New Audio Install + Tips
01-05-2012, 05:56 PM
#1
2nd Gear Member
Thread Starter
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: South Carolina
Posts: 341
New Audio Install + Tips
For short version, just look at the pictures, for the technical install details read on.
Hello guys, making a thread to show off my new sound system install & bring up some key points for anyone wanting to do a similar setup in there own stang. I have some before & after pictures of what disaster of a “system” I had before, which when I bought my car in ’08 was suppose to be a temporary setup. However the temporary “system” has been in the car since ’08. See the previous crappy setup on my cardomain. See (Old) Audio section for before, & (New) Audio section for the after.
http://www.cardomain.com/ride/3313378/
Recently working overtime & had to get a new battery anyways since the stock one crapped out after about 4 years & went with a yellow top, just seemed appropriate to redo the sound system as well. I already had 2 of these 10” DB Drive Platinum PLW (old gen) series subs. Already installed component speakers in the front door (those still need to be cleaned up), & had a decent 4 channel amp on the front speakers already, so I could reuse that. The box my one 10 was in, was a crappy truck box, & the amp powering it (before this) was a 2 channel amp pushing like 200wrms through each channel, but only one channel was ran to the sub. Needless to say it wasn’t very loud.
Some key points for anyone looking to install a good system in the stang. It is possible to do dual 0 gauge wire runs in the car without cutting any holes in anything, other than the giant rubber grommet firewall, that is already there in the passenger footwell. I did a vertical slice on each side of the main wire loom in the firewall & ran one run on each side. See picture.
Both 0 gauge runs can be easily hidden under the carpet. In order to get these bad boys in the trunk, once you remove the back seat side panel, you will see a giant round hole in the top area of the trunk, behind that panel that just came off. There will also be a foam pad as well. You want to run your wires under this foam pad. Run both 0 gauge wires under the pad & through the hole. I then ran them down behind the side panel/carpet in the trunk. I took box cutters & cut a vertical hole in the side of that to route them out from. See pictures.
You do want to run all your wires under the stock black convoluted tubing. There is tubing on each side of the car, however I only took a pic of the passenger side. The stock tubing has a natural arch to it. You don’t want to make the carpet poke up any more than necessary. As such you can route your wires under it & it won’t be any more raised up than it is stock. See pic. Disregard the power wire being ran under this. This is before I saw the round hole at the top that went directly in the trunk. Use the hole instead. Route your speaker wire, remote wire, rcas, & any other wires you need under this tubing though.
To get the power wire into the engine bay, it has to be ran from inside the car out to the engine bay. Push it through the firewall & take off the splash guard behind the front right tire. You will see it come through & there is small gap in the corner of this wheel well that will allow you to route it into the engine bay. This hole does look small, but it will allow 2 separate 0 gauge wires to be ran through it.
Best place I found for grounds was to mount them in the same place as the stock tail light ground. Take off the panel on the back of the back part of the trunk. There are like 4 push pins holding it in. Underneath this, you will see the stock grounds. I removed them & ground off some of the paint around the holes to get a good bare metal contact. There are 2 holes which are perfect for running dual 0 gauge grounds. See picture.
The carpet in the final pictures, is not the stock trunk carpet. This is grey subwoofer box carpet I picked up from my local Radioshack/hurricane electronics. It just happened to match the stock side piece carpet pieces perfectly. The stock trunk carpet can not be reused. It is too thick & uncuttable. It’s 2 thick pieces of carpet with some nasty thick glue holding both pieces together. It makes for a nice piece of stock carpet but isn’t reusable, I found this out when I tried to reuse it & cut it.
The box I’m sure I could have easily made myself, but between working overtime & the holidays, & for simplicity’s sake I stumbled upon zenclosures.com from one of the car audio forums I visit. I saw they did some great semi-custom car enclosure work. My 10” sub is a beast. It requires a larger than normal cutout hole to mount because of the basket design. You can request adjustments to the sub boxes before they send them. I had them increase the cutout diameter slightly so my sub would fit. Check them out here.
http://www.zenclosures.com/
You guys may be asking yourself why I ran two 0 gauge runs of wire. The reason is, I have pulled the car apart numerous times & do not wish to do this anymore in the future. Also in the future, like I said, I have another matching 10” sub that I want to put in eventually. At this time my alternator won’t allow it. Eventually within the next year or so I will probably get a new H/O alternator & then can just get a box, drop sub in, add amp, & wires are already ran. Basically these wires will stay in the car for the rest of the cars life & never have to be messed with again. I bought the oversized 0 gauge from knukonceptz. The real OFC, not the CCA wire. There is about 50-60 feet of 0 gauge wire in my car, between the power & ground wires. I’m also going to do the big 3 upgrade with the left over wire that I have. I bought the OFC stuff for a reason. I live in the south & it gets well above 100F in the summer. Couple this with underhood temps in a V8 mustang & factor in IF I did get the CCA stuff, it would raise the wire temp a decent amount due to the extra resistance CCA has. I read a link showing temp rise with CCA wire. This just seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. Melted plastic wire jacket in the car doesn’t sound like fun. Better safe than sorry.
