Speakers/Sub/Amps install and base/select model audio information

[iexiak]

I've been working on my setup since I got the car, and happy enough where it's at now to share!

Initial goals here were to replace the factory setup, add as big of a prefab sub as possible without affecting trunk space in the upper position and sound deaden. Parts of this install were done myself, but the doors and initial wiring were done by a shop.

For sound deadening, I used Dynamat and used about 4 sheets for the trunk and doors. Removal of trunk panels was a breeze and there's a few other threads that cover how to do this. Treating the rear wheel wells was as or more noticeable than the doors, and I would recommend this to anyone that thinks the car has road noise as an easy first step. I did not see a mounting hole for the 'sub' in the trunk that would come on higher audio levels...not that it would be worth the effort to put in a 6x9 in that slot.

Equipment-

• DSP/Speaker AMP - HELIX M6 DSP (6 channels in, 6x100w, 4 RCA out)
• Sub Amp - Kicker KX400.1
• Sub - Kicker 48TRTP122 12" single sub with passive radiator
• Fronts - Alpine R2-65C composite with the passive crossover
• Rears - Alpine R2-65 coaxial
• Audio integration t-harness - PAC LPHFD31 and extension LPHEXT17

Overall it sounds really good! I am planning some future upgrades (full sub build/floor replace, potentially 3.5" in the A pillar with 3-ways speakers, center channel), but this is more of a hobby for me and I plan on having the car for 7-10 years so I've got time to do that.

The floor is raised. I cut a 2x4 and routed in the floor holder shape into it. Then filled the routed part with Dynamat to help it form to shape and covered the rest in felt. This brought up the floor slightly and the rubber mat doesn't quite fit. I thought about trimming the rubber mat, but decided it looks fine.

One more pic with the seats down for good measure.

Keen eyed among you probably noticed my amps are different. At this point I was using an LC7i and Kicker amp.

Keener eyed among you may have noticed all the fur

He's a good boy, but man does he move fast. Someday I'll get a less blurry photo. And no I don't full send the sub with him back there.


So why the move from LC7i/Kicker to DSP? Below is a REW measurement of the RCA out on the LC7i of the front channels. For those that care, it's head unit -> LC7i -> Synthesizer audio mixer (sorry, I don't have the make/model) -> laptop. This is not a measurement of speaker output using a microphone, it is the raw signal. Head unit is set to factory defaults (no equalizer, no fading, etc).

What I noticed here is the boosted 50-100hz and drop off below 50hz. This was at all volumes and not something the LC7i could fix. You can bass boost, but that's not really restoring the correct signal and still leads to midbass sounding to loud with lower bass sounding too quiet. This kind of curve is apparently pretty common in car audio. Reduce lower signals to protect the speaker/keep it from blowing over the lifetime of the car and silly antics. Boost some signals around the road noise area. This lead to bassier songs feeling like the bottom drops out. Kick drums that sound/feel fantastic for some bands, and then a different band has a lower kick drum and you can just barely hear it.

I like to have my sub on the same channel as my fronts. This is because I have the car faded forward some so the rear seats aren't as loud for the kids (and yes, I have a sub knob and it's turned mostly down while they are in the car). Those of you like me, it seems like the rear signal is much flatter (pictures in a moment) and maybe you could switch rear/front and just mentally reverse the fader. But a perfectly flat signal maybe isn't the best answer either. The OEM tune has some peaks/valleys to help with road noise/cabin gain/etc and you might actually lose some perceived sound quality. If you are faced with the same problem, test it and let me know your thoughts.

So with that in mind and a bigger budget, I decided to move past the equipment I had from my last car and get a DSP. After playing with some software and reviewing features, the Helix won out. Went with the 6 channel amped to reduce total number of devices in the system. It is a breeze to setup and would recommend ResoNix Sound Solutions Youtube channel for a good overview of how to work with the software (which you can do in demo mode before buying a Helix product). Using a Dayton measurement mic, I was able to untune the factory tune, restore the 20-40hz signal, and put in a nice curve. Definitely still a work in progress, but would say that it's been more fun than frustrating. Really noticeable control of the tune and ability to customize to exactly what I want.

