Audio Upgrade Amp and Speaks
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VP Electricity
Joined: Jun 2004
Posts: 4,617
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From: Portland OR US
Audio Upgrade Amp and Speaks
I recently helped out Joerckt in upgrading the audio in his CG/Q Navi 6MT.
Joe listens to rock primarily, and has had systems in other vehicles before. He likes lots of highs (more than me) and does not want boomy bass. His likes are walks on the beach ..wait, wrong show. : )
He personally likes sound to come from both front and rear speakers. (I mention this because I am about to be flamed by some audiophiles for building a system with rear fill. I personally believe, like all right-thinking audiophiles, that rear fill is a trick from Satan and the Communists and should be avoided by all true believers… but then again, this is America, and it’s his freaking car
He had a budget of $500.
A bit of background:
The factory Navi audio system has Front and Rear full-range preamp signals going to an external 6-channel amp. (I assume that it’s 6 channels… it could be 8 channels if they high-pass the tweets actively.) The amp has two plugs – the 20-pin has power and speaker wires, and the 14 pin has signal and Remote Turn On.
The gear list:
- Kicker 300.4 four-channel amp.
- JL 10w0, 4 ohm.
- MB Quart Discus 6.5 Coaxials
- Q Logic box.
- PG Amp wiring
- Cascade Audio V-Bloc door kit
- TRC GLI
- TRC Line Driver (see note below)
This added up to around $450, I think, with careful shopping.
Wiring at the factory amplifier
We hijacked the F channels for the new amp, and left the R channels running the rear doors and the by-nines. As has been noted before, this preamp signal is capable of reaching about 9/10 of a volt with a test sine wave, so NO LOC is needed, and none was used.
The F channel wires I cut and connected to a hacked-off Female RCA cable. (Actually, it was a 1-male to 2-female Y adapter, since female RCA’s are kinda rare). I bought the Acura RSX harness to see if it would fit, but no dice (it’s a 20-pin for the preamp harness). I also tapped into the RTO wire, which worked fine in controlling the amp.
For the noobs, the stranded shielding on the RCA cable goes to the (-) signal wire, and the center conductor goes to the (+) wire.
(NOTE: DO NOT BUY STUFF FROM INSTALLER.COM - THEY NEVER SHIPPED MY ‘04 ACCORD CABLE AND I HAD TO CALL THEM TO FIND OUT IT NEVER SHIPPED. TEN DAYS LATER.)
For the speaker wires, I bought a 2002 Accord car-side plug (plugs into the factory radio) and two 2002 Accord radio-side plugs (plug into the car). These were made by Metra.
The car-side plug was hard to find and is often special order. I used two of the others to get more pinned wires for the additional speakers (the 02 radio had 4 speaker outs and I was needing 8). Just not enough wires in that plug...
I disassembled them by pulling out the pins and reassembled them to mate up to the speaker wires in the Amp speaker plug. I stubbed out the F doors, and passed through the rear door and rear deck wires. I did not pass through the tweeter wires (we weren’t running them anyway, and since I only had one radio plug I ran out of pinned wires). I referred to the Electrical T-Shoot Helm manual for this.
NOTE: The Constant and Ground wires are already in the right position, but you will have to move the ACC wire.
NOTE: When disassembling the Metra harnesses, do not cut a ¾” slit in the end of your thumb with the fin that juts up out of the pin, as you yank it out of the plug. It will bleed a lot, and cause you to do the rest of the job with electrical tape wrapped around the end of your thumb.
The T-harness made the in-console wiring much easier – I only had to cut the signal wires for the F speakers and the remote wire, everything else plugged in.
Front Doors
With the front doors, we installed Cascade Audio V-Bloc sound damping material. This is vinyl, not asphalt like Dynamat, and has no smell and is lighter. The difference was noticeable, but also we did not put in big sheets like I see many folks doing here. We cut pieces to fit and put them in piece by piece (using a heat gun to prep the material). All bolt access and factory holes were retained – if a window ever breaks, this TSX door mech works just like the mechanics will expect it to.
