Modernizing the Stereo - Part 7 - THIS is what makes all the difference...

So all the hardware is now installed. Cleanly, might I add, and as a side benefit I was able to clean up and fix the mess left by others.  So does it sound good?

Cannot wait to go for another spin in this car! And this time with the full audio experience!

Well, I knew that the new speakers alone would be an improvement. Remember, a few months prior I had swapped out the door speakers for the Alpine coaxials, and it was actually pretty good, even using just the OEM deck (no external amp).

But now I have 6 very good speakers in the car - a pair of Alpine X-65C components up front and that pair of Alpine X-S65 coaxials in the rear.  I presumed all the high quality wiring and the powerful Audio Control d.6-1200 amp (at 4 ohm = 6x125 watts) with built in digital signal processor (DSP) WOULD mean good clean sound, but frankly I was not prepared for how a DSP can make a HUGE difference - even though I am choosing to stick with the OEM cassette deck (hooked up to the OEM optional Sony-made CD player).

Before I started this project, despite what I wrote in this blog, I was committed to keeping the OEM deck if possible, for aesthetic purposes.  To me, the OEM deck simply looks right.  So, no (more) fancy 21st century head units (plus I wasn't impressed with the Pioneer CyberNavi that had been installed by Worx).  And, my research quickly revealed that there are now a lot of products that integrate with the factory OEM head unit. With modern technology, the compromises inherent in factory head units can be vastly eliminated, and with modern cell phones I can get all of my navigation needs taken care of as well. So really, no more need for a 2 DIN stereo and the large display. Whatever stereo I use, I can focus on the sound quality. 

And this is why a DSP for me was a necessity from the beginning. Given however the lack of space in the car, an amp combined with a DSP was the only solution.  And, because this would be the first time I would use a DSP, I wanted something relatively simple to use, but sophisticated enough to actually add value by making a noticeable improvement in sound quality. 

My research revealed that there are some amps with rudimentary DSP controls on the amps themselves... but the majority of the current popular stand alone DSPs /DSP amps use bespoke software to make the necessary adjustments. 

As Pablo commented in an earlier post, the Five Star Car Stereo YouTube channel  (with Dean and Fernando) is a fantastic resource. The other notable YouTube channel is Car Audio Fabrication,  but Mark from that channel tends to be a bit too into certain brands (i.e. sponsored), while Dean and Fernando seem a bit more about installing what the customer wants (but centric to what their shop carries).  I also love their "911" series - I can totally relate to crappy installs that need to be removed and redone! Therefore, while Mark from CAF had a lot of interesting tips, I paid more attention to what Dean and Fernando talked about and demonstrated.  Thus when Mark recommended Audio Control, I was a bit skeptical (I've seen him act as their spokesman), while Dean and Fernando actively compared Audio Control against other brands, including Alpine, Helix, Rockford Fosgate, head units that include DSPs, etc.  

But in the end I was swayed by what both Dean and Mark said about ease of software use, which is why I went with the Audio Control DSP. The fact that their d.6-1200 product combines a 6 channel amp with the DSP was ideal, because I wanted to run the Alpine tweeters actively.

I'm not going to talk about the amp and its install because I've covered that in this Modernizing the Stereo series, nor will I talk at length about the features that the d-6.1200 has - stuff like AccuBASS (which restores bass the factory stereo removes), GTO (their auto-on feature), etc. - you can find plenty of reviews on the YouTube channels I mentioned plus elsewhere online.  I will mention however that I now have a USB cable tucked under the drivers seat by which I can hook up my laptop so I can use the DSP software to fine tune the d-6.1200's DSP settings:

Anyway, once the software was downloaded and installed, here is what the initial screen looked like:

I then began to tinker with the settings to get used to the software. It was also interesting to see how the music I was playing looked. Here is the Input View showing the RTA input from the OEM deck - you can see how there is a dip in the mid-range:

Then Output View:

It was here I started using the "auto" equilization feature (looking at the input and output RTA) in conjunction with playing back pink noise through the Sony CD player, in order to get the flattest output possible - important as part of OEM head unit integration.  Once output is flat, then a user can start tweaking to customize the sound to his liking. 

Another cool thing you can do with DSP is to measure the distance from your ears to the speakers - you can see below how I've entered, in centimeters, the delay distance.   I did this for all 6 speakers, both when I was in the driver's seat and passenger's seat. And yes I could immediately tell the difference, the sound seemed to come from a proper sound stage, with the vocals seemingly floating above the center of the dash, and instruments on either side!

I also have to mention that this amp has an options port, to which I hooked up this Bluetooth module through which I can stream music and/or use a miniaturized version of the laptop software from my phone. 