The original front signal into Helix confirms the factory tune seen with REW. Little bit harder to interpret, green bars are what the Helix sees incoming from head unit on average. Red bar is sliders to help fix the signal, which are in the default position here (no input signal modification)

The original rear signal into Helix shows very flat.

The Helix won't display 20-50hz at the same time as 50-20k, so ignore the big drop below 50hz. When looking at 20-50hz directly it shows good output levels.

Helix DSP was able to solve the input signal problem. Overall really like the software and sound with this setup.


Other information for base audio owners-
The center channel cutout is behind that panel. However there do not appear to be mounting clips for the 3.5. Seems easy enough to cut a hole and mount directly into this channel. Reviewing the upgrade center panel, it does appear that the 3.5 clips come with the other piece which I believe is part number LJ8Z-18978-CC or LJ8Z-18978-CB. (Big note - you can't just add a center, you need some kind of upmixer or center recreation. After doing a lot of research I decided to wait on this until my front 6.5/tweeter are active crossover instead of passive and potentially 3.5 in the A pillar.)

The rear speakers are different from the fronts. They are significantly less beefy. Fronts on the left.

Front speaker part number-

Rear speaker part number-

Less blurry pictures of Simon-

I miss air conditioned seats and so does he If anyone's got a guide on installing air con seats that'd be amazing.

 

[PA Bob]

How did you figure out which breed of dog would provide the best sound deadening?

 

[iexiak]

Haha! At 45lbs he doesn't bring much to the table lol. Suspect you'd want to go with a great pyrenees or similar for the big and fluffy sound deadening

 

[iexiak]

I'm back with more updates! Since the last post I've changed out the front speaker/tweeter and fiberglassed in a better sub setup.

Front speakers-
I changed over to Infinity BeTa 621Be for the 6.5 and tweeter. The beryllium tweeter on these is amazing! I have them crossed over at 2500hz which is really helping to bring the sound stage up higher.

Subwoofer-
The downfiring Kicker passive was fun, but it just doesn't dig deep enough for me. This upgrade was based on getting more volume in the 20-40hz range. I'm still working on integration as it gets quite loud, and it seems like the factory head unit is not sending as much 20-30hz on any channel. It's a bit of a struggle to tune in enough of the low end without clipping on the DSP side. (If anyone figures out how to defeat the factory sound processing would love to know).

The new setup is a fiberglassed box to take up ~80% of the space under the floor of the trunk and replace the floor board. I wanted enough strength to continue using the trunk as a trunk. This sub is -

• 80 liters internal volume
• 2x CompR 12" subwoofers
• 1x Earthquake 12" passive radiator with 375g of weight
• Infinity Kappa K1000 amplifier

It is slightly taller than I wanted to end up at, putting it about 1/4-1/2" above the trunk lip...but it still looks very factory with the mat.

I'm considering trimming the mat to remove the lip. This gets rid of some spill protection but it would make it fit better. If anyone has opinions on that lemme know, also if you have ideas on how to cut this easily and make a straight line that'd be great.

Progress pics-

A closeup of the glass (yes I know it's scratched, it was also free)

I wired in 2 60mm noctua fans along with a temperature sensor. At 90F it will turn on the fans to bring in fresh air. The fan on the left is pushing air out, while the fan on the right is pushing air in. There's enough of a gap on either side of the rubber to allow for this so far.

 

[Jcoleman411]

How had the system effected your range?

 

[iexiak]

How had the system effected your range?

Basically none at all. The math works out as follows-
The system is 1600w total, but only will hit 1600w playing at max volume with pure noise (IE sine waves that max out all speakers, not music). Running in this way it would consume 1.6 KW per hour.

My best miles per KWH is 3.4 (usually lower, but will use best here for exaggeration purposes). If the sound system is at full blast playing sine waves, then I would lose 5.44 miles over an hour.

That's not a practical use case though - listening to music at a comfortable volume (around 10-13 on the dial) - the actual watts going is significantly less. I would guess between 400-600w or .4-.6 kw per hour, which translates to 1.36 to 2.04 miles of range lost per hour.

