stereo upgrade

[apgandy]

Well after mucking about with the standard stereo I decided to replace although keeping the head unit stock was my goal I failed On the upside I replaced with a sony gt24 unit that is perfect for my needs!! no Bluetooth,wifi or any gubins to do with the dreaded internet or phones lol just music. Looked into a jbl sub setup and not very impressed considering their reputation, so set about building an enclosure around two cheap 8" juice subwoofers. Now I wasn't expecting much from these but with subs its all in the box so to speak so I built a twin 22ltr enclosure and replaced the front speakers with pioneer mids retaining the original tweeters for now. The rear speakers are not worth worrying about as even for rear fill they are not much use as the car is so small. The overall sound of the system with fronts running from the head unit and subwoofers amped with a four channel unit is very good and balanced with plenty of headroom and scope for improvement. The best buy was the subs and although cheap I was wrong to underestimate these little things as they will hit low and hard and the enclosure sits nicely under the boot blind so roof down is not an issue with space to spare. The whole system worked out very cheap at just under 100 pounds so very happy with the results.

[Spitfire6]

Hi,
Nice one.
What RMS do you put through the front and rear sub to make it clean and loud?
Cheers,
Iain.

[apgandy]

There are just two 8s in the rear no subs in the front. I use a 4 channel amp for the subs putting 200 to each sub. The subs are rated at 1000watts max so real watts is 200 a piece. It can be very loud if that's your thing but the main result is getting the sound into the car as you lose bass in convertibles with the roof down. The fronts speakers are fed through the head unit amp but have yet to install the amp for these.

[Spitfire6]

I like to be saturated.
You have hastened my need to install my 30 amped single channel bridged amp.
Routing a 6 to 10mm CSA cable and purchasing a cheap large-capacity capacitor, stopped me last time.

I wonder what the resistance of the boot motor feed cable s. I assume that it must be switched locally in the boot via that black box? A possible high power source for an amp while the roof was not operating?

Cheers,
Iain.

[apgandy]

I would stick to an 8ga cable feed from the battery as drawing current like that through standard factory wiring is likely to overload. Never found the need for caps in the past with amps as good as they are nowadays but depends what your trying to achieve I guess. Bass is important in all music but not really into pounding the streets and shaking windows lol, plus I think the car would obliterate itself. My old mx5 had a front mounted footwell sub as its impossible to get any decent sound into the cabin but worked very well with a three way component setup in the doors. Sounded very nice in the car and with good mids helped a lot to fill in the low end sound losses with the roof down.