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Need some audio advice!

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advice audio
2K views 15 replies 3 participants last post by  shoegazer 
#1 ·
Hello guys,

So at the moment I'm in a huge problem that to much isn't a big deal lol. The stock radio in my 02 Type S sucks, but we all already knew that. My car is loud, which cancels out more of the radio sound. I've been searching for something cheap, but still good in quality and I always heard Pioneer was a good brand so I found this:

http://www.crutchfield.com/p_130150MP/Pioneer-DEH-150MP.html

For right now, I wanna keep the bose amp. Maybe if someone could lay down exactly what I have to do to bypass the amp and what harness I need, I'll give it a shot off the bat. Right now, I feel like my speakers are lacking bass, it just sounds like a elevator speaker with no bass. Soooooo, I was hoping by installing this radio, I would get a little more volume and bass along with it. Is this possible? Also is this radio any good for the price? What harness and hardware would I exactly need? (Besides the radio bracket)

My friend is running the stock bose amp and speakers and his sounds 100x better than mine with an alpine radio and the EQ button turned on. The bass is rich and boomy, but not like cheap and crappy speaker kinda boomy, it sounds pretty decent to my ears. I'm not an audiophile, just like my bass ahaa.

BTW, I'm a huge noob to this stuff, and yeah I've been trying to research on here but it feels like a clusterfuck of info for me so if anyone could lay it down nice and simple I'd appreciate it!
 
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#2 ·
The Bose is gonna' die sooner than later. I'd go ahead and get rid of it. The instructions and what you need are in a sticky (why you should always...) at the top.

It was never a decent amp to begin with. Now it's over a decade old. And the Pioneer amp you linked to is just way better. I have a similar one. There is a decent amount of bass. But the speakers have to be able to reproduce it. And so much of the bass response is from the cabinet that the speaker is mounted into. It's tough to pull this off inside a car door. But some do better than others.

So... a decent amp and decent speakers will set you on the right course. I like the Pioneer speakers as well as the HU. You're not gonna' get any Miami bass out of them. But you'll get a decent, clear and pleasant sound quality from them. And, with enough power, you can raise the signal up above the noise of the road. Make sure all of your audio is normalized (98% or so) and the amp will have to work even less as hard.

Tony recommends to not even bother with the rear speakers. I do like having them. But I see (and hear) why he feels this way. Concentrate on the fronts, balance and EQ them to taste, and you'll be surprised.
 
#3 ·
So if I bypass the Bose amp I'll get overall much better sound quality and volume along with bass? I just checked out the thread you said and it looks like there's a lot of cable mess, I'll be willing to do it but is there a harness that does all of it for me by jumping all the speaker cables?

Also what do you mean by make sure all your audio is normalized?

I'm on the same page as you there, I rather have rear speakers as well haha
 
#4 ·
Yeah... The Bose just doesn't sound very good. The Pioneer line will give you more EQ options as well as a generally nicer sound. So far as the bypass...there is a harness. You still have to connect wires to it. But it's not a difficult job.

Normalized is when you raise the relative volume of your audio program. When you burn a CD-R; you can choose to 'normalize' the signal. If the CD had low volume; the amp has to raise it even higher than usual to bring it up to a listenable level. When you start off with almost 100% of the possible level at the input; the amp is amplifying more signal and less noise... sort of. Same thing for gain structure with a chain of amplifiers. Each needs to be at the optimum. Normalized digital audio just makes it all better down the line.

The only issue with rears that I can relate to is that the EQ to make the rears sound good is usually different from what the fronts need to sound good. So you tend to compromise one for the other. If you can blend them together and get a good sound... then it's cool. But what sounds good on one set usually doesn't sound good on the other. So the industry wisdom is to focus on the fronts and fill with the rears if at all.
 
#6 · (Edited)
The harness is available from Wal-Mart, Amazon, Crutchfield, etc. The exact model is escaping me right now. But it's in the threads. You want the 'bypass' harness; not the 'integration' harness. For all I know; there may be DIY videos on YouTube by now. The harness is made by Metra.

Whenever Tony gets back; he can lay it all down in detail. Or direct ya' to a thread that does it. But bypassing the Bose amp is just a matter of connecting wires under the passenger seat. If you're really handy; you can do it without the harness. The early pages of the 'why you should ALWAYS...' do it without the harness since it didn't exist back then.
 