Finally, because the DSP allows for different settings, I installed this optional controller (so I can change on the fly) and hid it in my old ashtray (which had holes drilled in the back) - excuse the dirt/dust on the dash surround, I'll get that cleaned up in due course:

Current settings are for "driver", "passenger" and "streaming" but I will continue to tinker with the DSP settings - clearly I have a lot more to learn, plus I haven't really tuned the output to my ideal. But the music truly sounds fantastic - even though I am still using a flat curve! I've found that I can adjust for each song by using the OEM deck treble and bass controls!

Meanwhile I am debating whether to keep going and add a proper subwoofer (located in the trunk) or maybe a powered one under drivers seat?  I also worry - is the OEM alternator enough or does the addition of a fairly powerful amp require an upgrade? Anything else I need to do?

Oh, and while I was working on this, I did a few other things... standby for some more posts on those!

Modernizing the Stereo, Part 5 - Rear Deck

So while waiting for the Alpine components to arrive, I decided to clean up the rear deck area and at minimum run new speaker wire from the DSP amp to the new rear speakers. I had actually already removed the rear parcel shelf while working on installing the amp and the wiring.

You can see how the amp isn't installed yet,
but I had already gone ahead and removed the rear parcel shelf!

A closer look at the speakers showed that there was some degradation.

The plastic ring surround on these Pioneers were about to fall off!

The parcel shelf itself needed some help as well:

Quick glance and you can see the OEM felt lining was bunching up in some places.

A closer look at the speaker grills showed a mottled texture, almost like mold.

So I removed them both to try to figure out a way to clean up.

Obviously this is beyond saving. I guess Nissan used this black tissue-like cloth to protect the OEM speaker? Thin enough to let sound out, thick enough to protect from fading or degrading from sunlight?

Since I didn't want to remove the grill from the plastic housing, I had to be very patient and use a small screwdriver to slide the tissue cloth out of the nooks and especially the corners. Check out this dust!

The end result:

And yes I was tempted to cut away the supporting plastic ribs, but given the age of the part decided to leave well enough alone for now. Then it was onto first removing the old Pioneers (and yes had to figure out how to tuck away the existing speaker harness/wiring):

Whereupon I found out that the Alpine coaxials would not fit!

The reason is obvious when you take a look at the shape of the speakers from the side - they are both 6.5 inch in diameter but:

You can see how the basket of the Alpine (left) is much wider and taller, with the magnet actually incorporated into the basket body. The wide basket doesn't give enough clearance to allow the speaker to simply drop into the speaker hole. The Pioneer is a more traditional shape, with a minimal basket and larger magnet on the bottom.

And even though both are supposed to be 6.5inch (17cm) wide, the Alpine looks larger. 
Certainly the tweeter core looks like it uses a wider diameter tweeter too.

Luckily I knew exactly what to do, which is to get some MDF spacers which would have a larger diameter cut out than the OEM plastic ones - and I went to the guy I had purchased the spaces for the front speakers many years again (from Yahoo Auctions).

Of course I immediately painted these with some flat black lacquer paint to protect from moisture, and to ensure they blend in with the interior.

Test fitting it to make sure.

And here is where I found another problem - while these spacers DID fit properly, they still did not clear enough of the metal (pink arrow). However after fiddling around with the spacers, I hit upon a solution, which was to flip them over and use only the front bolt hole, while drilling out another hole on the opposite side (in mirrored location) below the elongated tip (green arrow below).

While I was doing this I measured and drilled out the holes (orange arrows above) to screw down the speakers:

Despite the silver ink marks, to make sure the lower holes were accurate
I drilled the holes with the speaker in place. Nerve wracking!

So now it was time to install the speakers, but before that, I wanted to install some sound deadening and dampening to the rear deck. For that, the easiest solution was this door sound dampening kit from Audio Technica Japan.

I had previously used a similar kit for the front doors way back when I first added sound deadening to my car (way before my misfortune with Worx). So I knew I was getting a good kit, and rather than buying parts separately a kit is always easier (plus I figured if I didn't use all the pieces I could add even more material to the doors).

Here is what the kit contained:

First, these foam items - here you can see the round "clip dampers" (designed to go around the clips used to connect door panels- to prevent squeaks); the thinner "sound proofing wave" on the left (designed to be applied to the door metal as an outline to the panel - to plug any gaps between the door frame and panel (and thus prevent further sound leakage) and the thicker "sound proofing wave" (designed to be applied around the speakers to direct sound up and out):

Here are some "vibration controllers" (small sizes for "point tuning")- to dampen vibrations:

What Audio Technica calls "noise-less rug" - a sound insulator material

More "vibration controllers" (cut for door application):

Application tool with clip remover on one end:

So the usual stuff, plus some stuff I hadn't used before (the "sound proofing wave" and the clip surrounds). 

At the same time, the foam speaker gasketing tape had arrived, so I decided to apply that first.

