Breakers Stereo

The addition of a subwoofer to your car audio system is one of the best investments you can make. Not only that but adding a car subwoofer has THE LARGEST impact on how your car stereo will sound. It doesn’t matter you’re not looking for a booming system that will turn every head in a 1 mile radius, a subwoofer is necessary for ANY stereo system. Take for example home audio systems, they all have subwoofers. Or stereo systems in the movie theater, they do as well. If those stereo systems do then so should your car stereo system. The speakers in your doors and rear deck can’t produce the same bass that a car subwoofer can. So with that said let’s examine what makes a good subwoofer and what will work for you and your needs.  We’ll good through what to look for and what to look out for.

1. Power Handling. Not only does this determine how many watts you can put towards the subwoofers also it’s normally an indicator on how good the subwoofer is. But be careful you want to look at car subwoofers that are made by good quality well know companies such as: Cerwin Vega, JL Audio, Alpine, Memphis Car Audio and Kenwood. Lesser quality lesser known companies will over rate the power handling on their car subwoofers, so look out for that. Look at RMS rating for actually power handling. RMS  stands for “Root Mean Squared”, and is a formula used to calculate an approximate average for the power an amplifier can continuously create.
2. Magnet weight. A direct indication on how much power a car subwoofer can handle. Typically the heavier the car subwoofer the better it is.
3. The designed used to cool the voice coil. When a car subwoofer blows it’s because the voice coil gets too hot and burns up. That’s why it’s important that whichever subwoofer you choose is well designed to alleviate heat from the voice coil.
4. Enclosure recommendations. This is important mainly for you. Ask yourself two questions. #1 what type of music am I going to listen to with my car stereo system?  #2 How much space am I willing to give up in my trunk for my cars subwoofer. If you listen to a lot of music that has a lot of low end bass, such as rap, hip-hop and country, then a ported enclosure might be your best bet. But if you listen to rock or house music that has a lot of punchy quick bass then you might be better off with a sealed enclosure. Ported enclosures do well with lower bass because they are normally tuned really low, like at 30 Hz or so. But sealed enclosures for car subwoofers are all around better sounding because they are more accurate. Another thing to know is that ported enclosures for car subwoofers are much more efficient then sealed enclosures so this means that they don’t need as much power to sound good. Another thing to consider is that some better quality car subwoofers are very enclosure specific such as the JL Audio W7 subwoofers which need a ported enclosure with specific vent size. The Cerwin Vega Stroker subwoofer is the same way.
5. Voice Coil Size. This will determine how much power the car subwoofer can take and also how much abuse it can handle. The bigger the voice coil the better.