#8 · (Edited)
Hey guys, just a little update and also in need of more help once again.

I ended up going with the Pioneer DEH-X6600BT and I did the Bose amp bypass. But then I hooked up some RCAs to the back of my headunit and ran them down under the carpet to plug into the wires going to the Bose amp/sub in the trunk. Everything was perfect and it was a huge improvement but I noticed that the sound gets really distorted after I pass volume 45+. The headunit goes to 63, and I can't get anywhere near there without distorting. I have the front speakers, rear speakers and sub in the trunk hooked up. All stock speakers. What do I have to do to not have distortion? Are the speakers not handling the power? Is the headunit maxing out on power? If the speakers maxing out, what should I upgrade to? I was looking at some Pioneer speakers but they're 30w RMS and my headunit is only capable of 14w RMS. I need to fix this!
 
#9 ·
That HU doesn't have sub pre-amp outputs. I think that you may be running full band program signal to the sub.

Not clear if it's just the sub distorting or all speakers. But the thing will distort at some point.

You have 14 watts per channel RMS. The stock speakers are capable of handling that.

Maybe turn off the RCA outputs and see how it works without them? Also... you may want to make sure that the RCA outs are set to subwoofer and not full range.

If all else fails, do a factory reset and start over.
 
#10 ·
I have the rear factory sub connected to the sub preamps I believe. During setup it asked me what I wanted to select, so I selected rear/sub after checking the manual. I believe its all the speakers that are distorting, it just gets muddy. The vocals get all muddy and the bass gets muddy as well. I tried starting over, but no luck. Could you recommend maybe some cabin speaker upgrades and I'll just run those 4 speakers off of my HU and just throw out the sub in the trunk all together.
 
#11 ·
Pioneer speakers are decent. Just use the tools on the websites to make sure that they fit.

Just FYI... I'll get a ton of distortion if I turn my system up near 75% of capacity too. Most amplifiers tend to have all their gain in the first 30% of the gain stage. The rest is headroom. Unless you have 'all your base' turned up to Miami-Maxx; it should behave at lower volumes.

If you can post a video of what it sounds like; maybe we can hear the problem. Keep your phone outside on the hood, though. It doesn't take much to overload the smart phone mic element.
 
#12 ·
Right now for the EQ settings on the HU it's set to Natural. When I first turned on the HU it was set to Powerful and it was too punchy for my taste. Then I turned up the bass boost to +2. It can go all the way up to +6. The rest was untouched and I changed the backlighting to red. It gets pretty loud, like it progresses nice and like I said earlier, it distorts at around 45, which is pretty loud but when driving with the windows down and the engine noise, it's not that loud. It's only loud when the car idles and I'm stopped. I'll try and get a video of what it sounds like. Would I be able to run pioneer speakers and not risk damaging them? I see speakers rated for 180 watts and I'm so confused on what to get honestly.
 
#13 ·
So long as your speakers are rated for equal or above the power output of the amp; it's fine. Be sure to compare RMS to RMS, peak to peak, etc. Most every 6.5" speaker is going to start to rattle rather than thump if it gets too much low end signal. And the way most guitarists get distortion is by overloading their amps. So there is a 'usable' and 'unusable' section of the gain stage. You may just need more power to cover up the road noise. Think of 14 watts like a 14 watt light bulb. You can spotlight it, floodlight it, or a little of both. But it gets no brighter than 14 watts. Amps are the same. They are rated for a specific power output (at a relatively low Total Harmonic Distortion percentage). Beyond that, the THD goes up.
 
#15 ·
You could just buy a HU with more power or buy an external power amp that would, basically, be just like the split Bose system. The HU would send a pre-amp signal to the main power amp where the signal would then be amplified to speaker level.

Beware, though... the lower end power amps will have something like 5% Total Harmonic Distortion as opposed to .05%. At high volumes, it can be like playing the music through a CB radio.

If you have connected the speakers via the harness and find the sound quality to be decent at mid-level volumes; you must require a really loud listening level. Your HU is usually loud enough for most folks.

How did the original Bose amp perform so far as loudness?
 
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