[sr20de4evr]

Originally Posted by ponchonutty

I'm sorry. I needed to expand my thinking on this. I should have said that these suck for the typical car installation mainly because of the space they need. There just home stereo speakers. That's why all that space is needed. Besides, having a car stereo that has a sub thats got a FS of 18hz is unnecessary. In stereo competitions, you rarely see a sub with FS below 25htz.. At 18htz, you can't even hear any of it but is great to have in a home where you have large amounts of room.

Brahma, tempest, and the rest are really just old designs from home stereo speakers. Today, people want big sound out of the smallest enclosures. Yeah, kids don't mind loosing space that much but when you have people comming in with H2, Z06, Mercedes, Lexus, and such, they don't want to loose all of their cargo space for a sub's enclosure.

yes the tempest and shiva are old designs from HT (NOT the brahma, it's completely different, the 12 is at home in less than 1cf and it's very inefficient, more efficient than many others, but anything that needs 800-1000rms to hit full excursion in a sealed box is inefficient), in fact that's part of the point. They're built so they do very well on low power and can still play very deep, ANY sub with those qualities is going to need a huge box due to Koffman's Iron Law. Like you said, most people nowadays want big sound out of tiny enclosures, which is actually what makes the shiva and tempest "old", but there are still those people who are willing to sacrifice trunk space for amp power without any loss of SQ or low end extension, which is exactly what the shiva and tempest (and koda actually) are suited for. Just because they're built with different goals in mind doesn't make them ill-suited to car audio, you just need more space and less power vs other more "common" designs.