This is the initial system description of the first phase of my RX-8 install that was performed last August

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General System Design Goal: To create a high powered stealth 5.1 surround sound car audio install for a 2004 RX-8.


Equipment List provided by customer:

1. JL Audio 10W3V2-D4 (already installed in 4080 enclosure)
2. JL Audio 8W0-4 - Qty 2
3. Focal 100KP stereo component speaker set - Qty 2
4. Bose factory rear stereo speaker set.
5. Clarion DVH-920 surround sound processor with controller
6. Soundgate differential converter
7. JL Audio 300/2 stereo amplifier
8. JL Audio e6450 six channel amplifier


Equipment Provided By Installer:

A. Fiberglass for door sub enclosures.
B. Sound deadening material for A.
C. Power and signal cables as required.
D. Other miscellaneous mounting hardware.


Design Specifics:

Using the front left and right audio signals that normally go to the Bose Audio system of the RX-8, the Soundgate will be inserted in-line to create a RCA line-level signal for the Clarion processor.

The Clarion processor will then matrix decode the stereo signal to create a 5.1 signal to be amplified in the following manner. The front left and right signals outputs of the Clarion will go to channels 1&2 of the 300/2 amp, the rear left and right will go to channels 3&4 of the e6450, the center channel will go to channel 5 of the e6450, and the subwoofer channel will go to channel 6 of the e6450.

The 300/2 will low-pass its input signal and power the two 8W0's in the front doors. The front door sub enclosures shall be between .3 cubic feet to .45 cubic feet sealed. The 300/2 will also high-pass its input signal and output the filtered signal to the e6450 channels 1&2.

The e6450 won't filter any of its inputs (filtering will be done by Clarion and 300/2 only). Its channels 1&2 will be wired to the front left & right 100KP speakers which are to be mounted high in the doors. Its channels 3&4 will be wired to the rear Bose speakers which are already in place. Channel 5 will be wired to another 100KP speaker set in the center console to be mounted close to the windshield. Channel 6 will go to the 10W3V2 sub already in the trunk.

The arrangement of all components should be as "stealth" as possible consuming as little additional room as necessary in cabin vehicle's interior.

Initial and final settings for the equipment are expected to be tailored by the customer himself. This means all equipment should have accessible controls. This dictates that gain and filter settings on the amplifiers and Focal crossovers being reasonably easy to get to for periodic adjustment by customer.

The RX-8's rear seat pass-through channel shall useable in some capacity after installation is complete.

Installers: Lee of JR's Custom Auto & Nick Johnson

Design Cost:

Labor:.......$300/day = +$1500
Equipment Costs:......= +$2000
Material Costs:.......= +$ 500
Total (approx.)........=+$3500

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Results:

The most challenging aspect of the design was getting 3 way system in each door with its own subwoofer. In this case we are talking about 4 inch Focal set with .35 cubic sealed encloser for the sub.

Door:



I wish I had pictures of the interior of the doors. Lee is known for working fast and it still took him well over a day to fiberglass each door subwoofer chamber. We initially started using an 8w3 but couldn't get quite enough depth to make it work.

The 4 inch speaker covers were not much easier but that part was a little more straight forware and worked really well.

Center:



This was crucial part of the design we wanted to get matched sets accross the entire front of the car so we installed the the woofer where the Bose midrange went and a tweeter in the vent opening. (Look close and you can see it)

Sub:



The sub came from earlier work with 4080 and Nick. It is powered by one, yes one channel of the e6450. the e6450 shares it power well so in my case the primary channels are loafing along not consuming much power and the sub is getting about 180 watts wired at 2 ohms. The bass is very tight. This sub only plays 50Hz down; the rest of the bass is done by the front 8" subs. The combined effect is bass that sounds very much like it is coming from the front of the car.

Amps:





Lee did a great job again shoe-horning these amps in. Originally I thought he was going to have to cut sheet metal to get them in, but no he just has them in very tight. There is a lot of friction when you try and move the amp board up and down and that is good thing. The pass through is still very very usable.

Processor:



See ya Bose amp, here's a real processor. The Clarion is good overall surround processor. It is a little cheaper than the Alpine equivalent and has a few less features as well.