 

[Jcoleman411]

Basically none at all. The math works out as follows-
The system is 1600w total, but only will hit 1600w playing at max volume with pure noise (IE sine waves that max out all speakers, not music). Running in this way it would consume 1.6 KW per hour.

My best miles per KWH is 3.4 (usually lower, but will use best here for exaggeration purposes). If the sound system is at full blast playing sine waves, then I would lose 5.44 miles over an hour.

That's not a practical use case though - listening to music at a comfortable volume (around 10-13 on the dial) - the actual watts going is significantly less. I would guess between 400-600w or .4-.6 kw per hour, which translates to 1.36 to 2.04 miles of range lost per hour.

Thank you for the education!

 

[iexiak]

A couple updates since I'm here...It's posted in other parts of the forum, but you can defeat the factory EQ on the base model systems! It requires a Forscan tool, so I bought the OBLink EX and got it done following this guide on the Bronco6g forums and this spreadsheet of our options from Livnitup.

The bronco guide has changing of 2 digits, we only have one digit for EQ selection. The star below was default to '1' and '0' is flat EQ.

727-01-02

xxx*

xxxx

xx--

The Helix DSP confirms that this has completely flattened the signal, from 20hz to 20k hz

Just a note for B+O system owners - I spoke with a Harmon Kardon engineer that worked on our vehicle for the B+O system and they stated that there is no way to defeat their EQ. You can change your EQ setting to different vehicle setups but the additional amplifier will always put some kind of EQ on it.

This was a huge relief! At the same time I changed the seatbelt warning to Euro mode (seatbelt warning happens when you start driving instead of at car start) following this guide. Instead of disabling any of the other chimes, I changed the setting "chimes primary source" to "instrument cluster only." This resolved a lot of my annoyance with the chimes, which was that they played very low and loudly over the subwoofer/new speakers. This did remove the startup and shutdown sounds, which I'm OK with. I also added the energy meter following this guide which is really cool!

Overall for $50 buying a Forscan tool has been one of the cheaper and more satisfying mods I've done to any vehicle.

 

[Vgkfan]

Congratulations!

 

[iexiak]

I've been working on sound deadening the car and wanted to share results with the community! So far I have treated the front/rear doors, roof, C-pillar/trunk sides.

At each step I took measurements using REW real time analysis (RTA) and a UMM-6 microphone. All measurements were completed using Blue Cruise at 60 mph along a nearby stretch of highway, started and stopped at specific expansion joints, with ~175 averages taken for each measurement. Between each modification I took 3 measurements and kept the quietest measurement of the 3. Note - this is an imperfect process, it's possible that my initial measurement there was a semi or other loud vehicle passing my car and all my other measurements are invalid. It's also possible that there are compounding effects that limit the validity of this method (IE there may have been a larger difference doing roof after doing doors if the roof overall noise floor was lower than the doors). All measurements were taken with the microphone mounted on the passenger headrest.

The progression in quietness is apparent and I feel like this testing method was valid, but bear in mind that this was not completed in a lab environment and external (non-controllable, IE what cars also driving on the road) factors may influence these results. All measurements are presented with REWs psychoacoustic smoothing applied.

Before diving into results, lets go over the product I used with links to each product -

• Constrained Layer Dampener (CLD) - CLD is not a sound absorber, it stops resonance. It is used to reduce panel noise and help each panel reduce the amount of noise it can transfer.
  • Dynamat Xtreme - initial treatment of interior door skins and trunk floor/C-pillar.
  • ResoNix CLD Squares - product I used after running out of Dynamat.
  • A quick comparison of the 2 - Dynamat is stiffer and easier to remove. ResoNix has a more premium feel and flexibility. Dynamat comes in a larger sheet, and CLD works best if you can make it as large as possible without cuts or joins, however the Resonix's small size means there's less waste and generally I was able to cut both materials to similar sizes. Overall I liked learning with the Dynamat (made fixing mistakes easier) but would use ResoNix for all future projects.
• ResoNix Butyl Rope - This is applied to all clips and to all spots where 2 different materials are joined together (IE door ribs or different plastics in the door cards).
• ResoNix Fiber mat half inch - This is for sound absorbtion and decoupling. Works best for sound absorbing if it is not compressed. I chose half inch to avoid compression and fighting panels back in to place. I did not have any problems getting panels back into place when using this product.
• ResoNix Lockout - This is another sound absorbtion product. Unlike the fiber mat, this product is hydrophobic and appropriate for installation on the exterior door skin. I used this in the rear doors and near the rear wheel well.
• ResoNix Guardian - This is the same as the Lockout product, but includes a mass loaded vinyl layer. This was used in the front doors.