We installed the V-Bloc on both the inner door skin and the inside of the outer door skin. The door kit also comes with foam and we used that to protect the plastic door skin from the back of the door panel in a few places. Knocking on the door, and slamming the door, definitely sounds different now.
You have to be careful not to get the yellowish sealant off of the plastic liner on the rest of the car. I recommend only pulling the rear half of the plastic and taping it into place temporarily, and placing a towel over the running board to keep the gunk off. It's probably easier in colder weather too.
For the door speaker mounting spacers, we used a single layer of ¼” masonite and a layer of ¾” particle board, stacked on top of each other. The goal was to get the front of the spacer and speaker frame to mate up to the rear of the speaker opening in the door panel. We did not cut any metal.
The OE speakers are 1-1/8 thick (not counting their foam tape). The MB Quart frames are about 1/8” thick, and we used foam weatherstripping tape on the back of the spacers too. If you can get the door speaker to seal up against that opening, your mid-bass is a lot better then if you don’t, because the door panel acts as your speaker baffle.
We spray-painted the spacer rings with flat black paint to make them more water-resistant, and drilled pilot holes for all our screws to avoid shattering the particleboard. (I learned this the hard way…broke one.) We applied rubber half-round weatherstripping tape to the front of the speaker frame before re-installing the door panels, to seal the speaker up against the door.
Amplifier and sub
NOTE: The Q-logic box hole was really bigger than the JL 10” needed. It was very hard to load the box and get all the screws into wood.
We put the amp in the trunk. Joe built a board that went under the trunk floor liner, but above the gas tank, and then the box and amp were mounted to this panel through the liner. (Which required the box to be mounted before loading the woofer, and required an awkward position to load the woofer in the box. As a result, anyone wanting to buy a never-used JL 10W0 with a slight rip in the surround, that has been repaired by silicone, at a good price, please contact me...
Running the power wire through the firewall is very stealth. First off, I went to the main 12v taps at the underhood fuse box, not the (+) terminal. Second, I didn’t go through the firewall the way most folks seem to have.
There is a plastic trim piece along the L and R edges of the engine compartment. You can run a wire under it and it enters into the airspace above the inner wheel well cover.
I turned the steering wheel all the way to the left, to make space behind the tire, and pulled the fasteners from the back half of the plastic inner wheel well cover. There is a blank popout through the metal a few inches above the driver’s kick panel fuse box. This allowed me to run a wire from the UH Fuse Box to the Driver’s kick panel almost invisibly, inside the driver’s front fender. (We covered the wire from the UH FB to the edge of the compartment with flex tube from Home Depot, wrapped that in electrical tape, and hit that with a heat gun – it looked VERY factory! - just like all the other flex tube in the engine compartment)
This was made much easier by the presence of the Injen intake instead of the OE intake. Lots more space.
I made all this sound much easier than it really is, but that’s the nature of this sort of project.
Settings:
Joe runs his Treble a couple of clicks up (2?). I set the system with the bass centered on the head unit.
We ended up with the F speakers playing 50 Hz and up, the sub playing roughly 75-80 Hz and down, and a little of the bass boost on the sub (not much - 6dB?) F gain was at zero, sub gain was at about 1/2 of the range (5 on a scale of 0-11).
Noise
When we fired up the system, we had a bit of engine noise that a TRC GLI fixed. Later, after a whole lot of tuning, we found out that the noise was back. Turns out that the noise was there with any amp gain setting other than the minimum.
So I installed the TRC Line Driver to see if it would let me get more drive in the system(actually, re-installed, as I had had it in there before).
NOTE: DO NOT USE TRC LINE DRIVERS.
