Howdy all,

I was wondering about something one day and kept forgetting to ask, so while I'm sittin here surrounded by bikes and parts I figured I'd ask.

When you've got a bike with multiple speakers is there a way to verify speaker phasing without tearing everything apart? For example a sound file to play. I know it is easy with just two speakers playing, but with a system with eight speakers, how could it be verified just using and audio file?

I'll lay out how I've got all this cobbled together (it's a bit odd to most folks but I had to do this because of space requirements and the desire to keep all my Ultra functionality). I've got a four channel amp in the fairing driving fairing and lowers in stereo. I have a bridged amp in my saddlebag driving my lids and another bridged amp under the tour pak driving the rear pod speakers. I have an Arc PSM with the front four channels feeding the four channel amp up front matched channel to channel so to speak, but the last two channels are feeding the rear two amps through a Y connector.

Given this layout are y'all aware of a way to play a certain type of sound file and somehow verify that all eight speakers have matching polarity?

As always thanks for the thoughts and time.

 

I don't know of a way to determine with an audio file. I've always checked with a 9v battery. Sure that's not what you wanted to hear.

 

I understand Hoss. I always verify the speaker terminals with a battery (any 1.5 volt cell has worked well for me) I was just thinking about when all the yards of wiring and crap are tied together. I'm pretty conservative on the low end of my DSP settings to try to keep from damaging speakers, so I am wondering if I would really catch a phasing problem or not.

 

Are talking about the polarity when you say phasing? If so there are several speaker polarity apps. Or I may not be catching what you are getting at.

 

I believe using a multimeter on Ac millivolt setting with the speaker playing you put the positive lead on the positive of the speaker and the negative lead on the negative speaker connection and if the reading is positive then it is in phase.

 

Studio Six Digital makers of "Mobile Tools by AudioControl" (the iOS RTA etc.) have a speaker polarity test using a proprietary "speakerpop" sound file and their polarity tool. Some info can be found here on the Mac version but you can download the iPhone version off the iOS app store.

 

Very cool Hamah. Nice research

 

Thanks for the info y'all I was thinking I had heard about some sort of pop test. Might be worth a try.

 

Well I tried the iPhone pop test with the sound file that Studio Six said to use. The results were somewhat encouraging, but not rock solid. Even when I used my DSP to shut off all the other speakers sometimes the test would literally flip between + and - with every pop. If I moved the phone around a bit I could sometimes get it to stay on + for several pops, but the results were not as repetitive as they implied they would be.

 

I tried a couple apps as well and got inconsistent results like you did.