The Audio:

I bought this Clarion almost two years ago when I first thought up this project. I used it for other things and thought I would never get a chance to install it until I met 4080, Nick, and Lee. They are great installers (Lee is now back and Dallas) and it is only because I knew they could do a great job at a good price that I took up the work. (If you think $300/day is too much, consider this: Lee bills out for JR now at $100/hr!)

Working with a 5.1 system is not for everyone. You really have to know what you are doing. You have to know the intricacies of Pro-Logic II Music Mode and what each setting does. You have to set the center width, dimension, panorama fields correctly. If you don't, you are screwed and you will never get it sounding correctly. If you use normal pro-logic movie mode or whatever, I guarantee that it will sound like the voices are coming directly from your center channel and the focus will be way too tight.

We initially couldn't get the Soundgate working correctly so it was a long time before we actually had the factory radio integrated correctly. For months I was simply using my IPOD as a direct input to the Clarion.

So if you get all of the filters, EQs, etc. set correctly, 5.1 can be a beautiful thing. I am very happy with the sound quality. And yes $3500 for this phase of the project was well worth it.

-Mr. Wigggles

 

Phase Two: IPOD Intigration

This is the phase that took a lot longer to get started. I waited a long time before starting this phase because I wanted to wait and see what IPOD products came to market.

I settled on the Audio Link product that FalconTX is selling.

I wanted to have very easy access to my IPOD and given the length of the cord and other factors I decide that the best place for it was in the center console not in a side compartment or cup holder that I use for other things.

So I had Nick create a custom mount where the MD or Cassette player would normally go. Here are some in process shots:



and here is a picture of the tunnel used for the IPOD cable:



I also had Nick put the Clarion controller on top of the ash tray lid with the caveat that the tray would still open and close:

The results:



As you can see I have a stealth install here. The IPOD sticks out a little but unless you were looking for it, you wouldn't know it was there.



Then for operation (when the Audio Link is acting up) I can pull it out and do manual adjustments. The idea being here that my IPOD is going to stay in my car 80%-90% of the time.

We also finally got the Soundgate installed up front close to the radio. As such it has no detectable noise at all nominally - alternator or otherwise. Ocassionally I will get a mild start-up pop but I think that is do to the Audio Link not the Sound Gate. It is very minor regardless.

This Phase Two only took a day and only lightened my wallet $400 labor + $120 for the Audio Link. I also had to shell out $90 total to get my firmware updated. (That was a hassle.)

So, am I through? Yes and no. I don't see any big changes in the future. I am thinking about reangling my tweeters and maybe just maybe upgrading to the Alpine 5.1 decoder which has much more flexibility (when I got the Clarion, the Alpine was only available at full MSRP cost and was much more expensive)

Anyway, a proper Pro-Logic II Music Mode system can sound very good. For reasons I stressed in the past, Lee and Nick were very leary about this project because every 5.1 system they had heard in the past had imaging that was too tight. This system wound up being a little different.

It is quite unique. A system that is stealth, loses very little vehicle utility, has good up front bass, and has tight yet adjustable imaging. What else can you ask for?

-Mr. Wigggles

 

You're a sick man. $3500 is a lot of money to dish out on car audio, but someone had to do it. I bet it sounds amazing.

Now all you need is a DVD player + LCD screen and you'll be watching movies with 5.1 surround in your car. There wouldn't even be a point in getting out of your RX-8.

 

Did you make sealed boxes for the Focals? Are the tweeters at the factory place?
Do you think this place is the best setting of the tweeters?

 

When I installed 5.1 audio in my BMW I didn't have a center dash-mounted speaker. What we ended up doing however was mounting two small speakers inside the center air vents. They are actually mounted flush in the vent walls so they don't impede air flow and are totally invisible. It worked out really great--the LCD screen is next to those vents so it really sounds like the center channel is coming from the screen.

I have two a/d/s PH30.2 amps and two Image Dynamic subs in the trunk. Total install cost went into five figures. Five years ago when I had this work done a system like that was considered exceptional. Now even minivans have DVD players and good sound systems from the factory. Ah the march of progress...
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Uggs

 

No, the 4 inch Focals don't have there own seperate box per se so they are essentially operating in free-air. This is not a problem since they are only playing down to about 200Hz - the rest is being done by the 8w0's (which are in their own box). Also the doors are heavilly damped using a material similar to dynomat.

