Measurements By Redrock Acoustics
Subwoofers are probably the hottest item in car audio today. It's become so popular as to overshadow everything else. What about the rest of the system? It is always important to have a broad spectrum of music that only a component set can reproduce. In this month's review we tested MA Audio's new Synergy series component speakers.
The SY65C1 component set arrived in a craft brown gift box that contained two 6.5-inch woofer/mids paired with a set of 25 mm (1 inch) aluminized PEI dome tweeters. Two large outboard crossovers, wires and an accessory kit completed the set along with a brief manual.
The mid-woofers look tough the way they were constructed, with stamped steel baskets, mica-injected poly cones, and a rubber surround. Positive and negative terminals reside on either side of the woofer, thus eliminating any chance of the connecting wires or tinsle leads from shorting. A sharp looking wrinkle-finish basket really completes the overall appearance. All in all, very nice cosmetics.
Addressing the importance of mounting, baskets of the mid-woofer have multiple holes around the mounting flange to match them up to a large number of factory mounts, making a sometimes challenging job easy. The enclosed grills can be mounted flush with the door or off the door approximately a half-inch with the application of the included spacer rings. This spacer ring mounts behind the grill ring and is a nice feature if you are having some depth issues in a shallow car door.
Once the grill ring is mounted, the speaker can be inserted and permanently fastened to it. The grill can then be press-fit into place. On our test samples, the mounting templates did not have any lines for the speaker itself, only the grill ring (according to the manufacturer the product consumers purchase has templates with the lines).
The 25 mm tweeters appear as though they are titanium, although they are actually aluminized PEI domes. PEI is plastic composite material, much like Mylar, which is used for its lightweight quality and rigidity. These common-sized tweeters use neodymium as the source for magnetic energy, as is the case with most manufacturers' products nowadays.
Mounting the tweeters is fairly easy and can be done in different ways: flush or surface, with the ability to angle them in either of the mentioned ways. The tweeters snap into their mounts in much the same fashion as the grill on the mid-woofers, but the fit is so tight that they can be difficult to pull apart should you ever need to. However, you will never have to worry about the tweeter falling out of the door if you slam it too hard.
MA Audio takes a unique approach in the crossover design. More specifically, the two-way crossovers can be used with a single amplifier to power both the mid-woofer/tweeter combo, or (here is the unique part) the system can be bi-amplified. Bi-amplified means that separate amps or channels are used for each individual mid-woofer and tweeter. This is displayed by the two inputs, high and low, and the two outputs, tweeter and woofer. The crossovers come from the factory setup for a single input. Therefore, if these components bi-amplified, and the jumper setting on the circuit board remains in the factory setting, then this could be disastrous to your amplifiers. In the manual there is no mention of changing these jumpers, and the diagram provided displays a connection only for bi-amplification.
Peering through the smoked acrylic case, you can see other features of the crossover. For instance, a five-position tweeter attenuation circuit that uses a removable jumper instead of a less reliable switch. This can cut the output of the tweeter by up to -6 dB. The DC current absorbing light bulb is another nice feature that effectively protects the tweeter. It is worth clipping the outputs of your amplifier once just to see the bulb illuminate.