This is when we discovered that the TRC Line Driver sounded like poo-poo. Massive Mid-High distortion at listenable volumes. It’s possible that this device would work OK with an iPod that doesn’t have very high voltage output (like a head unit with a volume control does), but when we got the volume to the upper half of the range (20 and up) with this thing on the Navi head unit, it sounded awful.
So I yanked it, turned the gain all the way down on the Kicker amp, and faded the system three klicks to the front to keep the factory amp from being too loud on the rears. Worked fine. We have no audible engine noise even with the headlights on and the rear defroster on.
Joe is going to try a higher-quality Line Driver (that TRC one was very cheap and looked it). In the meantime we have good volume, and can get all the way to 40 on the head without distortion.
The whole job took one long day and a few hours the next day - call it 12 hours.
Thanks to his wonderful wife for the hospitality as we messed up the garage and went over time on the schedule.
Now bug Joe to post the pics.
Joe listens to rock primarily, and has had systems in other vehicles before. He likes lots of highs (more than me) and does not want boomy bass. His likes are walks on the beach ..wait, wrong show. : )
He personally likes sound to come from both front and rear speakers. (I mention this because I am about to be flamed by some audiophiles for building a system with rear fill. I personally believe, like all right-thinking audiophiles, that rear fill is a trick from Satan and the Communists and should be avoided by all true believers… but then again, this is America, and it’s his freaking car
He had a budget of $500.
A bit of background:
The factory Navi audio system has Front and Rear full-range preamp signals going to an external 6-channel amp. (I assume that it’s 6 channels… it could be 8 channels if they high-pass the tweets actively.) The amp has two plugs – the 20-pin has power and speaker wires, and the 14 pin has signal and Remote Turn On.
The gear list:
- Kicker 300.4 four-channel amp.
- JL 10w0, 4 ohm.
- MB Quart Discus 6.5 Coaxials
- Q Logic box.
- PG Amp wiring
- Cascade Audio V-Bloc door kit
- TRC GLI
- TRC Line Driver (see note below)
This added up to around $450, I think, with careful shopping.
Wiring at the factory amplifier
We hijacked the F channels for the new amp, and left the R channels running the rear doors and the by-nines. As has been noted before, this preamp signal is capable of reaching about 9/10 of a volt with a test sine wave, so NO LOC is needed, and none was used.
The F channel wires I cut and connected to a hacked-off Female RCA cable. (Actually, it was a 1-male to 2-female Y adapter, since female RCA’s are kinda rare). I bought the Acura RSX harness to see if it would fit, but no dice (it’s a 20-pin for the preamp harness). I also tapped into the RTO wire, which worked fine in controlling the amp.
For the noobs, the stranded shielding on the RCA cable goes to the (-) signal wire, and the center conductor goes to the (+) wire.
(NOTE: DO NOT BUY STUFF FROM INSTALLER.COM - THEY NEVER SHIPPED MY ‘04 ACCORD CABLE AND I HAD TO CALL THEM TO FIND OUT IT NEVER SHIPPED. TEN DAYS LATER.)
For the speaker wires, I bought a 2002 Accord car-side plug (plugs into the factory radio) and two 2002 Accord radio-side plugs (plug into the car). These were made by Metra.
The car-side plug was hard to find and is often special order. I used two of the others to get more pinned wires for the additional speakers (the 02 radio had 4 speaker outs and I was needing 8). Just not enough wires in that plug...
I disassembled them by pulling out the pins and reassembled them to mate up to the speaker wires in the Amp speaker plug. I stubbed out the F doors, and passed through the rear door and rear deck wires. I did not pass through the tweeter wires (we weren’t running them anyway, and since I only had one radio plug I ran out of pinned wires). I referred to the Electrical T-Shoot Helm manual for this.
NOTE: The Constant and Ground wires are already in the right position, but you will have to move the ACC wire.
