Project White Noise

Hey everyone. Finally decided to start a build thread for the car documenting everything I do to the car. Callin' it White Noise for now. This is my daily driver. Picked it up November 18, and it already has 3900 miles on it. Previous car was a 1999 Toyota Solara that I learned to drive on and traded in November (after almost 9 years with it and at 186,000 miles, it was time...)







The car is an EcoBoost Premium non-PP Automatic. I chose this over the GT for a few reasons, none-the-least being TURBO. Speaking of, let's talk about mods.

****Mods****
Interior:
*JBL MS-8 DSP, JL Audio 12W0-v3 subwoofer, Rockford Fosgate R500x1D amplifier
*Precision Power P65.c3 3-way component speakers: 2/15/2015

Exterior:
*Wheels: 18" x 8" Falken RT-7M's
*Tires: Continental Extreme Contact 235/50-R18
*Tint. 35% on the sides 5% in the back.

Suspension:
*BMR Vertical Links TCA045: 10/21/2015
*BMR Sway Bars SB044/045: 10/20/2016
*BMR Cradle Lockout CB005: 10/20/2016

Powertrain:
*Precision Turbo 5558 JB: 10/26/2016
*Full Race Street Exhaust: 10/26/2016
*ATM Intercooler: 10/16/2016
*Stainless Works downpipe: 10/26/2016
*MMR CAI: 10/26/2016
*Tial Vee Port Pro BOV: 10/26/2016
*UPR Dual Valve Oil Catch Can: 10/26/2016
*Tune by Tune+ via COBB Accessport

OLD MODS:
*MAP CAI, FFTEC IC, and FFTEC Cold side charge pipe->Upgraded to Precision 5558 and ATM IC

Mods in the works:
*10/15/2016: I purchased an E-85 auxiliary fueling kit which needs to be installed.
*11/3/2016: Purchased a set of slightly used GTPP shocks/struts which needs springs to complement

Mods considering:
*BMR SP080 Springs to go with the GTPP shocks/struts
*Brake light tint: still up in the air between BigWorm and AnchorRoom
*Headlight tint
*Mesh grill
*Velossa Ram Air Duct
*Roush spoiler, black
*SVE Drift Wheels wrapped in 275/40-R19's or spacers for current wheels
**Swap 3.15's to 3.55's...would make the turbo even more fun!! (If anyone knows what all is needed for this, feel free to PM me. Legitimately interested)

Here are some pics of my installation/wiring for my aftermarket audio stuff for anyone interested...

It all starts with this thing right here, the factory amp:



It's located up by the driver's side kick panel. The brown/grey plugs contain all of the amp's outputs to your speakers, plus the brown connector has a power cable(blue with red stripe), a ground cable(black with grey stripe), and a remote wire(small blue with white line).

For wiring, I snipped all wires except the power/ground wires on both plugs about 2-2.5 inches from the plugs(need to leave room to work with on the wire!). Then routed the front left/right/center channels to the ms-8 input. The ms-8 output routed back to the same area where I snipped the wires, and connects to the wires that lead to the speakers. Here are some pictures of all the connections up behind the driver's side kick panel:



For routing the wires, I used a combination of 2-conductor and 4-conductor wire. I then wrapped my wires in some stuff called techflex to bundle the wires together and make it visually easier to see which were output and which were input haha. They started under the kick panel...



... and went under the carpet under the driver's side seat.



I had to pull out the seat and pull up the carpet to do it right. Wasn't enough room under the door sill panel.



It comes out where the carpet meets the backseat and enters the driver's side rear panel



Then goes up under the rear side panel and through a hole where the seat belt feeds through



and finally out into the trunk...



I routed the power cable through the passenger's side the exact same way, except I tucked that guy up under the door sill panel. I recommend trying to go under the carpet like I did on the driver's side. Made putting the panel back on a PITA...



Getting access behind the carpets in the trunk is easy. Just pry up this little rivet thing...



Then all that's holding it up is this magnet thing...



Meanwhile, in the engine bay...



I mounted a circuit breaker to the side of my fuse box and mounted my power cable to one of bolts in there. I will be honest, THIS IS NOT THE PROPER LOCATION FOR THIS(so don't give me a lecture, I know I'm being lazy!) Ideally it should be attached to the (+) terminal on my battery, but ford made the weirdest terminal I've ever seen so I need to change it out to mount the cable to it.



Also, credit to heinoceros because I totally used his idea for routing my power cable through the firewall, except I cut off the rubber nipple and routed through that. I need to work on that part again anyway, so I'll snag a picture of that sometime later too.

Last but certainly not least, the ground cable! I mounted it to the bolt holding down the springs for the folding mechanism of the driver's side back seat...



It then routes under the carpet to the same space where all of my signal wires are, and I cut a slit in the side of the carpet to route the cables to my sub amp and ms-8(tried to keep the sub amp ground as short as possible!).

Taking out the back seat cushion is pretty easy by the way. There are two clips that hold it in place, one in the middle of the passenger's side, one in the middle of the driver's side. They look like this...



The red circle is the clip. You can push the lever circled in blue to release the seats. You'll feel it when you push your fingers under the seats in the middle of each side.

Here was phase I of my trunk. Complete mess with wires everywhere.



I'm going to re-route the ms-8 input/ouput cables as I don't like them just dropping in from the top. I'm going to cut a slit like I did for the ground cables. Plus, i'm going to get a 3/4" piece of wood cut out to fit in the trunk and have everything drilled down.

Tip, if you plan on doing this kind of stuff, get one of these!!



A kit will cost you like $15-$20, and it makes taking out these panels/rivets way easier, plus you won't break anything!

