Hello,

As this is my first post to this forum I'll begin with a short introduction. The name is Richard, live in sweden, recently bought myself a Honda Accord Tourer '09. This would be called the Acura TSX Sports Wagon on the North American market. I like the car very much so far, the i-dtec engine is great, its great to drive and very comfortable. There's however one issue with it that really puts a tarnish on the over all impression. The sound of the audio system, it's just not good enough in my ears opinion and thus I have to do something about it.

I've read through all the threads I can find on here that seemed even remotely related to after market audio modification to my vehicle, and bought myself short term access to techinfo.honda.com to read up on all of this. The car is out fitted with the "Premium audio system", however, from what I can understand from the manuals and reading here this seems to be some kind of hybrid between whats called Premium audio and ELS on the NA market.

The HU in the car matches the illustrations of the Premium audio HU in the manual, but the amplifiers appearance matches the ELS amp and has the same number of pins on the connectors. It also has a center speaker and rear satellite speakers which seems to be a feature of the ELS package. The connector on the amp for the HU is 28 pin, just as the manual says for ELS but less than half of the pins actually have wires connected to them (according to the manual, there should only be a few unconnected pins), and the colors doesn't match what the manual says.

Can anyone help me make heads or tails of this mess? Can I somehow confirm if the DSP is in the HU or amp? I can't find a european equivalent to techinfo.honda.com. As this is a relatively rare (compared to VW, Audi, Volvo, Ford etc) car in Sweden, none of the professional after market car stereo shops I've been in contact with have any experience working on this type of car and none of them seems willing to take on the challenge. So I beg of you, no matter how far fetched, if you have any idea of what I can do, what I should read etc, please share.

I'm not looking to shake the bodywork of my vehicle, I just want good sound, and I'm willing to spend both time and money on it.

Sincerely

Richard.

 

Does your HU have a Dolby mode? I doubt that Honda would install an Acura ELS audio system in the Euro Accord; I know it’s the same car but it’s a marketing thing. I would be interested in looking at the pin out for the 28 pin amp connector on your system. I should be able to identify your system by that. You can post it here or PM me.

Jeff

 

Thank you very much for replying.

As I'm a new member and not allowed to post attachments, I've uploaded some pictures here:
http://imgur.com/a/unsiX

There's no Dolby setting nor logo to be found anywhere. Also I don't have navi.

Most of the wires that are actually present on my connector seems to match what the manual says color-wise except for pin 3. These are the pins that have connections, the color of my wire, and what the american manual says they should be:

1, Red, (ELS DATA)
2, Black, GND
3, Yellow, (SWD B) This should be white according to the manual.
10, Black, FL PRE
11, Green, FR PRE
12, Grey shrink tube, Shield for 10, 11 24, 25
15, Green, ELS DATA
16, Grey possibly shrink tube, Shield for 1, 15
24, White, FL PRE
25, Red, FR PRE

Come to think of it, it would appear the amp indeed has a bit more intelligence than I'd like here. If the manual is correct on the actually connected pins there is only 2 actual audio signals going from HU to amp, but from the HU I'm able to set the usual suspects of levels:
*Balance
*Fader
*Center
*Subwoofer

That would have to mean that the amp sorts out these levels and sends them off to each speaker, and that it (among meny other things) "invents" a center channel, right? I can lose the center channel, but if the HU tells the amp to amplify to a certain level rather than changing its own output level, I'm in trouble.

I've removed the front passenger door panel and the tweeter matches the ELS tweeter in that it has small capacitor and 6 ohm rating.

Any ideas about my options?

 

I'm a bit unsure about what you are trying to do here. Perhaps you could try to describe what you think is lacking with your system and then we can give you advice about possible upgrades.

Your system does appear to be a hybrid so any upgrades would have to follow along the lines of a tech package upgrade.

 

The sound is just not good enough in my opinion, and I cant really point to one single thing about the sound that I dont like. It is harsh, it lacks warmth, it completely lacks definition in the bass. If the treble is set to a level at which you can actually tell it's there it becomes painful to listen to, etc.. I could go on. And please take no offense if you think it's fine, to each his own

My first goal/milestone is to get a signal out of the HU that I can feed into more standardized components and take it from there: find a suitable amp, replace speakers etc.

I am of course open to suggestions so if I've gone completely off the deep end here, feel free to point me in the right direction.

 

What car were you coming from where you thought the audio was fine?

I must say that I haven't spent much time listening to the base audio, but the ELS system is considered to be one of the better OE systems.

Let's analyse the problems

No bass, scratchy tweeters, lacks depth. Sounds like a blown speaker or two, defective amp or some other wonky bit.

Can you compare your system to anoth Accord Tourer to rule out defective components?

What type of music do you listen to? Is any source better than others? Any source OK?

 

That’s a hybrid system and I would bet you don’t have DVD-A or Dolby. The ELS data line is the giveaway but where is the other side (should be two ELS connections) I should say it’s not a hybrid but an ELS without DVD-A and Dolby modes. I built a preamp for the ELS that reads the HU ELS control data but I don’t think it would work straight out of the box for your system. I would have to read and decode the ELS data for your car then update my code. Obviously I’m in the states so that can’t happen. Basically you have to take the signal post amp.
Wish I could help.

