Faulty Halo 9? Where's the bass? Anyone local to me that could help?

[ross271]

Hello, wondering if anyone could help me. I've installed an Alpine Halo 9 system in my T6 at the weekend and I'm seriously underwhelmed at the audio quality - there's next to no bass unless I turn the lower frequencies on the EQ up to max, and even then it's not great quality. I reconnected the original headunit last night to check speakers and the bass is excellent in comparison! Warm and deep, and present! For the price of the Halo I was expecting excellent quality audio.

I've done/tried the following so far:

1. Upgraded the stock speakers to Alpine SPC-106T6 the other week - sounded great even on the stock VW headunit
2. Completed stage 1 and 2 sound treatment to the door panels
3. Upgraded to the Halo 9 at the weekend - very disappointed...it's a step backwards compared to the original headunit
4. Checked for phase issues by sending all audio to the left, and then all to the right - no improvement
5. Checked for polarity issues by switching the "-" and "+" pins in the ISO harness (just incase it had been wired incorrectly)
6. Been through all of the EQ/Crossover/Presets settings multiple times
7. Reset the settings on the headunit
8. Checked forums online (here, and also a Halo owners group) and everyone seems to suggest the unit sounds amazing out of the box (i.e. even with the EQ flat)

Is there anything else I'm missing or should try before I send it back as faulty? Or is there anyone local-ish to me (I'm based in South Tyneside) that has a Halo system installed in their T6 that would be open to me coming to have a listen and confirming that mine is faulty?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Absolut5]

Very odd, Alpines are great sounding.

I would check the grey and white wires in the alpine loom, interface are pinned correctly, only takes it to be pinned incorrectly for it to be out of phase, we have seen interfaces pinned back to front before, though rare

 

[Stay Frosty]

In my car audio days 20yrs ago this would have been reversed polarity on one of the mid bass drivers, each side would sound reasonable individually but obviously 3db down on the stereo pair when the 180 degree out mids cancel each other rather than sum.

 

[ross271]

Cheers for the replies both. Yes I wondered about polarity/phase so tried reversing the white and white/black pins (for front left), and the grey and grey/black (for front right) but it didn't seem to make any difference.
With the EQ massively boosted at the lower end I can get some bass - particularly with the van stationary, but once I'm travelling I'm mainly just hearing the higher frequencies from the tweeters.
I've also tried adjusting the speaker distances in the audio settings to push the drivers side "further away" to mitigate any potential phasing issues.

I have an old Pioneer compact sub (TS-WX130EA) which I could install under the drivers seat but I feel like I shouldn't have to do that after spending ~£1k on the Alpine headunit. Also the sub is mainly for "sub" frequencies right(?) .... the door speakers should still be handling a fair chunk of the "bass" frequencies?

Anyone in/around the North East got the Halo system installed that I could come compare against?

 

[Stay Frosty]

Just reverse one of the mid bass drivers otherwise they're still pushing and pulling together but having been turned 180.
Think clapping your hands when the polarity is correct and waving your hands side to side but parallel to each other when one speaker is out of phase.
We used to have this issue with subs wired out of phase and it's obvious with two 15" speakers in a sealed box when you put a AA battery across the speaker terminals with one sub going in the opposite direction, great care needed to match polarity on dual voice coil multi sub installs with magic smoke coming out of the port split seconds before the smell of burnt voice coil.

 

[ross271]

I tried reversing the pins in the ISO harness for just 1 side and that sounded very definitely out of phase/weird - but I'm guessing that reverses the phase for both the tweeters and the door speakers on that side....could it be that just the door speaker on 1 side needs reversing (i.e switch the pins on the cable going into the door speaker rather than in the ISO harness) ?

 

[ross271]

Actually, thinking about that further - if it was the case that the speakers were out of phase wouldn't that affect the original headunit too? The bass sounded great when I connected that back up...

 

[Stay Frosty]

You really want to isolate the tweets if they're confusing the missing bass output so you can concentrate on just the doors as that's where any bass reinforcement should be coming from.
In an ideal world you want to be able to band pass the mid bass door speakers as even a decent pair of 8" drivers are never going to be happy below 40Hz and cranking them up to play some L'il John when they haven't got the cone area to deliver the goods is just cruel.
The doors want to be somewhere between 80 and 1.5 kHz as a rough guess, possibly higher if the tweets can't drop too low, I used to run some Dynaudio MD100 mid tweets with my tweets to allow for the door mids to stay happy, any proper grunty bass should come from the subs with bags of cone area and excursion.

 

[Stay Frosty]

I'll admit I'm not sure how your Halo is set up as DSP was only just emerging when I used to muck about with car audio however if you're replacing the door speakers and tweets but retaining the VW wiring and crossovers then it's going to be difficult to improve on the stock system as the stock crossovers will call the shots and not allow you to raise or lower the mid to tweet output level.
On the last system I ran the only passive crossover network was on the mid tweets and tweets but they were crossed at around 1.7kHz and up from the Pioneer hu to the amp then through the two way crossover to the individual mid tweets and tweets.
How have you got the Halo feeding the various amplifiers?

 

[Stay Frosty]

Put one of these in each door...

 

[Deaky]

Can you post some pictures of the crossover settings

 

[ross271]

Hi @Deaky I'll grab some pics when I get a sec. Basically I've set the upper LPF around 16k/20k and the HPF at 100Hz after installing my old sub last night (and setting that to 100Hz too). As you'd expect the sub makes a huge difference, but I'm experimenting with rolling it off slightly higher than typical (100Hz - 125Hz) in order to compensate for the lack of bass from the door speakers.