ResoNix provides excellent guides on how to sound treat a car that are applicable to any product. Recommend checking out their reference information guide and deadening buyers guide. They also have several installation guides that were very helpful.


Before we get into measurements I need to note that the first measurement is taken with some deadening. This was done during the initial speaker installation and included the interior door skins for all doors, the rear wheel wells, C-pillar, and trunk floor. Approximately 4.5 sheets of Dynamat were used during this install. I did not take measurements of the car prior to this install. That looked like this-

C-pillar Passenger

C-pillar Driver

Front interior door skin

Rear interior door skin

For reference I have a 2023 Mach-e select all wheel drive without the extended range battery or sunroof with factory everything except the sound system.

Alright lets get into measurements! Below are 2 lines, the car stationary with AC at full blast and a baseline 60 mph measurement. The x-axis is frequency Hz and the y-axis is SPL in dB. If you aren't familiar with frequency measurements this visual may help map the road noise to instrument noise. It's important to note for the Y-axis SPL that dB is a logarithmic scale, 25dB is not half of 50dB. 3dB up or down is twice or half the energy.

The graphs can be summarized with 2 numbers - dB A and dB C - which are a way of weighting sound measurements used to measure potential hearing damage. Recommend the wiki article if you aren't familiar with how these work. We'll be using differences in measured dB A and dB C to describe noise reduction at each step, while the graph provides a representation of where we see reduction across the frequency.

AC at full blast dBA 68.8 | dBC 77.4
Baseline dBA 72.0 | dBC 91.0


Rear Door Cards
Material used -

• 1 sheet Dynamat $25.55
• 3/4 sheet of Fibermat $56.25

pre-install

CLD

Fibermat

Measurement-

Rear door card dBA 71.0 (-1) | dBC 90.6 (-0.4)

Roof
Materials used-

• ~1.5 sheet Dynamat $38.33 (could have fit some more but ran out)
• 1 sheet of Fibermat $56.25

Pre from trunk (it's really cool that the head liner is held on with magnets! I did not take off the a-pillars so access was kind of miserable at the front of the car)

Pre from drivers side rear door

Because we didn't take the A-pillar off, the install was a bit of a struggle. Here's how we did it by reaching in through the rear door to apply to the front of the roof-

A quick knock test to demostrate the effect of CLD - the rear has CLD. This test isn't as noticable as the effect on the doors.

Post fibermat

As I wanted to report this seperately from the C-pillar/wheel well treatment but did not want to risk clips in reassembly/dissassembly, the roof measurements were taken with the C-pillar dissassembled. This measurement should not be in context with the baseline or prior measurement as the c-pillar skin is fairly effective in blocking some of the wheel well and rear motor noise. The c-pillar skin removed baseline and post-treatment measurements are below

baseline dBA 72.0 | dBC 90.5
post-treatment dBA 71.9 | dBC 89.9


C-pillar and rear wheel well
Materials used-

• ~1.8 sheet Dynamat $45.99
• 1.3 sheet of Fibermat $73.13
• 1 sheet of Lockout $112.5

C-pillar plastic pre (see above for metal) - the factory treatment is minimal and a tossed this in the trash.

CLD + Fibermat

C-pillar lockout (note - I had to trim some of this and broke one of these panels at the exterior pocket. Nothing a little epoxy couldn't fix, but would recommend against trying to get as much of this in as I did.)

Measurement-

(reminder - baseline and post rear doors)
C-Pillar/Wheel well dBA 69.5 (-2.5) | dBC 89.3 (-1.7)


Front door exterior skin and door card
Materials used-

• 12 ResoNix CLD squares $102 (3 on each exterior skin and 3 on each door card)
• .75 sheet of Fibermat $56.25
• 6 squares of Guardian $330

Pre - the only major difference I notice between the front and rear door cards is this hole below the speaker grill. Reference rear door pre image for more information about the door card itself.