I got some really nice lugs to crimp on the end of the 0 gauge. I purchased them from tinnedmarinewire.com. These aren’t regular lugs. They are completely sealed & tinned to prevent corrosion, very nice stuff. I purchased 1/0 gauge. I’m sure these would have been fine for actual rated 0 gauge wire from kicker/stinger, but the knukonceptz wire is underrated. It’s actually closer to 2/0 gauge. The 1/0 gauge lugs were a pain to get on the wire. I would advise to get 2/0 lugs if you use knukonceptz wire. Also the oversized 0 gauge wire from knukonceptz is a pain in the butt to get into my stinger 0 gauge terminals. If I had to do it over I probably would have went with stinger 0 gauge, since that would have fit the terminals better. Check out the lugs here.
http://tinnedmarinewire.com/wire/ind...b623f454fbd26d
The grommets used on the amp rack are stinger grommets, I got them off a ebay guy bagboy/darvex & in the auction it lists the exact size to drill the holes. I believe 1” for 0 gauge grommet & 5/8” for 4 gauge. Takes all the guess work out of what size your holes should be. I drilled all holes in amp rack prior to carpeting, then used spray adhesive to attach the carpet to the plywood & cut out the holes with an exacto knife.
I made the false floor/tire cover/amp rack out of like a 4 sheet thick piece of plywood. It’s plenty sturdy for anything. I got a like precut 4’x6’ piece from lowes for around $15. They have the giant size house sheets, then if you ask they should have smaller precut ones which is what you want. Have them cut it to the size you need at the store & it will fit in your mustang trunk to take home. It won’t fit without cutting it at the store. You would have to measure the piece of board that is stock glued to the carpet, I don’t remember what size it was. I wrote it down on some scrap paper, which is now gone.
I have some pics of the amp rack/false tire cover being made. Basically I laid all my amps/crossovers/distro blocks out on the board to see where I wanted stuff to go. Then I laid out my grommets to see how they would look. You want to make sure your grommets are spaced a little ways away from your amps/distro blocks, getting those cables to bend is sometimes a pain in the rear, if put too close. I laid out my grommets & drew a dot in the center of each one. Then used a ruler & drew a straight line to make sure they would all end up in a straight line.
Here is another picture of it with me running the 4 gauge wiring outside of the car in my garage. Run all the wiring outside of the car that you can. I ran the 4 gauge power & grounds from my distro blocks to the amp while outside of the car & ran the input wire on the crossovers to my amp.
Next you can see how I got it into the trunk. Slice a vertical hole in the side of your stock trunk liner & you can route both wires out of it & under the carpet & then they will go down through the holes in the top of the amp rack. This same hole you cut, you can also route your speaker wire for the sub through it.
I have a shot of the wires being ran & sitting in the trunk getting ready to be ran up through the amp rack.
A few shots of me test fitting stuff prior to final install.
Then the final finished shot of everything put together.
I set my gains modestly with a DMM. It’s loud enough to make me happy, & is probably at 75-80% gain level before clipping. I set the gains via 50hz test tone, recorded at 0db with headunit on volume 30/40. Playing music at 30/40 volume level there is pretty much no voltage drop. I have some digital gauges on my Avic D3. One is a volt-meter. It might drop down to 13.6-13.7 at most. So there aren’t any issues with voltage drop.