Jeff

 

Thank you again.

I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and go with the post amp signal, I'm leaning towards the JBL MS-8, but it does feel a bit stupid to pay that amount on money on just trying to undo what the amp does (it's also almost double the price in europe compared to US).

I've always been of the opinion that as clean a signal path as possible is always the way to go, and this would involve at least two unnecessary AD/DA conversions, DSP added in factory amp, DSP trying to be compensated away in the MS-8 and then have the MS-8 apply another set of DSP algorithms to "enhance" to audio experience.

Sigh..

 

On the other hand, a slightly more appealing bullet to bite on might be to get an amp that has a remote volume control built in, feed it the clean PRE signal and live with the fact that I can't use the volume control on the HU and steering wheel.

Can anyone come up with a reason why that wouldn't work? I'd leave all the other HU<->Factory amp connections in place so the HU would think it's business as usual.

 

most of the cost of the ms-8 is the tuning aspect of it. Is not just as a line level converter that lets you use the factory volume knob. I say get the ms-8 if quality of sound is what your going for (as long as you keep the rest of the factory audio equipment as that is what the on board amp is ment to run).

I think the pre amp signal is still processed or augmented to prevent cliping at volume and if you want a flat quality signal to amp you need some sort of signal processor. You might think about other signal processors on the cheaper side. I am getting an alpine one for my car for around 250 bux. JL clean sweep has good reviews also.

 

This is not true; the preamp output from the HU is a fixed level signal and is full bandwidth all the time. The volume control is not part of the HU audio circuit. A fixed level signal is required for the A/D in the factory amp to work correctly.

As far as adding an MS-8 it would just make things worse since the factory amp is a digital signal processor that was tuned to what the engineers thought would be a good sound. This extra tuning added a lot of distortion especially in the mid and high regions. I posted a photo of the output of a 1Khz sine wave out of the ELS amp and it was badly distorted. The other problem (for the ELS systems) is that each input, XM,CD,DVD, FM, Aux has its own eq tweak so the MS-8 would have to be setup for each input or a compromise would have to be made.
Jeff

 

An update on my progress so far.

Most of the hard work is done:
Power cable from battery to Amp (this was quite cumbersome..)
Front door speakers installed: http://dls.se/en/car/prod.html?produkt=en_779
Speaker cable for front doors and crossovers installed.
Cable for remote volume control installed.
Remote turn on cable installed, will use one of those "add-a-circuit" fuse holders to hook it up.

Waiting for the JL XD700/5 to arrive. Still pondering what to use for rear doors, satellites and subwoofer, and how to hook it all up.

Jeff, the distorted 1khz sine wave you saw, was that under heavy load or is that how the amp behaves even under low load?

The first thing I'm going to try is to hook the JL amp up to high level FL FR outs from factory amp, and if that sounds bad go with plan B and use remote volume and PRE signal. Plan B has me a bit worried about pops and such since I'm guessing the HU doesn't really mute it's output - only tells the amp via it's control channel to mute when changing inputs and such.

I've tested the front door system by just using a home stereo amp, and they sound really good just by themselves, so thats my benchmark.

 

Normal level, it wasn’t clipping it was a changing of the wave shape due to frequency shaping (mostly IM distortion). The output should have been a pure 1 khz sine wave but is was more of a triangle shape. This type of distortion makes it difficult to identify instruments since the wave shape of the note is changed. So you can’t tell a harmonica form an electric guitar or a saxophone from a clarinet and so on. This would also explain the high frequency harness from the system.
I find that the ELS system is completely out of sync with the music. I have listened to one song since it came out on vinyl in 1972. When I play the CD in the ELS some of the acoustic guitar fades in and out so I don’t hear notes that should be there. It doesn’t do that on any other system I have played it in. This is from heavy handed digital processing. This is why I am ditching the ELS amp just like I did with the 09.
Jeff

 

Jeff,

Having fed the JL Amp the FL FR speaker outputs from the factory amp I sadly now know exactly what you mean.

In The Flesh by Pink Floyd was my benchmark track and that organ just can't decide on wether it wants to be an organ or just some sort of noise. Tried connecting my phone headphone out directly to the JL Amp and played the same track and given the circumstances (MP3 file, headphone output quality etc) it sounded great.

I also compared quite a few different tracks and the speakers sound really well when fed the somewhat clean phone signal compared to the tone deaf factory amp.

My car has been in the shop all week for some paint work (my parking space at work is next to a rarely used steel door, and a nitwit lady decided it was a good idea to leave that door open and unattended during a storm) so as I have some driving to catch up on I'm going to indulge tomorrow to decide wether I can live with the unclean factory amp signal or if I'll have to turn to plan B. I'm guessing I'll decide on plan B.

Can you confirm or alleviate my fears about pops etc using the PRE signal?

 

Sorry to hear of your garage door incident, once at work some contractors decided to dump their unused paint in the dumpster near where my car was parked. Not so bad but they tossed the pails over the parked cars so we ended up with pin stripes in the corporate colors.
Unfortunately you will get all kinds of noise on power on/off from the HU. I incorporated a power on delay for the amp remote line in my ELS preamp this, you will have to do the same.
Jeff