Pretty simple stuff, just cut to length and attach. Looks like Alpine expects its customers to do so, judging by the pattern on the underside of the lip of the speaker:

Green arrow shows how the tape width was perfect!

Just a few minutes per speaker and:

So this gave me reassurance of no rattles between the speakers and the spacers. But what about between these spacers and the rear deck itself?

Right before I started adding parts from the sound dampening kit, I wiped down the rear deck for dust and dirt (but it was actually really clean!) and first applied this gasketing tape to the outlines of the speaker holes (purple arrow below). As you can see I did not cover the entire area with the sound deadening material. I first laid out as much of the vibration reducing material ("vibration controllers") and then on top the "noise-less rug" sound insulation but made sure to leave space for the spacers to fit completely flat and snug on top of the gasketing tape.  I also got clever (I think) and added some of the vibration controllers and sound insulation material to the area next to and above the rear coilovers (green arrow):

Eventually, the rear deck was sufficiently covered - given how loud the car is and how the rear board already has some factory insulation, the emphasis was on vibration reduction and patching up holes that lead into the trunk - to try to get better bass response from these speakers) and I had the spacers installed as well. After this I only had to drop in the speakers (note the red wiring - that's the 16 AWG speaker wires for the rear speakers):

But before I did that, one more thing to do -  fix up the rear parcel shelf itself. First, I had to re-glue some of the insulation that was coming off.

I let it dry overnight (and yes, see those two white clips in the middle - I DID apply the foam "clip damper" things to them during the install).

One more hurdle - turns out the OEM holes in the parcel shelf are too small for these larger Alpines (and how the speaker locations had also changed a bit as I shifted the spacers) so I had to widen them a bit - as you can see there was plenty left to cut out:

Using my jigsaw, I managed to cut cleanly cut out the extra space needed:

To get this:

Pretty clean if I may say so myself!

Finally, before re-installing the parcel board, I attached the speaker foam surrounds (pink arrow below):

Meanwhile as I was doing this over the course of a few days the Alpine X-series component speakers had finally arrived... so in my next post I'll show the unboxing and then how I installed those speakers.

Almost done!!

Modernizing the Stereo, Part 4 - Wiring

So this post will be about all the wiring I had to do to upgrade the stereo to a true hifi system.  If you remember, Nismo Omori Factory had told me that Worx had stripped out the OEM wiring harness for the front door speakers, so in addition to the cables for the new DSP amp, the wiring from the head unit to the amp, the speaker wiring from the amp to the speakers, I had to deal with removal of substandard wiring in the doors, as you will see.

First, the wiring/cabling for the amp. Here in Japan it is near impossible to find, at least at the consumer level, 1/0 AWG OFC wire, so I ended up ordering from the US what I thought was more than enough to handle the power and ground cables. 

As you can see I also ordered lots of speaker cable - the dark blue - as well as some 4 AWG power cables in both red and blue. 

As you saw in my last post, a lot of the effort was to make sure I was able to properly mount the amp, the distribution block, and the main fuse holder.

But once done:

I decided to go ahead and make it look more professional by adding some PET cable wrap protection - although to be honest I'm not sure how much protection these cables need given their location in the trunk (versus being in the engine bay for most other cars with a front mounted battery - protection from heat and fluids is more relevant there).

Green arrow shows me starting to add the wrap

And solid black for the ground cable

After wrapping both it looked like this:

Green arrows show power cables wrapped; red arrow is the lead I made for the CTEK charger; and pink is showing where the power cable from the battery would plug into the main fuse holder

And then of course I went ahead and tested to make sure there was enough clearance (I also checked how the inner trunk lining fit - no problem there either, just no photo at this stage:

No problem! Right? Well except because I had chosen to use these battery terminals - they are unique in that they clamp directly onto the battery terminals and allow attachment of various size cables but also via side posts allow you to attach the OEM battery cables directly - - all great except it requires the cables to be attached from the front side of the battery - meaning it turns out that the length I ordered for the power cable was JUST a bit too short (see pink arrow two photos up). 

So I did what a reasonable person would do, I managed to find a 1 meter length of 1/0 AWG here in Japan from a specialty store (but it cost me over 3000 yen!) and ordered it... but while waiting for it, I decided to go ahead so I decided to finish laying the speaker wires.

This too, was a miscalculation - in order to run speaker wires for an active component system, I realized I should use DIFFERENT colored wires to differentiate the wiring for the tweeters and for the midrange woofers up front. So, I went ahead and ordered the wiring on the left - same 14 AWG gauge and OFC of course (see technical note below - yes total overkill on the speaker wires...live and learn...). And yeah, this is what happens when you order when tired and sleepy... the new wiring (on left is ALSO blue but luckily its ground cable is black).