NOTE: When disassembling the Metra harnesses, do not cut a ¾” slit in the end of your thumb with the fin that juts up out of the pin, as you yank it out of the plug. It will bleed a lot, and cause you to do the rest of the job with electrical tape wrapped around the end of your thumb.
The T-harness made the in-console wiring much easier – I only had to cut the signal wires for the F speakers and the remote wire, everything else plugged in.
Front Doors
With the front doors, we installed Cascade Audio V-Bloc sound damping material. This is vinyl, not asphalt like Dynamat, and has no smell and is lighter. The difference was noticeable, but also we did not put in big sheets like I see many folks doing here. We cut pieces to fit and put them in piece by piece (using a heat gun to prep the material). All bolt access and factory holes were retained – if a window ever breaks, this TSX door mech works just like the mechanics will expect it to.
We installed the V-Bloc on both the inner door skin and the inside of the outer door skin. The door kit also comes with foam and we used that to protect the plastic door skin from the back of the door panel in a few places. Knocking on the door, and slamming the door, definitely sounds different now.
You have to be careful not to get the yellowish sealant off of the plastic liner on the rest of the car. I recommend only pulling the rear half of the plastic and taping it into place temporarily, and placing a towel over the running board to keep the gunk off. It's probably easier in colder weather too.
For the door speaker mounting spacers, we used a single layer of ¼” masonite and a layer of ¾” particle board, stacked on top of each other. The goal was to get the front of the spacer and speaker frame to mate up to the rear of the speaker opening in the door panel. We did not cut any metal.
The OE speakers are 1-1/8 thick (not counting their foam tape). The MB Quart frames are about 1/8” thick, and we used foam weatherstripping tape on the back of the spacers too. If you can get the door speaker to seal up against that opening, your mid-bass is a lot better then if you don’t, because the door panel acts as your speaker baffle.
We spray-painted the spacer rings with flat black paint to make them more water-resistant, and drilled pilot holes for all our screws to avoid shattering the particleboard. (I learned this the hard way…broke one.) We applied rubber half-round weatherstripping tape to the front of the speaker frame before re-installing the door panels, to seal the speaker up against the door.
Amplifier and sub
NOTE: The Q-logic box hole was really bigger than the JL 10” needed. It was very hard to load the box and get all the screws into wood.
We put the amp in the trunk. Joe built a board that went under the trunk floor liner, but above the gas tank, and then the box and amp were mounted to this panel through the liner. (Which required the box to be mounted before loading the woofer, and required an awkward position to load the woofer in the box. As a result, anyone wanting to buy a never-used JL 10W0 with a slight rip in the surround, that has been repaired by silicone, at a good price, please contact me...
Running the power wire through the firewall is very stealth. First off, I went to the main 12v taps at the underhood fuse box, not the (+) terminal. Second, I didn’t go through the firewall the way most folks seem to have.
There is a plastic trim piece along the L and R edges of the engine compartment. You can run a wire under it and it enters into the airspace above the inner wheel well cover.
I turned the steering wheel all the way to the left, to make space behind the tire, and pulled the fasteners from the back half of the plastic inner wheel well cover. There is a blank popout through the metal a few inches above the driver’s kick panel fuse box. This allowed me to run a wire from the UH Fuse Box to the Driver’s kick panel almost invisibly, inside the driver’s front fender. (We covered the wire from the UH FB to the edge of the compartment with flex tube from Home Depot, wrapped that in electrical tape, and hit that with a heat gun – it looked VERY factory! - just like all the other flex tube in the engine compartment)
This was made much easier by the presence of the Injen intake instead of the OE intake. Lots more space.
I made all this sound much easier than it really is, but that’s the nature of this sort of project.
Settings:
Joe runs his Treble a couple of clicks up (2?). I set the system with the bass centered on the head unit.
We ended up with the F speakers playing 50 Hz and up, the sub playing roughly 75-80 Hz and down, and a little of the bass boost on the sub (not much - 6dB?) F gain was at zero, sub gain was at about 1/2 of the range (5 on a scale of 0-11).
