Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's even a secret handshake
Thanks for the kind words.
Having been in the field for most of my adult life, I know that many in it are not technically astute nor mechanically inclined. (We'll leave my CV for another day...)
I started in home audio back when most car audio was sold in a section of a home audio store with some kind of higher-end gear. That exposed me to the concepts of what makes different gear sound different - in a way that car audio folks are rarely exposed to.
I also started pre-rap. Regardless of what you think of rap, its effect on the car stereo field was to allow you to make a living without having to learn anything about musicality or high fidelity as it affects other musical genres. Now that rap isn't blowing up with the suburban kids, you can't make a living with those skills any longer, either - but we have a lot of installers and system designers who only know how to pull off "boom and sizzle"
The car stereo field is shrinking due to iPods replacing CD players, and soon due to phone nav replacing aftermarket indash nav. Amps and speakers are left for us, but we better be really good with those amps and speakers to have a future. Many of us haven't figured that out yet.
Anyway, off of my horse.
I should mention that the bass would not have sounded good in my opinion without the DSP in the amp. There was a boomy peak around 65 Hz which I damped down using the parametric EQ. That let the upper-range output of the woofer be more audible and let it "meet" the 4" better.
We ended up having a slight buzz created when the 4" mid in the door was striking the foam tape in between it and the door panel, due to it being played so low and due to imprecise foam tape application on someone's part (mine). I mention this to show how the 4" were traveling a long way, but as long as that foam wasn't in the path, they pulled it off flawlessly. Great mids.
You talk to Sound In Motion in Boston? They do Janix' work last I checked.