Door card CLD

Door card post fibermat

Exterior door skin CLD

Exterior door skin guardian

Door knock test (rear door exterior skin is not treated in this video)

Measurement-

(reminder - baseline and post rear doors)
Front Doors dBA 68.7 (-3.3) | dBC 89.3 (-1.7)



And that's where I'm stopping for now. I have treated the rear door skin, however, either an update or the sound treatment has lead to a problem (post here). I'm pausing on measurements until that is resolved. I plan on treating the hatch and the exterior wheel/fender wells, and will report on measurements for those as well.

In case you wanted to see all the measurements together -

Total materials $1059.5-

• 9 sheets of Dynamat Xtreme $230
• 12 ResoNix CLD squares $102
• 3.8 sheet of Fibermat $285
• 6 squares of Guardian $330
• 1 sheet of Lockout $112.5

Overall the reduction in road noise is apparent and appreciated. I think it makes a bigger difference on surface roads, particularly ones with more bumps, but I could not devise a fair and consistent test for low speeds.

 

[DanoiZ]

I'm back with more updates! Since the last post I've changed out the front speaker/tweeter and fiberglassed in a better sub setup.

Front speakers-
I changed over to Infinity BeTa 621Be for the 6.5 and tweeter. The beryllium tweeter on these is amazing! I have them crossed over at 2500hz which is really helping to bring the sound stage up higher.

Subwoofer-
The downfiring Kicker passive was fun, but it just doesn't dig deep enough for me. This upgrade was based on getting more volume in the 20-40hz range. I'm still working on integration as it gets quite loud, and it seems like the factory head unit is not sending as much 20-30hz on any channel. It's a bit of a struggle to tune in enough of the low end without clipping on the DSP side. (If anyone figures out how to defeat the factory sound processing would love to know).

The new setup is a fiberglassed box to take up ~80% of the space under the floor of the trunk and replace the floor board. I wanted enough strength to continue using the trunk as a trunk. This sub is -

• 80 liters internal volume
• 2x CompR 12" subwoofers
• 1x Earthquake 12" passive radiator with 375g of weight
• Infinity Kappa K1000 amplifier

It is slightly taller than I wanted to end up at, putting it about 1/4-1/2" above the trunk lip...but it still looks very factory with the mat.

I'm considering trimming the mat to remove the lip. This gets rid of some spill protection but it would make it fit better. If anyone has opinions on that lemme know, also if you have ideas on how to cut this easily and make a straight line that'd be great.

Progress pics-

A closeup of the glass (yes I know it's scratched, it was also free)

I wired in 2 60mm noctua fans along with a temperature sensor. At 90F it will turn on the fans to bring in fresh air. The fan on the left is pushing air out, while the fan on the right is pushing air in. There's enough of a gap on either side of the rubber to allow for this so far.

Killer job! How deep is the sunken area where the styrofoam holder is to the bottom of the floor in the high setting? I’m building a small sub enclosure I measured about 8.5”.

 

[iexiak]

Killer job! How deep is the sunken area where the styrofoam holder is to the bottom of the floor in the high setting? I’m building a small sub enclosure I measured about 8.5”.

Thanks! You should have about 8"-8.5" max to the bottom of the floor. Depends exactly where the sub will fit. These measurements are roughly what it looks like.

 

[stoopid]

Amazing built and attention to detail.

 

[iexiak]

Amazing built and attention to detail.

Thanks! Sorry I didn't have a chance to answer yesterday, but in short I wouldn't say the rears are 'worse' just different. Actually think the fronts are standard magnets while the rear are neos, which leads to the 'less beefy' comment. IDK how to verify this though.

RE replacing the rears - you should really do the fronts first. It's a common trope in car audio recommendations that given a budget you should just delete the rears and spend all the budget on the front (and sub). Same deal with a center channel. Unless you are driving your Mach-e as a premium cab service, the audio is for you so upgrade the stuff that matters most for you. That said, I have no plans to replace my rear Alpine R coaxials (even though my front stage is now like 6x as the cost of the rear).

