I've been thinking about ways to mitigate some of the road noise in the TL. One thought was spraying the inside of the wheel wells with bed liner. Looked at some of the old threads and I didn't find anyone that had tried this idea. Anyone have any experience with this solution?

 

Dynamat the floor and doors of the whole car.

 

Buick enclave, Lexus es, Bose active noise canceling headphones. Just kidding I would say dynamat.

 

That is the equivalent of someone asking how to fix a paintchip and telling them to repaint the entire car.

 

^^^^^

If someone knows through exactly where does the road noise enter into the inside of the car, then the OP can just dynamat that particular location(s).

Anyone ?

 

The car is almost silent on smooth asphalt. A little noisier on concrete and pretty loud on rough/coarse grain asphalt.

Not sure that I want to disassemble the car and dynamat the whole deal. I'm guessing that would work, but it's more trouble that I want to go to.

My thought was that if I could get 60% of the benefit of the dynamat with the bed liner then it might be worth it. I guess I might end up being the beta tester.

 

Sound damping material really is the only clean way to do it. I suppose you could spray the wheel liners or undercarriage but it will be messy.

Doors are pretty simple to Dynamat and shouldn't run too much more than a couple hundred dollars from any reputable car audio installer. The floor below the carpeting is a different story as it requires a lot more material and install time. It really depends on how much you want to pay to have a quieter ride.

 

Used to have an old 89 4-wheel steering prelude and I was tired of the road noise. But I can tell you my two elements were road noise and wind.

It was an OLD car, and by design, wind noise and road noise wasn't the focus the car back in 1989. I did lessen the wind noise by getting new trim on the leading edges of the car.

But as for road noise, one thing that would be a whole lot less intrusive, and MAYBE more expensive than this sound deadening project is TIRES.

I used to have a sound level meter app on my phone and I took measurements of before and after changing either size of tires, compound type and brand name. I found that thinner tires were much more quiet, especially with thicker side walls. The higher the tread wear rating the more quiet as well.

I guess what I'm getting at is try to look at the age and type of tires you have. This is the first step to lessening road noise, regardless of road surface. Some tires are actually built specifically to lessen road noise.

 

It has the stock Michelin 17s on it. It has about 20k miles, but no noticable change in the noise since new, so the stock tire may be noisy, but I haven't noticed any significant deterioration.

You are correct that tall sidewall, non-performance oriented tires will usually be quieter, but I'm not sure that I want to pay the performance penalty.

If I interpreted things correctly it sounds like the Conti DWS may be a good choice for reasonable performance with a little quieter ride.