Replacing Speakers on Sport Touring Hatch and Subwoofer Modification

[syndragore]

Looking forward to seeing your results!

Sponsored

 

[Spencer2131]

ALRIGHTY I have all the pictures together so I can give a full update! To start out with I am very happy with the cars install at this point I've been driving her for a little over a week now and this is officially the best sound system I own now. My poor jbl 305 bookshelves have been put to shame (still highly recommend for a PC). So for the full story I'm from the Pittsburgh area and like I said earlier in the post was looking to do this myself and was originally planning to do all 4 doors and the sub. I had a few ideas on what speakers I wanted (the alpine s or r series was the thought) and my biggest fear was trying to fit a larger sub into my stock sub's enclosure because I didn't want to lose trunk space from a box. THEN from research I found out my real biggest fear should be gettting the sound signal summed and flattened appropriately due to the magical stock equalizer of our car. If you have the touring it's even more distorted apparently. So I emailed Platinum Motorwerks in Pittsburgh just to get input, and talked with the owner Mark Blake. He had answered all of my questions and beyond in terms of expectations and how to approach this car, and had my full confidence in the install just from how experienced he was in this field. His goal was to keep everything as stock looking as possible, give the car volume, but more importantly give the full frequency range and clarity that this car is missing. The biggest flaw with these has to be the bass either from the sub's absent volume, or just the door speakers quality. But once I started messing with the stock equalizer, and you guys have probably heard this too, the mids and highs really are disappointing as well.

For the approach, like you guys talked about, we dropped, the back doors altogether. They'll have some benefit for the rear passengers, but for the driver and side passenger, its negligible and if you guys want to do it you can, but that should be consider a low priority. All speakers were dc'd except the front doors and the sub essentially leaving the car in a 2.1 configuration. For the doors, audiofrog g60s kits were installed for their audio quality and install convenience, and since the doors were apart, they were also sound deadened. I strongly recommend this as you'll see with the pics, the door is a hollow tin can with no acoustic absorption. Two approaches I've seen done in install videos is either using metal to cover that hole in the door and then deadening a flat surface, or deadening the inside of the outer metal of the door, and then deadening what you can on the inner metal, and then deadening the inside of the plastic door panel. That was the approach we went with, and it's a very noticeable difference in day to day driving. The more you can deaden the better, but the driver passenger doors makes one of the biggest differences just based off of location. Mark said that in the back of the speaker's enclosure, deadening is also applied to help prevent as much impact of the sound hitting off the metal as possible.

For the sound processing, Mark had attempted to originally not use JL's Fix 82, and started with JL's 700/5i which has a built in sound processor. The idea was to use the tuning software in the amp to adjust for the botched signal honda gives us, but because of the wiring and how the signal's delivered the only way to appropriately sum the frequency and give a flat one was with the Fix 82. These ended up getting installed behind the spare tire near the passenger seats and then the foam pads for the trunk floor were shaved down to make it back to stock level. For connecting the cars source audio to the fix 82, he was able to sum the total signal going throughout the car (if you've seen the output diagram from honda it's a multipin connector that has to be tapped into). The big trend I've seen with people connecting this car to the fix82 is just tapping the two doors for a best guess at signal. Mark didn't have to do that, I don't know the exact thing he had to do, but he was able to make a multipin connector from the source to the Fix that used the full range of the cars speakers to deliver a true summed signal. I gotta ask again for more specifics.

Onto the sub! Mark was actually able to fit in a thin 10 inch Focal P25FS into the same compartment by removing the entire enclosure, then applying fiberglass to the inside of the compartment and then installing the speaker on a custom cut piece of material that would mount the same way the original sub had! (This and the DSP nonsense really blew me away) So he was able to utilize the full volume of air that was between the chasis and the mounted speaker! There is some rattles from it and it has to be tuned lower because of the limited space, but it still pushes more than adequate volume. Eventually we are going to revisit this and consider a custom enclosure to slightly expand the cavity we're working with, add some flair, and really see the bass it can push.

Also side note: The fuse was even installed without just zip tying it to the wire harness! He 3d cut a piece of material for the whole thing to be mounted onto and still have easy battery access!

All and all, the sound system is more than I could've asked for or expected from the car. I really enjoy just listening to music and driving now, and again, I've been exposed to entry level high fidelity, but this was essentially my second wakeup call to the equipment. The things year hear, and the expression in the music is something else. This is a followup for everyone, but also a review for Platinum Motorwerks and seriously if any of you are in Pittsburgh and considering this, just go there. They'll really take care of you with real knowledge about how to utilize this cars space.

If anyone has any questions, even more technical just ask, if I don't have an answer from this install, I can call Mark and he'll gladly give more detail.

 

[w4kj4k]

Wow! Thanks for the very in-depth post and pictures, Spencer.
I am currently researching on upgrading my sport touring’s audio as well. And am leaning towards the route you took.

 

[EDM]

The setup bolts into the spare with it in it's original place. I lined the entire spare area with sound damping material to enhance performance. I retained 100% of the hatch cargo area.

I ended up going the same route but I used the VPSTX12 which is the shallow version. I am pretty happy with the results but now I just need to upgrade the door speakers.