RE utility of rear speakers - these serve 2 main purposes
1. Sound for the passengers in the back - I actually did some A/B testing with passengers in the rear (set my DSP knob to control rear volume, turned it all the way off, then drove around with them). Front passengers didn't really notice too much while rear passengers consistently complained that it felt like the audio was far away/not as clear. None of them could tell me what I changed when I turned the rears up but the rear passengers did like it better. I will say that having the rears louder than the fronts makes it sound like the sound is coming from behind you, which is not something I like. I do prefer having some sound back there in what would be more like a club vs a concert environment.
2. Rear fill - imagine you are listening at a concert, you'll get some sound bounce off the rear wall and come back slightly timed behind the rest. Using a DSP you can achieve this same affect, making it feel like the car is much larger. This is kind of like painting rooms in your house with bright colors instead of dark so they feel larger.

As a drop in replacement, I think the Alpine R's did a great job all around (components in the front, coax in the rear). If you are looking to go further (IE DSP)...well Alpine doesn't publish things like crossover frequencies so it becomes hard to integrate their component sets.

If you are in the Indy area I'm happy to demo my setup and could easily turn off the rest of the speakers to isolate the Alpines

 

[stoopid]

Thanks! Sorry I didn't have a chance to answer yesterday, but in short I wouldn't say the rears are 'worse' just different. Actually think the fronts are standard magnets while the rear are neos, which leads to the 'less beefy' comment. IDK how to verify this though.

RE replacing the rears - you should really do the fronts first. It's a common trope in car audio recommendations that given a budget you should just delete the rears and spend all the budget on the front (and sub). Same deal with a center channel. Unless you are driving your Mach-e as a premium cab service, the audio is for you so upgrade the stuff that matters most for you. That said, I have no plans to replace my rear Alpine R coaxials (even though my front stage is now like 6x as the cost of the rear).

RE utility of rear speakers - these serve 2 main purposes
1. Sound for the passengers in the back - I actually did some A/B testing with passengers in the rear (set my DSP knob to control rear volume, turned it all the way off, then drove around with them). Front passengers didn't really notice too much while rear passengers consistently complained that it felt like the audio was far away/not as clear. None of them could tell me what I changed when I turned the rears up but the rear passengers did like it better. I will say that having the rears louder than the fronts makes it sound like the sound is coming from behind you, which is not something I like. I do prefer having some sound back there in what would be more like a club vs a concert environment.
2. Rear fill - imagine you are listening at a concert, you'll get some sound bounce off the rear wall and come back slightly timed behind the rest. Using a DSP you can achieve this same affect, making it feel like the car is much larger. This is kind of like painting rooms in your house with bright colors instead of dark so they feel larger.

As a drop in replacement, I think the Alpine R's did a great job all around (components in the front, coax in the rear). If you are looking to go further (IE DSP)...well Alpine doesn't publish things like crossover frequencies so it becomes hard to integrate their component sets.

If you are in the Indy area I'm happy to demo my setup and could easily turn off the rest of the speakers to isolate the Alpines

Thanks for the belated response, I deleted my initial question because after about 90 minutes between reddit and Crutchfield I found a good solution, which ended up being Fosgates that had a low operating RMS ideal for stock head units but also decent low end response, which was the main goal. They make a similar component setup so I can match the fronts later on if I want to.

Agree on your points. One of the reasons I appreciated your prior detailed posts was that I'm above novice with car audio (and was a long time home recording musician/engineer), so sound is my thing too. The fronts have decent clarity/definition so I'm rolling with those until I change my mind, the rears are clearly the all around weak link and for the bit of extra bass the stock 6.5" could be providing but don't, I figure starting with the rears makes the most sense for me short term while I decide on the fronts which will cost more (components).

In my prior car I tossed in some lower end coaxials for the rear doors, because the car had two 7" subs under each front seat and I wasn't in need of more bass. Strategy and need with the MME is different. I did the component fronts and rears at roughly the same time as well with the prior vehicle. I was also driving 50+ minutes daily on commute for the first two years, so it made sense to spend money. Now my commute is 10-15 minutes round trip every other day.

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