Noise
When we fired up the system, we had a bit of engine noise that a TRC GLI fixed. Later, after a whole lot of tuning, we found out that the noise was back. Turns out that the noise was there with any amp gain setting other than the minimum.
So I installed the TRC Line Driver to see if it would let me get more drive in the system(actually, re-installed, as I had had it in there before).
NOTE: DO NOT USE TRC LINE DRIVERS.
This is when we discovered that the TRC Line Driver sounded like poo-poo. Massive Mid-High distortion at listenable volumes. It’s possible that this device would work OK with an iPod that doesn’t have very high voltage output (like a head unit with a volume control does), but when we got the volume to the upper half of the range (20 and up) with this thing on the Navi head unit, it sounded awful.
So I yanked it, turned the gain all the way down on the Kicker amp, and faded the system three klicks to the front to keep the factory amp from being too loud on the rears. Worked fine. We have no audible engine noise even with the headlights on and the rear defroster on.
Joe is going to try a higher-quality Line Driver (that TRC one was very cheap and looked it). In the meantime we have good volume, and can get all the way to 40 on the head without distortion.
The whole job took one long day and a few hours the next day - call it 12 hours.
Thanks to his wonderful wife for the hospitality as we messed up the garage and went over time on the schedule.
Now bug Joe to post the pics.
Advanced
Joined: Apr 2004
Posts: 75
Likes: 0
Very nice....
Excellent components for that budget.... had similiar in a GTI I owned and even after 5 years it still hit hard and sounded good. So many people expected a hatch filled with subs for the way it sounded and where amazed at a single 10" sub w/ 125w powering it.... really about matching specs on all the components....
Excellent components for that budget.... had similiar in a GTI I owned and even after 5 years it still hit hard and sounded good. So many people expected a hatch filled with subs for the way it sounded and where amazed at a single 10" sub w/ 125w powering it.... really about matching specs on all the components....
Just dial 1911
Joined: May 2004
Posts: 12,144
Likes: 1
From: San Diego, CA
Thanks...elduderino worked very hard to get the setup done right. Once I get that audiobahn line driver installed that line noise hopefully will go away. The MB's sound awesome with the gain turned up about halfway. The 10 hits really hard too. I've been very happy with the setup.
Just dial 1911
Joined: May 2004
Posts: 12,144
Likes: 1
From: San Diego, CA
Ok, here we go. Sorry for the large pics, but they dont look good any smaller, and I was too lazy to change them 
This first two here show how we placed the power wire. Very clean and factory after we used the black tubing. Instead of tapping right at the batt, we tapped at the fuse box.
Here is the finished power wire.
Next is the power wire coming in from behind the fuse box. From there, we routed the power along the door sill
The next several pics show how the front doors are removed. Once you get all the spots fro the screws, the door just unsnaps from the sides and lifts out. There will be several disconnects from the inside.
Finally, here is the new harness created by elduderino so that I could still use the rears.
I wish that we had more pics, but we had limited time and I needed to help out on other things as much as I could. As soon as I get the new kx350 in, I'll take a pic of the trunk. So if anyone has any questions about what we did, post em here and I think we can answer now
This first two here show how we placed the power wire. Very clean and factory after we used the black tubing. Instead of tapping right at the batt, we tapped at the fuse box.
Here is the finished power wire.
Next is the power wire coming in from behind the fuse box. From there, we routed the power along the door sill
The next several pics show how the front doors are removed. Once you get all the spots fro the screws, the door just unsnaps from the sides and lifts out. There will be several disconnects from the inside.
Finally, here is the new harness created by elduderino so that I could still use the rears.
I wish that we had more pics, but we had limited time and I needed to help out on other things as much as I could. As soon as I get the new kx350 in, I'll take a pic of the trunk. So if anyone has any questions about what we did, post em here and I think we can answer now
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