Yesterday and today we did an amp and speaker install in a forum member's car. He lives in Vancouver BC, and drove down to have us to the work in his brand new CG Black interior 6MT TSX.

We used all DLS equipment - The CA1 three-channel amp, UP6 components up front, and an MW110 10" woofer (NOT in our fiberglass corner box, in a small MDF fiberglass-reinforced box at the front of the trunk as he requested - he needed room for golf clubs) and the amp went into a tray next to the woofer box - also as he requested. We used metal perfed sheet to protect the amp, which matches the low-profile grille on the DLS sub and visually looks much nicer than in the pics (which are not bad).

The spare is accessible and the woofer is removable. The door midwoofers got our mating spacer stack, and sound great.

Great sound, no noise, gain at 50%. Plenty of volume. There has been no change to the car as far as I can tell to make the amp interface difficult or noisy...

Here are some pics (no 56k):

http://kward1.homestead.com/2006tsx.html

Two things:

1) The RCA "Y" adapters and the RCA's that we used had metal barrels. When the metal barrels touched together they would make noises (makes sense when you thihnk about them carrying balanced signals). So if you do this, make sure that you tape over any metal barrels.

2) The 2006 center console cup holder trim panel is WAY harder to take out than the 2004-2005 (I've taken out like half a dozen of these things). I had to pull on it so hard that I broke a tab on the panel - so now the customer is going to stop by his local North Shore Acura service center after he goes home (no one locally had one), who has already ordered the new part on our card and will install it when it comes in at our cost. I feel terrible about this part, and it was me personally who did it, and the 06 has a printed pattern on the top that is different than the 04/05, so there weren't any in the system yet... so let's be careful out there.

 

very nice!

 

Looks good!

 

looks great, thanks for the update eldude!

 

ElDude,

Can you elaborate any on a good process for removing the center cupholder trim area? I had a similar experience to you. I attempted to remove mine about 10 days ago, but never got it out. Pulling up extremely hard I only managed to get 1 of the 8 (?) clips to pop and I really felt like any more pressure would break the whole panel. Forum members keep telling me to just pull harder, but I just have a bad feeling about using the 04/05 'pry up from the e-brake area' method.

I'm sorry to hear it was so hard, but if you learned any lessons about it please share. I still want to get mine out at some point and start poking around under there.

 

I haven't had any a-has about it yet. At this point I'm ready to buy the $90 part and have it in stock if needed, seriously.

Possibly drilling a hole in the aft wall of the cup holder cylinder and inserting a tool there, and inserting a plug after?

This reminds me of the kick panel for a 1995 Integra - liked to come apart when removed. Dealership mechanics bought a lot of these...

 

nice,

one ? though... did you just use velcro to hold those box's onto the tray liner? since my wifes car also has one but it slides all over the place, so i had to use bungee cables but it still sucks

 

The amp tray is mounted to the wood under the cargo tray. There are very short screws going through the tray into the wood panel, which was pre-approved by the customer. The alternative was cutting the tray but in tests the spare was fairly easy to remove without taking the cargo tray out, so it was decided to secure the cargo tray in there with the amp rack mounting.

The box is locked in by the location of the amp tray and the square bump for the cargo net tiedown. If you lift the box up 1.5", you can take it out over the tiedown and then unplug it.

 

This is my car an can confirm there is no noise at all, zero, nada. The install was meticulous except for that 1 mishap, which Eldude 100% took care of without issue. You may wonder why I didn't want the amp on top of the box. I wanted to be able to remove the sub and keep front amplification.

 

How is it sounding? Did you play with the xover point yet (after woofer break-in?)

 

damn this makes me even more scared of trying to pull the bloody panel

 

The tools we used to evenutally remove it were not ordinary home hand tools (not even my set, our install managers trim panel removal tools) and it seriously took two of us.

but back to my question - how's it sounding?

 

System sounds great! The front UP6 are awesome, clear, not harsh, great range, & plenty loud. This weekend I will try tweaking the sub a bit for my music type.