourself, how many times has that brand been bought and sold, or worse gone bankrupt and sold off the name to someone outside the biz. The results will make you go cross-eyed! Polk is now owned by a company who's background is in alarm systems and remote starters.

The aftermarket audio biz has been in a steady decline for a number of years, while the OEM side has grown considerably! The downfall to the aftermarket is their inability to adapt even when they have a three year head start. The OEM side of the biz (which represents 70%+ of Harman's biz) is bringing significantly more advanced systems to the car that are outpacing the aftermarkets ability to develop radios, dsp processors, and infotainment interfaces that deliver a fraction of the features/benefits. With new legislation passed last week now every car produced starting with the 2018 model year will be required to have a backup camera. Bye bye radio, hello touchscreens in every dashboard! Now what does the aftermarket do? Like they have done in the past they will look to add interfaces and attempt to sell consumers new radios along with high priced dash kits and custom labor. It will not work! Apple has moved Siri into the car and OEMs are going the same for android and a multitude of apps. This is the last frontier before the start of these shops getting out of the biz.

We tried along with a few others to introduce add on multi-channel DSP processors that would allow installers to adapt and retune OEM systems (fact is that the automakers typically have last say in what the car sounds like as they have specific customer profiles they believe have preferences- in other words a great sounding system can be completely screwed up by the car companies), but what we are all finding out is that the aftermarket dealers have not got a clue! It's not a knock on the installers it is knock on the industry's failure to leverage those closest to these systems to bring a significant effort to bear to educate those in the small shops around the world.

There are so many variables to producing a great sounding speaker, and there are measurements that deliver a speaker that a significant cross-section of the population determines to be "good". What sounds good in a display board is not likely to sound the same or even as good when installed in a car. Nuisance variables such as the automotive interior, correctness of installation, and even factory EQ built into the DSP driven amplifiers all impact the final sound. I can tell you I have seen thousands of Infinity and JBL installations that the owners and installer boast as being "good" get a failing grade on the installation and the resulting sound quality because of that one factor, and I am not referring to backyard DIY people either. I have had to fix $10,000 installations because the installer thought it would improve the system by wiring speakers out of phase because he read in some lifestyle magazine that some car owner who placed the tweeter in the corners of the windshield did it and he made it into the magazine, thus I should do that all the time. Or having to rip apart very well done fiberglass trim panels to rebuild subwoofer enclosures that not only were too small, but built from substandard materials or worse yet flexed with every note. The real pain comes from seeing the thousands of amplifier installations and purchase decisions that are bring made blindly. More Power! More Power! is the battle cry along with "can you stuff those amplifiers somewhere out of the way?" by customers. Even installers proclaiming their custom masterpiece featuring 4 amplifiers under plexiglass is awesome, yet the run time on the amps on a 80 degree day is 12 minutes...that won't even get me to work before the system is compromised or shuts down.

So when you choose products look at the application first, then go and listen to them with similar conditions you will deploy them with. Don't listen to the speaker with a 50x4 amplifier behind them if you are going to use the radio to power yours. Be critical and make sure all eqs, bass treble, loudness, and crossovers are turned off. Bring your own music and for all that is holy use material of high quality both in recording/ripping and content. If you are ripping your music at 128kbps STOP! Don't bring in the latest bass cd either because that woofer is not going to do a good job filling the store like it will do in the car. Don't think every car stereo shop is a hip hop pleasure palace, remember your music is not everyone else's music of choice. There is no need for foul language blasted for your enjoyment while others in the story seek to shield their kids.

Great Car Audio is about the faithful reproduction of the art that people worked countless hours to produce. They sat in front of high quality studio monitors and headphones (NOT BEATS ) to make the decision in the mix, they played that back on other good quality and not so good quality speakers to see what it could sound like to the average consumer, and then proclaimed it finished. They delivered the live show with big arrays of professional grade loudspeakers and tens of thousands of watts to drive them. All to trigger an emotional connection between the music and the listener. If your system is not making that happen for you, then something is very wrong!

 

Been a couple of years and these have been upgraded by Infinity, but they are still around for purchase... Infinity Reference 6030cs 6.5-Inch 270-Watt Two-Way Component System

Amazon.com: Infinity Reference 6030cs 6.5-Inch 270-Watt Two-Way Component System: Car Electronics

Amazon.com: Infinity Reference 6030cs 6.5-Inch 270-Watt Two-Way Component System: Car Electronics

 

Infinity. Thank you, best read in quite a while.

 

Infinity...great read! All of it made sense to me.

 

Glad you enjoyed it.

