Can an 8-inch woofer really be louder than a 12-inch woofer? Surprisingly yes! It’s easy to think that a larger woofer automatically means that its more powerful, but this is not always the case especially when it comes down to installing sound systems in trucks or small cars that don’t have a ton of free space to use for a large subwoofer box.
The reason why its possible for such small woofers to out power larger woofers mainly boils down to two factors: magnet size and air space requirements. Generally speaking, larger more powerful magnets on a woofer means that they are designed to handle more power. When it comes to adding bass to trucks or small cars it is very difficult to install larger woofers with full size magnets simply because the boxes required to fit those woofers are too big. This is why a lot of truck sound systems rely on the use of “shallow” woofers that are designed to have smaller magnets so they can fit in slimmer boxes. Of course, a smaller magnet normally means less power handling. When it comes to 8-inch woofers though, their small diameter lets us get a little more creative with our box designs which lets us fit woofers with full size magnets in places that larger woofers wouldn’t normally be able to fit.
In this case, one of our customers had some 12” L7T shallow mount woofers installed by us a couple of years back in his 2019 Chevrolet Silverado. Unfortunately, one of his woofers decided to burn out which caused his amplifier to go into protection mode which cut off all of his bass. After checking to make sure his amplifier was still good, we figured it may be time for him to get a bit of an upgrade to what he had before.
The woofers we ended up using are the DB Drive G5 which are rated for 900 watts RMS a piece. That’s right. Between the two 8-inch woofers we are talking about a total of 1800 watts RMS which is impressive no matter what. These new woofers were placed in our custom-made ported box that sits perfectly underneath the truck’s rear seats. So after a quick retune of his amplifier we were able to get almost double the output from this new set up using dual 8-inch woofers when compared to his old set up that relied on the less powerful shallow 12-inch woofers.
As you can see the world of car audio can be a little tricky at times, but we are more than happy to help you make sense of it all. If you are in the Houston area and would like to learn more about installing a sound system in your vehicle or have a question about car audio in general, feel free to give us a call or stop by one of our locations. Remember, it’s your ride made better.