If you cross-over properly, then there is no reason real reason to put them in there own encloser (they would require at least .1 cubic feet of air volume to sound correct)

In your situation, I would strongly recommend making some sort of enclosure for your Kicker woofers if you haven't already. If you can't make an enclosure for the kickers then I would suggest making an enclosure for the Focals.

-Mr. Wigggles

 

Yeah and I applaud the march of progress.

There are a couple things that new vehicles never seem to have.

1. Good strong up front bass. The old myth of audio is that you can't tell where anything lower than 80Hz is coming from. Well the frequency is more like 50Hz so you need something that can go down to at least 50Hz in the front of the car. Your system was probably set-up in the exact same way to have good up front bass.

2. Prol-logic II Music mode is a must. It is the only format that allows you to blend the center info into the other front channels. So vocals, in particular, don't ONLY come out of the center channel, but also come partially out of the left and right channels as well. This helps to keep the vocal from sounding so centralized. The secondary benefit is power handling. If you have a strong mono recording, you don't want everything channeled to the cetner channel, it will likely overload it. You want som of that audio being reproduced by the other channels to share the work load.

When I pre-ordered the RX-8, I was hoping that the Bose would be good enough, but after enough time with it, I relized they just didn't quite pull it off. They used cheap speakers and never really got the Audio-pilot working well. They had a decent system design just didn't pull through with it.

-Mr. Wigggles

 

1.Thank's the answer! My Focals are playing down to about 240 Hz. The Kickbasses ( Emphasers ECP) doesn't have closed box, but they are separated from the Focals, because I didn' cut the metal parts of the doors, and covered all the holes on the inner panel of the doors with dynamat ( even behind the clips). And more..I can fix ( screwing) the focal, after that my door's panel is on their place, so I could make for them a little isolated place (box) with dampening mats.

2. What do you think after that you analised your audio system with "computer", is the mirror triangle the best place for the tweeters in the RX8? I'm so courius!

 

nice install, I probably would have done something a wee bit different with the amps, or thrown some sort of cooling measure in, but you're probably not pushing them hard enough to really cook them anyway so it probaly doesn't matter if you have fans or whatever on them. Looks clean, my question is what if what you're listening to is not 5.1 encoded, does the processor fake it for you?

 

Canary,

Pro-logic II Music Mode is designed just for that - music. And when I said it was "a must" that is a bit strong. For the current speaker positons of the Bose system in the RX-8, it is a must. For other cars and other speaker arrangement you can get away with simple stereo.

As far as cooling is concerned, if you look close at the amp rack in the down positon, you will see three 2 watt fans that pull air over the e6450 which does get hot. That amp can get very hot to the touch. When I am really jamming I probably only pull 450 watts out of it - 150+ from the sub and 300+ from the other five channels. (It is not a true 5.1 amp, but it does share power very well - every channel is capable of 150+ watts into 2 ohms but the total amps power is only 600 Watts so you can't pull 150 from every channel all the time.)
When I raise the rack up against (but not touching) the rear seats, those fans pull air accross the amp surface. (The 300/2 amp doesn't get hot at all in any circumstance)

-Mr. Wigggles

 

I'm following you. If you do make a box for the focal's just make sure it has some air space (it won't take much maybe only .5 litres)

No I haven't done a computer analysis, but I can tell you that those tweeters are close to ear level which is good. Those triangle panels are angled a little funny (those panels are angled slightly towards the dash and not to the listeners). Like I said in my review, I think I will be reangling my tweeters slightly in the future.

-Mr. Wigggles

 

are your sub boxes in the door custom fiberglass work?

 

Yes, the door fiberglass enclosures are probably the most impressive part of the system and they are completely custome. They are a dual chamber design which was required just to get enough air space and they had to be built into the vehicle. (In other words to reproduce his work, Lee would have to build the enclosures inside the actual vehicle. It would very hard to make a mold and mass produce the enclosures that are in my doors.

If I ever get my doors panels off again, I wil take pictures of what he did. On stealth systems, the most impressive work is always what you can't see.

-Mr. Wigggles

 

Absolutely. I'd love to see pictures of those doors as well if you ever take the panel off!