Headunit and Amp install - Wire routing - Sport hatch

[vonlaser]

Thanks for all the tips guys/gals.

To repeat an earlier question. Where are people with hatchbacks putting their amps? Under the seat? In the spare tire area? My mono amp is tiny enough I was considering the glove box, thats where it was in my previous car. Only concern I had lingering in my head was in the event of a crash, it would probably turn into a projectile.... so maybe under the seat is best.

I fit a 5-channel under the trunk floor next to the spare tire. Plenty of room on the sport. Cut a piece of plywood to give a mounting base, covered in felt, and it wedged in. Sliced a few of the foam blocks so the floor lays flat and haven't had any issues.

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[Shinjari]

I fit a 5-channel under the trunk floor next to the spare tire. Plenty of room on the sport. Cut a piece of plywood to give a mounting base, covered in felt, and it wedged in. Sliced a few of the foam blocks so the floor lays flat and haven't had any issues.

Fantastic. Yeah there seems to be a crazy amount of room under there. Just hope my existing amp wiring kit is long enough haha. Definitely know my RCA's are too short.

 

[geolemon]

Thanks for all the tips guys/gals.

To repeat an earlier question. Where are people with hatchbacks putting their amps? Under the seat? In the spare tire area? My mono amp is tiny enough I was considering the glove box, thats where it was in my previous car. Only concern I had lingering in my head was in the event of a crash, it would probably turn into a projectile.... so maybe under the seat is best.

Amp in any enclosed space is a bad idea - amps need to be able to shed heat. Plus, wiring shouldn't be subjected to continuous flexing that could lead to failure, shorts, crackles - any number of problems. The potential for 'projectile" is likely small, but sure - doesn't add a checkbox to the "positives" side of the tally. I'd definitely never consider the glove box even as an option.

Under the seat is nice because it's never in the way - but if you ever want to adjust it... either levels, or crossover point, or need to tighten a connection - it's a pain in the butt to get to. That's the main downside. But - if you just unbolt the seat and remove it, and route wiring where the seat brackets won't subsequently crush the wiring, it can be good. But it's not a space I'm personally considering as an option... that doesn't mean you shouldn't.

It seems most people are (as with most cars) adding them in the hatch. There's some great options here, noting different models have different hatch floors:

• Base/sport - has a raised floor on foam blocks, to accommodate the center exhaust and retain the spare with a Styrofoam tool rack in/on it.
• Touring (and Europe?) has a lower trunk floor, without all the foam blocks or space on the sides down there - but still the same options

For either one:

• You can build an amp rack and/or subwoofer box under here - easiest thing is to ditch the spare tire to do it.
• If you do that, note you'll need your sub box or amp rack to serve the dual duty as also being the new support structure for the otherwise flimsy floor.
• If you do that, you'll also (like the glove box) want to ensure your amp isn't in an enclosed space, cooking itself to death. You want ventilation over the amp, or else will need to build fans in a push/pull arrangement to feed air in from one end and pull it back out of the amp rack on the other end.. and THAT air needs to be ventilated to the interior.
• You could also build creatively into the sides of the hatch area - search for pics people have put up in these threads. I like putting my amps here, since they are thin enough to tuck into those side areas, and gives plenty of air to let that heatsink do it's job. You could build a small sub into the other side, or build a box to live in the hatch, if you don't want to get crazy or crazy expensive fabricating under the hatch floor.

Whatever you choose to do, let us know, and share pics!

 

[Doc_C]

To be fair - most everything is MORE dog shit than they used to be.
People aren't spending money on car audio these days... enthusiasts in general are waning - that's not just a mobile audio problem.

Long gone are the days of quality class A/B (much less class A) amps when $1/watt was a good value point...
Everything is made in China in the worst of manufacturing classes, and are prevalently class D architecturally... not just sub amps either.
People aren't buying "the good stuff" when it comes to cabling, either. Even when they do - you'll slap your forehead finding people using the center lead (intended to be grounded, to help reject noise, normalizing it to the chassis reference - at least at that point) for amp turn on lead... which isn't a high current / high RF affair, but certainly the opposite of a noise filter.

And at the same time, when huge wattage amps become cheap as it did with the class D revolution - they become attainable - and even 1/0 cable capacity becomes taxed (to say nothing of alternator headroom, which is frequently nonexistent). That DOES become a high-current RF nightmare, even with the use of a big cap at the amp end to help act as both a noise filter and electrical-transition shock absorber (car analogy... not literal shock). Sure, you can try to filter it out... but those are just crossovers, with slopes - not walls.

Mainly saying - best practices are still a good idea, even with the absolute most superior of cables - cables don't change, or even subvert (if barely mitigate) physics.

I'll always pick humble gear installed properly, over top-class gear installed in a rush with shortcuts.

Man, I'll have to respectfully disagree with everything except your last statement. Which subsequently butts heads with your "everything is more dog shit" statement.