I realized then that I had better take a look at the wiring that Nakamua at Worx had done to the door speakers, to see how I would pass these wires.  I was in for a shock.  

It started out OK. I started with the passenger side door and had reached inside the doors to see how the existing speaker wires were wired back into the car body. It all looked relatively normal at this point:

But I soon realized something was off:

Door side connector - what is that thick black wire?

OH MY F*****G LORD! WHAT THE F*CK...

So yes friends, Nakamura at WORX had decided that this was the only way to pass his new speaker wiring into the doors.

What to do...I called Nismo Omori and this part is no longer available...

Ok. After calming down and reading on the Internet car audio forums that this seemed to be an acceptable way of passing UPGRADED speaker wires into the doors...

14 AWG wire on the bottom - top 4 wires installed by Worx seems
to be about 20 or 22 AWG each (same as OEM?) 

I again almost had a stroke after seeing that the bulk of Nakamura's wiring was all insulation and filler! The actual wire core diameter is not much bigger than OEM. So he basically drilled the hole to pass an ADDITIONAL small core wire that he then wired BACK into the same speaker terminals. If not for that extra wire he could have used the OEM speaker wiring.

Technical note - I have learned that the reason for thicker speaker wire is to prevent voltage drop over long distances (due to resistance).  

Given the relative low power of the Pioneer CyberNavi deck, and the close distance of this head unit to the doors, I am honestly STILL not sure why that second wire was necessary.  Why not stick with the OEM connectors? Instead of drilling, could he not have simply upgraded the wires to a higher quality wire of the same gauge? OR, if you are going to go to the trouble to drill out the OEM connectors - why not use one single thicker wire? Passing another OEM size gauge wire makes absolutely no sense.

Being a realist as well as an optimist, I decided to see if that existing hole could handle the two 14 AWG speaker, but quickly realized this was not going to work.

Way too thick to pass through the holes, even where I used a file to make the holes just a tiny bit larger

Given that I was running 14 AWG speaker wire right up to the area in the body right next to the doors, I decided to see if I could run thinner wire in the doors only, to minimize the voltage drop I referenced above.

So, another delay as I had to order some 18 AWG car audio speaker wire, this time from Audio Technica Japan:

Again, for some reason it is blue...with silver

But at least I got two of them to fit through the existing connector holes. Ensuring I can run my tweeters and midrange actively from the DSP amp.

Of course, I had to repeat this exercise on the drivers side... which was worse because Nakamura drilled TWO holes into the connectors...

I went back under the dash and figured out what that second wire was for - the wiring for the red and white LEDs that fade out with the interior courtesy lamp that I installed in the door a while back - not sure why it wasn't present on the left side door. 

And while I was at it, I labelled everything not OEM (green tabs)

Gotta say, I did enjoy REMOVING Nakamura's wiring however:

SNIP! I cut and removed this from inside the door

And this one from inside the body:

Anyway, I finished this side in only 45 minutes (about 4 hours on the left side given trying to figure out what to do) and then as the Alpine components still hadn't arrived, it was time to move onto hooking up the 14 AWG speaker wires to the amp and laying it in the car.

I didn't know better, but after watching some videos I thought that ferrules would be good for these type connectors that plug into the amp.  I later found out I was wrong, but for now they seem to be doing a decent job.

You can see the tweeter wires on the right, with the black ground cable

I hooked up the two sets of cables to the amp:

And then ran them to the side and behind the amp, being careful not to block the amp's cooling abilities as well as the OEM cables there.

By loosely but carefully running these speaker wires - passenger side along the left, drivers side on the right, following the OEM wiring but NOT trying to disguise them as OEM, I was able to finally lay them out close enough to the doors, tying them loosely (temporarily) with red zip ties.

After that, I just soldered the 14 AWG wires to their respective 18 AWG wires on each side, making sure I didn't melt anything in the kickpanel area. While I was at it, I tried to clean up the wiring in the center stack. Note I did what I could with that random red power wire with fuse (for the boost controller... it also had a lead coming out for the ETC reader).

The car looked like this for about two weeks:

But as I finished up (after tightening up all the zip ties, double and triple checking for clearance, etc), it looked it like this:

Green: the DSP amp; light blue: drivers side speaker cables ; orange: USB cable and remote control cord from amp; red: the "speedwire" from the head unit; pink: bundled cables (speedwire and left side passenger cables) with the OEM wire bundle; and yellow arrow showing these wires bundled with OEM harness

So other than the door connectors, a relatively smooth install. I took pain to make sure people could spot the non OEM wiring, so used plenty of red and white zipties. 

So now I'm ready for the front speakers... but still no Alpine components - SonicElectronics sent me the WRONG product (I got the coaxials... again) so I had to order the components from another retailer, requesting expedited delivery. Oh well... meanwhile on to the rear speakers and deck!