For a lot of car audio knowledge I would check out this website. It helped a lot when designing this setup.
http://www.bcae1.com/
Hello guys, making a thread to show off my new sound system install & bring up some key points for anyone wanting to do a similar setup in there own stang. I have some before & after pictures of what disaster of a “system” I had before, which when I bought my car in ’08 was suppose to be a temporary setup. However the temporary “system” has been in the car since ’08. See the previous crappy setup on my cardomain. See (Old) Audio section for before, & (New) Audio section for the after.
http://www.cardomain.com/ride/3313378/
Recently working overtime & had to get a new battery anyways since the stock one crapped out after about 4 years & went with a yellow top, just seemed appropriate to redo the sound system as well. I already had 2 of these 10” DB Drive Platinum PLW (old gen) series subs. Already installed component speakers in the front door (those still need to be cleaned up), & had a decent 4 channel amp on the front speakers already, so I could reuse that. The box my one 10 was in, was a crappy truck box, & the amp powering it (before this) was a 2 channel amp pushing like 200wrms through each channel, but only one channel was ran to the sub. Needless to say it wasn’t very loud.
Some key points for anyone looking to install a good system in the stang. It is possible to do dual 0 gauge wire runs in the car without cutting any holes in anything, other than the giant rubber grommet firewall, that is already there in the passenger footwell. I did a vertical slice on each side of the main wire loom in the firewall & ran one run on each side. See picture.
Both 0 gauge runs can be easily hidden under the carpet. In order to get these bad boys in the trunk, once you remove the back seat side panel, you will see a giant round hole in the top area of the trunk, behind that panel that just came off. There will also be a foam pad as well. You want to run your wires under this foam pad. Run both 0 gauge wires under the pad & through the hole. I then ran them down behind the side panel/carpet in the trunk. I took box cutters & cut a vertical hole in the side of that to route them out from. See pictures.
You do want to run all your wires under the stock black convoluted tubing. There is tubing on each side of the car, however I only took a pic of the passenger side. The stock tubing has a natural arch to it. You don’t want to make the carpet poke up any more than necessary. As such you can route your wires under it & it won’t be any more raised up than it is stock. See pic. Disregard the power wire being ran under this. This is before I saw the round hole at the top that went directly in the trunk. Use the hole instead. Route your speaker wire, remote wire, rcas, & any other wires you need under this tubing though.
To get the power wire into the engine bay, it has to be ran from inside the car out to the engine bay. Push it through the firewall & take off the splash guard behind the front right tire. You will see it come through & there is small gap in the corner of this wheel well that will allow you to route it into the engine bay. This hole does look small, but it will allow 2 separate 0 gauge wires to be ran through it.
Best place I found for grounds was to mount them in the same place as the stock tail light ground. Take off the panel on the back of the back part of the trunk. There are like 4 push pins holding it in. Underneath this, you will see the stock grounds. I removed them & ground off some of the paint around the holes to get a good bare metal contact. There are 2 holes which are perfect for running dual 0 gauge grounds. See picture.
The carpet in the final pictures, is not the stock trunk carpet. This is grey subwoofer box carpet I picked up from my local Radioshack/hurricane electronics. It just happened to match the stock side piece carpet pieces perfectly. The stock trunk carpet can not be reused. It is too thick & uncuttable. It’s 2 thick pieces of carpet with some nasty thick glue holding both pieces together. It makes for a nice piece of stock carpet but isn’t reusable, I found this out when I tried to reuse it & cut it.
The box I’m sure I could have easily made myself, but between working overtime & the holidays, & for simplicity’s sake I stumbled upon zenclosures.com from one of the car audio forums I visit. I saw they did some great semi-custom car enclosure work. My 10” sub is a beast. It requires a larger than normal cutout hole to mount because of the basket design. You can request adjustments to the sub boxes before they send them. I had them increase the cutout diameter slightly so my sub would fit. Check them out here.
http://www.zenclosures.com/
You guys may be asking yourself why I ran two 0 gauge runs of wire. The reason is, I have pulled the car apart numerous times & do not wish to do this anymore in the future. Also in the future, like I said, I have another matching 10” sub that I want to put in eventually. At this time my alternator won’t allow it. Eventually within the next year or so I will probably get a new H/O alternator & then can just get a box, drop sub in, add amp, & wires are already ran. Basically these wires will stay in the car for the rest of the cars life & never have to be messed with again. I bought the oversized 0 gauge from knukonceptz. The real OFC, not the CCA wire. There is about 50-60 feet of 0 gauge wire in my car, between the power & ground wires. I’m also going to do the big 3 upgrade with the left over wire that I have. I bought the OFC stuff for a reason. I live in the south & it gets well above 100F in the summer. Couple this with underhood temps in a V8 mustang & factor in IF I did get the CCA stuff, it would raise the wire temp a decent amount due to the extra resistance CCA has. I read a link showing temp rise with CCA wire. This just seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. Melted plastic wire jacket in the car doesn’t sound like fun. Better safe than sorry.