Decent gear today blows yesteryear's gear out of the water. Even entry level stuff from your big brands (excluding Pioneer here because they still can't play the no max power on the box game) sounds damn good for the money. And sure, times have changed. Class A/B is fairly non-existent anymore, but if it was still a feasible technology and the consumers wanted it, it would still be readily available. I would much rather run the flagship products of today than some football field sized 100 watt 4-channel that offers marginally better THD & S/N. Plus modern technologies and competition have lead to fantastic improvements in the topology. Take Apline's PDX amps. One of the best sounding, if not the best, amplifier series that you can walk into a store and buy without taking out a second mortgage. Yet, it's still a class D.

There's a reason no one is buying the "good stuff" anymore. Take Monster Cable for example. You'll never catch me in a million years buying a MC HDMI (at full retail anyways). There's no point. The cheap $8 cable meets the HDMI specifications and 99/100 times no one could even tell the difference between the two when viewing a side by side image. That over-indulgence part of the electronics industry has lead the average consumer down the path of "cheap ones are just as good". Which, to some extent, is true. There were so many times that I pulled the "expensive" set of RCAs out and threw in the cheap bulk bag RCAs after going through 2, sometimes 3, sets of the "expensive" ones. There is definitely a much higher failure rate with the high dollar RCAs vs the bulk cheapos, and that was regardless of the brand.

I'll agree with saying best practices are still a good idea, but on a low power basic sub install, it's almost irrelevant where the RCAs go. The noise induced will be at a much higher frequency than the amplifier's response range. With most amps having 24dB/octave crossovers, no one is going to hear it. Not even you.

 

[geolemon]

Man, I'll have to respectfully disagree with everything except your last statement. Which subsequently butts heads with your "everything is more dog shit" statement.

Decent gear today blows yesteryear's gear out of the water. Even entry level stuff from your big brands (excluding Pioneer here because they still can't play the no max power on the box game) sounds damn good for the money. And sure, times have changed. Class A/B is fairly non-existent anymore, but if it was still a feasible technology and the consumers wanted it, it would still be readily available. I would much rather run the flagship products of today than some football field sized 100 watt 4-channel that offers marginally better THD & S/N. Plus modern technologies and competition have lead to fantastic improvements in the topology. Take Apline's PDX amps. One of the best sounding, if not the best, amplifier series that you can walk into a store and buy without taking out a second mortgage. Yet, it's still a class D.

There's a reason no one is buying the "good stuff" anymore. Take Monster Cable for example. You'll never catch me in a million years buying a MC HDMI (at full retail anyways). There's no point. The cheap $8 cable meets the HDMI specifications and 99/100 times no one could even tell the difference between the two when viewing a side by side image. That over-indulgence part of the electronics industry has lead the average consumer down the path of "cheap ones are just as good". Which, to some extent, is true. There were so many times that I pulled the "expensive" set of RCAs out and threw in the cheap bulk bag RCAs after going through 2, sometimes 3, sets of the "expensive" ones. There is definitely a much higher failure rate with the high dollar RCAs vs the bulk cheapos, and that was regardless of the brand.

I'll agree with saying best practices are still a good idea, but on a low power basic sub install, it's almost irrelevant where the RCAs go. The noise induced will be at a much higher frequency than the amplifier's response range. With most amps having 24dB/octave crossovers, no one is going to hear it. Not even you.

It's as you say - people won't pay fo the good stuff, so it disappears. That doesn't make class D better than A/B. Those are power supply switching nature fundamentals - those classes are what they are, advantages and disadvantages are what they are - people voted with their wallets, and high end products disappeared almost proportionally with the appearance of the Fast and Furious franchise, with faux-fast and flash-over-function.
It doesn't make today's class D amps better than yesterday's Class A/B amps. It just makes what's here... all that's survived.

The entire mobile audio industry has been suffering for years - I was a retail buyer and then a technology representative over 10 years at CES and several at SEMA, from 2001 until 2011. There's been no magical rebound, even with our economy at the best state it's been in a decade. Even CES is a shell of it's former self in that north hall - look, this year it's only 1/3 of it's former occupancy, which used to be the entire north hall, with installation showcases and numerous demo cars sprawling in the parking lot outside the doors at the bottom of this image:
http://ces17.mapyourshow.com/7_0/floorplan/?st=keyword&sv=car audio&hallID=A&selectedBooth=booth~5021
And now we suffer from a new generation that seems largely fundamentally non-enthusiast in nature... not just mobile audio, but much of anything besides "staring at phones".

Monster Cable has used marketing to their advantage perhaps second only to Bose (but at least Bose has some legitimate engineering designs behind their cheap plastic manufacturing) or Apple, with their success in peddling middling products to gullible consumers via retail channels that are also drying up. They've never been "high end" (and really never been a player in mobile audio regardless!).

