Hybrid Audio Technologies Legatia Pro - Manual (Page 35)

Legatia Pro User’s Manual ©Hybrid Audio Technologies Page 35 of 43
and listen to one, in person, live and un-amplified. There is no substitute for the visceral impact and
emotion of live music. Nothing else in life can touch your soul the way music does. Whether it’s a
200-member orchestra, or a four-piece fusion band, nothing compares to the phenomenon of live
music.
Take this as Hybrid Audio’s official request: become a student of music and your mobile audio sound
system will be better for it. We want nothing more than to know there are great sounding audio
systems around the world using our products, and you’d make us all very proud if you became a
student of music and learned its beauty and passion.
Advanced Installation of the Legatia Pro Component Systems
Mounting Baffle Considerations
Now that we have revealed five of our most important “Lessons Learned”, we can now apply these
lessons to the Legatia Pro installation. The first important matter is the physical installation of your
Legatia Pro midrange, and more specifically with respect to improving the Legatia Pro midrange’s
mounting baffles. Most vehicles’ factory mounting locations for speakers are less than ideal. In most
cases, the OEM speaker mounting flanges are likely nothing more than flimsy extruded plastic, and
provide no sonic benefit to your Legatia Pro installation. The Legatia Pro drivers are high-
performance midrange, and the plastic mounting baffles that come from the factory in virtually every
vehicle will lead to buzzes, rattles, vibrations, and resonances, all of which negatively affect the
Legatia Pro installation. In other vehicles, you may have attached the Legatia Pro midrange’s directly
to the door metal (hopefully with a layer or two of self-adhesive sound damping in between), but this
is still not entirely ideal. In whatever scenario you have installed your Legatia Pro midrange, there are
certain “tricks” and techniques that may be applied to get the most out of your Legatia Pro component
set, specifically the midrange installation, as follows:
Mounting the baffle, sound damping, and “decoupling”: the mounting baffle or mounting location
should either be secured extremely well to the vehicle’s body, or completely isolated from the
vehicle’s chassis. The reasoning is that the speaker baffle panel will vibrate and will radiate sound.
Even small vibrations can result in the baffle itself radiating more sound than the actual speaker at
certain frequencies. The mounting baffle or mounting location should be damped with a layer of
typical sound damping to reduce the Q of the baffle and lower its vibration resonance frequency
below the range of the driver’s frequency response. In many cases, using thicker baffle panel in
concert with self-adhesive sound damping can also be advantageous. Finally, if possible, the
speaker should be mechanically decoupled from the baffle. This can be something as simple as a
layer of self-adhesive foam tape, to more exotic examples of decoupling, including rubberized rings or
multiple-layer septum shielding.
Building solid mounting baffles: in many cases, it is advisable to mount your Legatia Pro
midrange’s in high-stiffness wood or high-density fiberglass (or wood treated with fiberglass resin).
Hybrid Audio Technologies recommends the use of a solid hardwood, such as birch or oak, namely
because these woods are stiff and help to dissipate resonance, and screws can be inserted and
removed multiple times without stripping. Avoid Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF), particularly in wet
environments like the door, as the MDF will act like a sponge with humidity and moisture, and not
only that, the MDF is a dense, but not stiff type of wood, and the results may not be particularly
noticeable if you use MDF. Once your baffle is built, it must be covered in one or two layers of a