I got some really nice lugs to crimp on the end of the 0 gauge. I purchased them from tinnedmarinewire.com. These aren’t regular lugs. They are completely sealed & tinned to prevent corrosion, very nice stuff. I purchased 1/0 gauge. I’m sure these would have been fine for actual rated 0 gauge wire from kicker/stinger, but the knukonceptz wire is underrated. It’s actually closer to 2/0 gauge. The 1/0 gauge lugs were a pain to get on the wire. I would advise to get 2/0 lugs if you use knukonceptz wire. Also the oversized 0 gauge wire from knukonceptz is a pain in the butt to get into my stinger 0 gauge terminals. If I had to do it over I probably would have went with stinger 0 gauge, since that would have fit the terminals better. Check out the lugs here.
http://tinnedmarinewire.com/wire/ind...b623f454fbd26d
The grommets used on the amp rack are stinger grommets, I got them off a ebay guy bagboy/darvex & in the auction it lists the exact size to drill the holes. I believe 1” for 0 gauge grommet & 5/8” for 4 gauge. Takes all the guess work out of what size your holes should be. I drilled all holes in amp rack prior to carpeting, then used spray adhesive to attach the carpet to the plywood & cut out the holes with an exacto knife.
I made the false floor/tire cover/amp rack out of like a 4 sheet thick piece of plywood. It’s plenty sturdy for anything. I got a like precut 4’x6’ piece from lowes for around $15. They have the giant size house sheets, then if you ask they should have smaller precut ones which is what you want. Have them cut it to the size you need at the store & it will fit in your mustang trunk to take home. It won’t fit without cutting it at the store. You would have to measure the piece of board that is stock glued to the carpet, I don’t remember what size it was. I wrote it down on some scrap paper, which is now gone.
I have some pics of the amp rack/false tire cover being made. Basically I laid all my amps/crossovers/distro blocks out on the board to see where I wanted stuff to go. Then I laid out my grommets to see how they would look. You want to make sure your grommets are spaced a little ways away from your amps/distro blocks, getting those cables to bend is sometimes a pain in the rear, if put too close. I laid out my grommets & drew a dot in the center of each one. Then used a ruler & drew a straight line to make sure they would all end up in a straight line.
Here is another picture of it with me running the 4 gauge wiring outside of the car in my garage. Run all the wiring outside of the car that you can. I ran the 4 gauge power & grounds from my distro blocks to the amp while outside of the car & ran the input wire on the crossovers to my amp.
Next you can see how I got it into the trunk. Slice a vertical hole in the side of your stock trunk liner & you can route both wires out of it & under the carpet & then they will go down through the holes in the top of the amp rack. This same hole you cut, you can also route your speaker wire for the sub through it.
I have a shot of the wires being ran & sitting in the trunk getting ready to be ran up through the amp rack.
A few shots of me test fitting stuff prior to final install.
Then the final finished shot of everything put together.
I set my gains modestly with a DMM. It’s loud enough to make me happy, & is probably at 75-80% gain level before clipping. I set the gains via 50hz test tone, recorded at 0db with headunit on volume 30/40. Playing music at 30/40 volume level there is pretty much no voltage drop. I have some digital gauges on my Avic D3. One is a volt-meter. It might drop down to 13.6-13.7 at most. So there aren’t any issues with voltage drop.
For a lot of car audio knowledge I would check out this website. It helped a lot when designing this setup.
http://www.bcae1.com/
Last edited by cegha; 01-06-2012 at 06:34 AM.
01-26-2012, 04:32 PM
#4
2nd Gear Member
Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: FL
Posts: 453
I'm interested in this as well. When I did my initial install I went with a sub thump enclosure because at the time I only saw that and the JL audio enclosure as my only options. the Subthump box feels like it's made of plastic. i would MUCH rather invest in the Zenclosure Convertible enclosure. It looks to be pretty decent given that it costs $150 shipped and the sub thump box costed me about $230.
01-27-2012, 09:38 AM
#6
2nd Gear Member
Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: FL
Posts: 453
Thanks for the feedback. There were not a lot of options for an enclosure for a convertible trunk. I contacted them yesterday regarding questions I had about air space and they responded via email within an hour. That left a great impression. I'll be buying my next enclosure from them for sure. What was the turn around time?
Thread
Thread Starter
Forum
Replies
Last Post
tj@steeda
Steeda Autosports
0
09-10-2015 08:39 PM