Sadly the state of the aftermarket industry is not healthy and while there are efforts underway to leverage the finest talent to change that, most of the actions are just a rebranding of past events but in more upscale locations.

In reality companies are taking a note out of the BOSE playbook leveraging DSP technology to correct for speaker/listening environment imperfections to deliver great sounding systems. Now they are not using $.15 paper drivers to do it which is still better, and even the finest speakers need the DSP to overcome imperfections created by the room/car they are placed in. With really good speakers those are more slight tweaks vs. large changes.

Our cars were part of a huge leverage in driver technology with CMMD which was a industry changing patented development that can be seen in several Harman applications under the identifiers of CMMD, CMMD Lite, and other names based on brand (CMMD is the Infinity id). Ultra stiff low resonance drivers that pushed the resonance/driver distortion outside the band of operation (beyond the useful operating range of the driver). This meant less needed to be done with dsp and crossover networks, but it also has a higher cost of production. The first appearance was in Infinity's Prelude MTS speakers ($12,000 a pair), and the Crossfire and Pacifica were the only executions to use it. All other applications from BMW and a host of other luxury brand autos used the "lite" version.

 

So, how do we decide what to get? I know you kinda pointed to it by saying "So when you choose products look at the application first, then go and listen to them with similar conditions you will deploy them with." Hard to do most places, wouldn't you say?

 

Yes it is very difficult but don't take the display of products too literally. We know it is unlikely you are going to find a local dealer with the speakers you are interested in mounted in a crossfire, and industry experts have been telling dealers for years to build realistic demo vehicles to address the average consumer, but thy find it better to create high dollar vehicles they can show off their custom skills (one of the reasons shops fail because if they got the job they can't charge enough to make up for; the loss of normal business generated from taking up space on the big project, the amount of labor time it takes to do it right, and deliver projects in a reasonable amount of time without pissing off the consumer).

However there are a few things to understand and things you can do within the space....for example

1. If you are listening to a pair of door speakers on a display board don't stand directly on axis (right in front of the speaker) try to replicate as best as possible the position you will face in the car. Off axis response is going to be a critical element for car speakers, in fact some brands design for it taking into direct and of axis reproduction

2. Power - try to find the closest representation of how you will be using them. Radio power = 12 watts per channel on a BTL amplifier no matter what the marketing is, more advance head units using digital dsp amps might get you to 20 watts @ 4 ohms. If you move to an off board external amp in the showroom and you get blown away with a 50x 4 amp without touching the head unit you know that the gains of the amp are set way to high. Regardless of the type of amp, power is power and doubling the power will only deliver a slight increase of volume change 3db. So going from 20watts to 40 watts of input nets you 3db, 40 to 80 nets you another 3db, 80 to 160 nets you another 3db, this gets you close to twice as loud at a 10db difference. You also begin to see why more is not always better because there are not many door speakers that are going to take 160 watts rms input. Also be wary of differences in amplifier brands. The hidden in plain sight trick that is used by manufacturers is to design the amplifier such that it does not take much to drive them. One company might use a fairly standard range of say 1v-2vrms while others will go .5v - 2v in the gain setup to make their amps seem more powerful but in reality they just reach max power sooner on the volume control and then distortion.

3. System - are you using an ipod/iphone or other device for a source? Use the same in the demo. If I play you a cut on a CD and you have the same cut at 128kbps AAC from iTunes I can bet the house my demo will yield a different level of performance than your cut...by a long shot! How good the system sounds starts with the content you put in....as the old saying goes....Garbage in Garbage out!

4. Lastly don't expect a 6.5" speaker to deliver earth shattering bass. Used properly most 6.5" drivers are good down to about 120hz before they tail off. Higher performance drivers down to 80hz before their output tails off. Generally speaking if you deploy a crossover between these drivers and a sub set at 12db slopes you should look for that 3db down point and double the frequency and dial that in...its a general rule of thumb. From there its up to the subwoofer system to fill in the bottom end.

 

Excellent explanation! I know I can make the right choice now...just have to find a store with the speakers I'm looking at!

 

I put a pair of KRK 6" studio monitor speakers and 1" synthetic silk domed tweeter using their crossover (properly voiced for the pair) on both doors when my driver side woofer blew. These have glass aramid cones and the semi-shallow basket that work very well off-axis but I need to upgrade the factory amp to push these 4 ohms drivers a little more.

They can pump out decent lows down to 50-60hz but you really have to push the volume to get there.

To get more bass at lower volumes i hope to install a dedicated subwoofer amp and a pair of 8" Cerwin-Vega subs behind the seats - hopefully sometime this summer..