Well... there's a good reason why there hasn't been an update on picking up an amp and a driver... and I still haven't done it yet. Having my amp of choice be unavailable from a trustworthy source when I was ready to buy was the prime reason, but there is more to it than that.
It's mostly due to the fact that I spent the other weekend running the infield section of the F1 track at Indianapolis Motor Speedway at the Miles Ahead Performance Driving School with my father as my birthday present. Yep... my 70 year old father and myself were flinging a JCW Mini Cooper into corners and hitting 100mph+ in the straights directed by the very lovely Pippa Mann herself. I had a blast, and it reawakened my urge to drive at the utter limit on a closed course... something that I'd put aside to be a responsible family man years ago.
The wife has indicated that she would prefer me to find a closed course to "express myself fully behind the wheel" so that I'll slow down a little on the street. And I know that I will find myself in trouble if I don't find a better place to express myself. So the money I had for the amp is potentially "diverted" so I can buy myself a SA2010 helmet for doing track days. However it looks like I've probably got a month and a half to come up with one so that might let me explore a cheaper option as far as the amp and driver go.
Overall I'm not changing my plans, I actually don't intend to regularly track this car, and certainly don't have plans to modify it for racing. It's still my daily driver, so the reasoning behind my audio upgrades is still intact. I'm thinking that I'll find a cheap sports car (like maybe an old Miata) that I can modify as a dedicated track car and leave my daily driver comfortable.
So I may be modifying my plans a little more to fit into the new scheme of things... which will take a bunch of research to find the best way to spend my diminished budget.
Considering that my current drivers (
Alpine Type X REF 6.75 SPX17REF component set ) are what are dictating the power needs for my amp and pushing the $500 range, I may actually decide to go with something cheaper that can sound good only getting 50W RMS to it and not needing to push as much power to it. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find the technical specs for the drivers themselves on what they need power-wise, everything I've read is assuming that I'm using them passively with the factory crossovers and I haven't found anything that tells me how much power I need to feed to the mid bass or the tweeters when running active. I know that a lot of power would've been converted to heat in the crossovers, so do they actually need 75-100+ Watts RMS thrown at them in an active setup? Unfortunately, the crossovers are broken... and I'm not sure I have all the pieces to fix them even if I thought I could, so I'm basically stuck going active, or ditching them and getting something new. I'd love to just sell them but without the crossovers they're probably not worth that much by themselves.
Hopefully some of you more technical types might help me find some answers... if anyone has any input, it's greatly appreciated.