These are very real, industry-shrinking problems that have plagued this industry for years... There's other reasons for shrinkage as well - acceptance of (and insistence on) MP3's, fracturing of music collections from media to services, OEM head unit integration with onboard touchscreen systems and controls, legitimate quality improvements of OEM systems and features to "liveable" levels, OEM inclusion of formerly aftermarket-only systems (think: remote starters), shift from retail/installation to online and shrinking DIY base - among other retail-shrinkage, rep-shrinkage, and brand-shrinkage.

But the decline of an industry never results in improvements in offerings. It results in less competition, and for the survivors - less available for R&D and a push from the top to shift the focus to lower price, higher margin products... that's exactly why we see the class D stuff today... at the few shops remaining (the survivors largely playing limbo, shifting to closely couple with car dealerships, or shift sales to other areas (one I was purchasing for years ago is mainly a motorcycle dealer today, with the largest of their mobile electronics sales and installations today being remote starters, and also having some partnership with installations for a Ford and Kia dealer nearby).

Arguments aside about whether I, or you could hear the "theoretical" reduction in sound quality in any dimension or measurement - it is a measurable difference and not theoretical... and every signal chain always imparts a multiplication effect on each one of those measurements. Regardless, those (along with the aggregate numbers of the entire decline of the industry) are in fact reference points to validate that things are simply not "better than never". It's actually an unfortunate sad state of affairs - not just nationally, but globally.

 

[Shinjari]

My amp is a marine grade/conformal coated mono amp so being in a tight spot shouldn't affect it too bad. I'll probably end up putting it in the spare tire area or under a seat. I mean its small. Here is how it was in my '13 Fit Sport. I know this isn't going to win car shows or anything but I want to fill the void of bass the stock stereo gives. I want to feel/hear the bass and fairly clean bass. I don't need ground/window shaking bass.

Began ordering wiring harnesses and the trim kit. Will need a longer RCA since it will likely not be next to the headunit in the glovebox again.

I had a ASWC-1 in my Fit, but apparently due to it's age I need the new version with updated components.

 

[Shinjari]

Today I installed my Pioneer AVH-P8400bh, Kicker 2-way 6.5s in the front doors, kenwood mono amp and kicker 8" compRT compact sub box that I took out of my Fit before trading it in. Metra kit and harnesses/adapters made it a cake walk. Only confusing part was the rear camera since the red/power wire had a label that said "6v camera power" and having to manually program the AWSC-1.

Need to wire up the sub and that'll be it.

Thanks for the tips everyone. I ended up routing thru the hood latch grommet. Was a pain to put the grommet back but it works. =)

 

[TT-00]

Today I installed my Pioneer AVH-P8400bh, Kicker 2-way 6.5s in the front doors, kenwood mono amp and kicker 8" compRT compact sub box that I took out of my Fit before trading it in. Metra kit and harnesses/adapters made it a cake walk. Only confusing part was the rear camera since the red/power wire had a label that said "6v camera power" and having to manually program the AWSC-1.

Need to wire up the sub and that'll be it.

Thanks for the tips everyone. I ended up routing thru the hood latch grommet. Was a pain to put the grommet back but it works. =)

There is another empty grommet next to it, I just used that one and drilled a small hole.

 

[Shinjari]

There is another empty grommet next to it, I just used that one and drilled a small hole.

Yeah I saw people use that. All good, car is sealed up again...was just a pain haha.

 

[integra15]

Does the hatchback have a spare tire? If you have the inflation kit like the SI there are a number of storage places in the spare tire filler where you can easily hide an amp

 

[Shinjari]

Does the hatchback have a spare tire? If you have the inflation kit like the SI there are a number of storage places in the spare tire filler where you can easily hide an amp

Hatchback has a spare tire still. Didnt know the SI didnt.

 

[geolemon]

Hatchback has a spare tire still. Didnt know the SI didnt.

I used to be against ditching customer's spare tires as a rule (right up with cutting factory wiring) - but in the case of my lease, it may be the easiest-to-reverse way to get a sub in there.

And today, the implication clearly isn't "spare - or stranded". Getting your hands on an official Si inflator kit (or else, replicating the contents of any of these kits yourself) is a good way to gain some room for a sub and amps. Especially in the hatches.

 

[integra15]

One advantage on no spare tire. I've only used my spare tire 2 times in 15 years of driving anyway.

 

[Shinjari]

One advantage on no spare tire. I've only used my spare tire 2 times in 15 years of driving anyway.

Nice! That storage insert is cool. Was eyeing those rockford fosgate mini amps for a bit as well before I ended up with the kenwood KAC-m3001. What sub are you running? I see something tucked in the passenger corner of the trunk =)

 

[integra15]

Both the Kenwoods and Rockfords are great. If I had needed a 5 channel I would have got the Kenwood. One thing about car audio over the last 5 years that I DO like it the miniaturization of amps. It's impressive how far they have progressed

I got a JL Audio 6w3v3 in a box and put it in the corner. Amazing that a 6 1/2 subwoofer could sound so good!

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