What amp to use?????
Pull the Harmon Kardon out, go with a nice aftermarket head unit and call it done. Line level converters suck.
My buddy has arc 5.25" in his fairing and arc 6.5" in his lowers ran off the Arc mini in parallel.. Sounds great.. He did cap the 5.25" speakers to give them a slightly higher crossover point than the 6.5" speakers....
My buddy has arc 5.25" in his fairing and arc 6.5" in his lowers ran off the Arc mini in parallel.. Sounds great.. He did cap the 5.25" speakers to give them a slightly higher crossover point than the 6.5" speakers....
Anyway, what do you mean by 'cap' the 5.25s?
My bike has had the Hogtunes tweeter pod on it before I added the CVO speaker boxes and they tend to dominate the sound at speed; i.e. most of the sound seems to heard from the pod rather than the fairing speakers.
When I added the CVO speaker boxes, I was already using the Arc 125.2 and initially wired them as mentioned earlier; i.e. run four speakers from the two-channel amp. That was okay, but I felt like I wasn't hearing much sound from the speakers in the lowers.
I rewired the speakers using the Arc amp to drive the speakers in the lowers as "rear" speakers, the fairing speakers were wired to the HK front speaker outputs (like MOCO does it), and had the fader control turned on by the dealer. This worked really well and I would not have changed it but for the RF amp coming out. And I did find myself using the fader control from time to time depending on the particular music I was playing while riding. Is fader control "needed," the 2011 CVO SG doesn't have fader control. For me, I already had the non-Ultra overlay harness on the bike so accessing the rear speaker outputs from the HK radio was easy and so I used the four channel configuration ultimately. Even w/o the NUOH, accessing the rear speaker outputs is easy, and the charge, if any, by a dealer for fader control is modest.
As for line output converters (LOC's), when I did the Arc amp install I asked the shop foreman at the quality auto audio shop where I did the install and bought the amp about using them with the Arc amp. He told me they'd done a lot of installs with the Arc amp and never used LOC's because the Arc amp provided such a clean signal.
Being as "sound" is very much a matter of personal preference and experience (what I hear may be, and probably is, different from what you hear riding a bike), a lot of these questions don't have an objectively proveable answer.
Carl
When I added the CVO speaker boxes, I was already using the Arc 125.2 and initially wired them as mentioned earlier; i.e. run four speakers from the two-channel amp. That was okay, but I felt like I wasn't hearing much sound from the speakers in the lowers.
I rewired the speakers using the Arc amp to drive the speakers in the lowers as "rear" speakers, the fairing speakers were wired to the HK front speaker outputs (like MOCO does it), and had the fader control turned on by the dealer. This worked really well and I would not have changed it but for the RF amp coming out. And I did find myself using the fader control from time to time depending on the particular music I was playing while riding. Is fader control "needed," the 2011 CVO SG doesn't have fader control. For me, I already had the non-Ultra overlay harness on the bike so accessing the rear speaker outputs from the HK radio was easy and so I used the four channel configuration ultimately. Even w/o the NUOH, accessing the rear speaker outputs is easy, and the charge, if any, by a dealer for fader control is modest.
As for line output converters (LOC's), when I did the Arc amp install I asked the shop foreman at the quality auto audio shop where I did the install and bought the amp about using them with the Arc amp. He told me they'd done a lot of installs with the Arc amp and never used LOC's because the Arc amp provided such a clean signal.
Being as "sound" is very much a matter of personal preference and experience (what I hear may be, and probably is, different from what you hear riding a bike), a lot of these questions don't have an objectively proveable answer.
Carl
Extreme HDF Member
Joined: Apr 2006
Posts: 10,449
Likes: 46
From: Roswell, GA
Sounds like your system screams already, why change for the RF unit? Couldn't leave well enough alone; it's a fairly common affliction among HD owners; and, the price point for the RF amp is too attractive. Also, have you had your radio all the way up, or at least at a high level and heard any distortion? No; I worry that I'd damage a speaker if I did.
Sound can be like meat. If you've only ever eaten hamburgers from McDonalds, it's hard to understand how much better a really fine steak, properly prepared, tastes. I accept that what I have is somewhere between hamburger and prime, but where it fits I don't know.
Carl
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