 

[vblue42]

With all due respect if he went after the amp which is the only way to do such without the proper interface then it’s still using the shitty signal as a source from Honda. Metra Axxess has the proper interface and I have a demo thread here. But what’s done is done I guess. I’m sure it sounds better then before but for me using the source signal after the amp wouldn’t have worked for my ears.

https://www.civicx.com/forum/thread...-speaker-audio-of-sport-touring-type-r.52248/

 

[Spencer2131]

With all due respect if he went after the amp which is the only way to do such without the proper interface then it’s still using the shitty signal as a source from Honda. Metra Axxess has the proper interface and I have a demo thread here. But what’s done is done I guess. I’m sure it sounds better then before but for me using the source signal after the amp wouldn’t have worked for my ears.

https://www.civicx.com/forum/thread...-speaker-audio-of-sport-touring-type-r.52248/

Hey Vblue,
I read the thread over you attached. This is probably one of the first options I've seen that actually use the spdif connection off the head unit and I'm really curious to see where that goes mainly because of the integration with voice commands/ Android auto. The source is pure but especially with that fix 82 trying to predict the clean source I'm curious what the difference in quality is that end of the day gets transferred over the speakers. Yeah theoretically it's cleaner but until we introduce an aggressively sensitive system into a background noise free environment i don't know how much you'll notice day to day.

 

[vblue42]

Hey Vblue,
I read the thread over you attached. This is probably one of the first options I've seen that actually use the spdif connection off the head unit and I'm really curious to see where that goes mainly because of the integration with voice commands/ Android auto. The source is pure but especially with that fix 82 trying to predict the clean source I'm curious what the difference in quality is that end of the day gets transferred over the speakers. Yeah theoretically it's cleaner but until we introduce an aggressively sensitive system into a background noise free environment i don't know how much you'll notice day to day.

Well clearly you’ve never heard a properly tuned system in a car then. I have this installed and the sound quality is night and day from before with everything Honda does in the amp to destroy the sound.

 

[Synomenon]

The setup bolts into the spare with it in it's original place. I lined the entire spare area with sound damping material to enhance performance. I retained 100% of the hatch cargo area.

So the non-shallow version that you have (VPSTX12) fits on the spare and the hatch floor still lays flat on it like nothing's in there?

 

[Spencer2131]

Well clearly you’ve never heard a properly tuned system in a car then. I have this installed and the sound quality is night and day from before with everything Honda does in the amp to destroy the sound.

Alright... didn't know you wanted to go that way with this. I've been doing high fidelity for a while and am newer to the car side of this, but you know how Fix82 works right? The whole purpose is to resumarize the signal and predict what ends were amplified and then remove that amplification to try to generate the predicted base clean frequency the head unit started with. Obviously that's not a perfect fix, but going into this I'd never heard of the processor you're mentioning and the overall community hadn't talked about it. On top of that the people that tapped off of the optical out I heard did have issues with getting their voice commands to work because it's a different set of wires so I'm really curious how you were able to fix that or what your solution was.

On top of all this, this is sound. Every seasoned veteran when it comes to sound quality understands it's a battle of diminishing returns and

So the non-shallow version that you have (VPSTX12) fits on the spare and the hatch floor still lays flat on it like nothing's in there?

No it's the shallow version, but the floor is flat. Near the dsp it's slightly elevated but it's not noticeable unless you're looking for it.

 

[Spencer2131]

Alright... didn't know you wanted to go that way with this. I've been doing high fidelity for a while and am newer to the car side of this, but you know how Fix82 works right? The whole purpose is to resumarize the signal and predict what ends were amplified and then remove that amplification to try to generate the predicted base clean frequency the head unit started with. Obviously that's not a perfect fix, but going into this I'd never heard of the processor you're mentioning and the overall community hadn't talked about it. On top of that the people that tapped off of the optical out I heard did have issues with getting their voice commands to work because it's a different set of wires so I'm really curious how you were able to fix that or what your solution was.

On top of all this, this is sound. Every seasoned veteran when it comes to sound quality understands it's a battle of diminishing returns and

No it's the shallow version, but the floor is flat. Near the dsp it's slightly elevated but it's not noticeable unless you're looking for it.

Finishing that earlier thought: sound quality is a battle between what you'll notice and what it's worth. I wanted to have an educated conversation about whether you think it's truly going to be noticeable in a middle grade quality car setup in actual day to day use. OR if you think while theoretically yes this will make a difference unless you're looking for it a predicted digital output will perform similarly to a true digital source in a typical driving environment.

If you're gonna follow this with more toxic condescension then just move on.

 

[Deleted member 40377]

@Spencer2131 I agree with your assessment. The law of diminishing returns is huge in car audio. I won't go into all the details. I used to compete in this arena back in the day. I got into time/frequency analysis to be able to adjust the center position and check for unwanted reflections/delays. Yeah, that rabbit hole goes deep. With the set-up I did for mine, I opted for something very simple. I used Alpine for the doors, a smallish Alpine 4/ch amp and an Alpine 8" under seat powered sub (adjustable bass knob is cool). Keep the OEM head unit as I didn't want to fuss with the dash.
Did I lose some fidelity using the stock source, most likely. Is the sound better than the stock, absolutely. For what I paid, I think it was worthwhile. Could I have gone down that old road, sure but I've got other things to spend money on (like other mods). In the end, are you happy with what you've got, then that's the whole point. You're the one who has to be pleased. Others can have opinions but it's your money and your enjoyment, not theirs.

 

[vblue42]

Alright... didn't know you wanted to go that way with this. I've been doing high fidelity for a while and am newer to the car side of this, but you know how Fix82 works right? The whole purpose is to resumarize the signal and predict what ends were amplified and then remove that amplification to try to generate the predicted base clean frequency the head unit started with. Obviously that's not a perfect fix, but going into this I'd never heard of the processor you're mentioning and the overall community hadn't talked about it. On top of that the people that tapped off of the optical out I heard did have issues with getting their voice commands to work because it's a different set of wires so I'm really curious how you were able to fix that or what your solution was.

On top of all this, this is sound. Every seasoned veteran when it comes to sound quality understands it's a battle of diminishing returns and

No it's the shallow version, but the floor is flat. Near the dsp it's slightly elevated but it's not noticeable unless you're looking for it.

No issue with voice commands. CarPlay and the onboard voice command works as it should.

Sponsored