Need help with speaker choice

Jonathan · Post by **Jonathan** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 1:50 pm

"Can you buy Rainbow tweets on their own? And if so, in your honest opinion, what would be a good match for the focal mids and how much would they cost? Roughly?"

You can usually buy the raw drivers. They'll cost you as they're handmade in Germany, but you can't beat the build quality or the sound quality. Rainbow invests a lot of money and labor into their products. If you can read German, you can look at the reviews in Autohifi magazine (under the German section of the Rainbow site) and see how the Rainbows stacked up. They don't have any reviews in English, so that's your only option. Anyway, to sum the Platinums up, they were:

43/50- Sound Quality
8/20- Maximum SPL
20/20- Equipment
10/10- Processing

The Platinums are excellent, the only thing they lack is extreme output. Anywho, I liked the Platinums tweets a lot better than the Utopia titanium and beryllium domes.

Take it with a grain of salt though, I am not a fan of the Focal inverted domes, for these reasons:
Really bad powerhandling
Doesn't like to be played low, and are aggressive as they get lower
Only good if on axis
Tend to be bright due to the rising impedance curve (<-zobel network would benefit that a LOT).
PITA to install.
Require tuning to get sounding natural.

Basically, add to the drawbacks of a ribbon tweet, take away some of the benefits, and you have the Focal inverted dome. Sorry Focal fans, jmo

JeremyC · Post by **JeremyC** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 2:31 pm

Ok man your starting to worry me a little. Same deck and mids as me, either you have good taste or I have a stalker. :help:

Anyways, nice choice on the mids. Give them some good clean power, and a little tweaking from the deck, and they sound pretty darn good.

Robert Wollenberg · Post by **Robert Wollenberg** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 5:27 pm

JeremyC, what tweets are you running? Do you like them? Is there anything about your setup you wish you had done differently?

I know someone had mentioned a Jeep Cherokee install, do you have pics of what you did to your doors? They must have been modified in some way. I was really hoping to keep my doors as factory looking as possible but I'm pretty sure that idea is going out the window. Oh well.

sinister audio · Post by **sinister audio** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 5:38 pm

youll probaly want to talk to kiki hes the jeep man and the one who knows a ass load about everything youll ever want to know.

ridr4lif · Post by **ridr4lif** » Wed Sep 21, 2005 5:43 pm

I think audiobass has a cherokee too. Might wanna talk to him...on gtalk!

tedd

Post by **GlassWolf** » Thu Sep 22, 2005 6:21 am

yeah my forte is really the grand cherokees though.. I do know the cherokees but not quite as well for little stuff.

Robert Wollenberg · Post by **Robert Wollenberg** » Thu Sep 22, 2005 7:05 am

I know my Jeep pretty well. I know there's no damn space anywhere in it. lol. My doors are a very shallow mount (2") so I have to modify it to get anything good to fit. My kicks are pretty small so I don't want to cram too much down there. I put in my other post I'll probably be mounting my mid in the door location, modified of course and the tweet in the kick aimed at dome light. I tend to lean toward the middle of my Jeep during normal driving so my head isn't usually center of my seat anyway. When I'm off-roading it is, but I don't usually have the stereo loud enough to notice it then anyway. I need to pay attention to where my tires are so I'm not breaking things or getting stuck.

JeremyC · Post by **JeremyC** » Thu Sep 22, 2005 3:02 pm

Yeah right now I am running the Focal Utopia tweets, and I really like them. They are kinda picky when it comes to install (as jonathon has told you), and can be a little bright, unless properly EQed. Thats one of the reasons I decided to go active. I knew I wanted a SQ stereo, and with my limited options for install, I would need the extra control.

Other than that, I really like them. I am sure there not the best set out there, but for the variety of music I listen to they work really well. They have plenty of punch in the mid range, which works well for rock and rap and the tweeters really come alive with techno (one of the main reasons I went with the Focals)

I guess my only regret is not doing the install myself. I was in Korea at the time, and wanted my car to be done when I got home. So I had my friends shop do the install. Yeah they did everything like I wanted it, but it doesn't have that personal touch, that I would have given it. Then again, my mom, girlfriend, and friends would have killed me if I spent my whole month of leave (in route to germany) doing my install.