More pics to follow as I will be doing my speaker replacement in a couple of weeks along with my catch can and CAI replacements!!! Thanks for reading!!

TLDR: A white ecoboost premium got some new rims and some aftermarket audio work done. More cool stuff to come.

Good luck with the build! Will be following for sure. Like what you're doing with the stereo. I'm coming from a 2012 FX4 that I put a complete JL setup in. Including wiring and connectors. Clean sweep, signal summing device, HD900 amp, and 10w0s.

huge help!

Thanks very much for posting! Looking forward to what you do with the cable/amp cleanup in the trunk. Also would like to see your sub setup

I just picked up a new ms8 for a great deal on ebay so looking forward to your updates! Hope you don't mind me stealing some of your ideas!

Bryman said:

I just picked up a new ms8 for a great deal on ebay so looking forward to your updates! Hope you don't mind me stealing some of your ideas!

Click to expand...

How is the MS-8 sounding? I was thinking of adding something like this as well. I just wanted to know if it made THAT much of a difference.

Dillon Whitis said:

How is the MS-8 sounding? I was thinking of adding something like this as well. I just wanted to know if it made THAT much of a difference.

Click to expand...

I don't know - it hasn't shipped yet. 33.3 did say in another thread that it made a big difference. Waiting on him to update his thread . ;)

Thanks for the write up, especially concerning aftermarket car stereo strategy. Now officially following you around until the audio job is complete, lol.

Made some edits to my original post. I put up better pictures of the car and shrunk all of the pictures in general for easier viewing.

Got my Precision Power P65.c3's! Installed them over this weekend. They don't have amp'd power yet, and the mid and tweet are on the same channel currently. I'm basically running the 3 way like a 2 way, yet they still sound much better than the stock speakers with the ms-8 pushing them. Currently I have the mid/tweets crossed between the door woofer at 4kHz. Eventually, I'll have the mids crossed with the woofer at 400Hz and with the tweets at 4kHz as per the recommendations of PP's manual.

Some pictures...

Before:



After:



Here's behind the A pillar with the stock setup. Had to do some cutting to release the 3 contact points holding the tweeter up, then some general man-handling got it removed:



Then, I popped out the tweeter grill, and spent some time with a dremel tool so I could snugly screw in the new tweeter:





But I'm ok with how it looks

The mids side by side. The kick panel woofer comparison is pretty much the same thing but scaled up:



wiring for the speaker:



Made use of the stock mid mounting bracket and screwed down the new mid with 4 screws:



For the woofer mounting, I drilled out 4 holes to use for mounting screws and screwed the woofer directly into the door.



I'm going to do some more research around this before I throw amplified power at it. There's probably some more things required to properly accommodate more power. Did throw some dynamat down in the enclosure. That's not even the half of it lol. Much more was added after that camera shot.

Here is step 2 in the evolution of my trunk. This is temporary:



Put down some 3/4" mdf to screw everything down. Sub has L brackets behind it holding it down. Plans for the future are exciting. I'm considering a total of 3 amps plus the DSP, so I'm thinking I'll need to get creative with the mounting. Check back in a few weeks to see what I do with that. Expect a lot of work with some mdf

Thanks for reading

Awesome update!!

Awesome, thanks so much for all the pics and details! Looking forward to what you do with the DSP/amps.

ThirtyThreePointThree said:

Made some edits to my original post. I put up better pictures of the car and shrunk all of the pictures in general for easier viewing.

Got my Precision Power P65.c3's! Installed them over this weekend. They don't have amp'd power yet, and the mid and tweet are on the same channel currently. I'm basically running the 3 way like a 2 way, yet they still sound much better than the stock speakers with the ms-8 pushing them. Currently I have the mid/tweets crossed between the door woofer at 4kHz. Eventually, I'll have the mids crossed with the woofer at 400Hz and with the tweets at 4kHz as per the recommendations of PP's manual.

Click to expand...

Sorry for the newb questions, as I don't know a whole lot about car audio. Are you using the PP 3-way passive crossover for just one input channel for the two outputs (mid/high) and keeping the woofer on its own dedicated channel to the MS8? Is it possible to run it this way?

Awesome, make sure to document everything in pics as it's supremely helpful to those of us who haven't hacked a modern system before. I take it you have no plans for a spare tire? When I installed my bottom layer from plywood, I made a hinged door in order to pull, replace the spare tire.

As an aside, are you running new wire from the amps all the way to the 3-way speakers, or just cutting in at the amp and using the existing door wiring? It looks supremely difficult to get wire through the door-canal thingies.

Bryman said:

Sorry for the newb questions, as I don't know a whole lot about car audio. Are you using the PP 3-way passive crossover for just one input channel for the two outputs (mid/high) and keeping the woofer on its own dedicated channel to the MS8? Is it possible to run it this way?

Click to expand...

No, I am not making use of the Precision Power passive crossovers at all. I honestly do not know if using the passive crossover like that is a viable option as I have never tested that. I don't think it would work because the passive crossovers would have been designed around using the resistance of each speaker's voice coil to generate the proper filters(LowPass Filter/HighPass Filter equations use resistance and capacitance to determine the resulting cut-off frequencies). Hope that answers your question bryman.

This is definitely not a newb question as an improper component set-up can damage the speakers in very little time (like seconds). If you would like some more info., keep reading...(this will explain why I have mine set-up the way they are currently. It will be kinda technical and lengthy. You've been warned...)

Here's some good rules of thumb to keep in mind when setting up components:
*Playing a frequency too low for a driver is much more likely to cause damage in a short amount of time. Try to drive a tweeter with a subwoofer output channel and see what happens...POP!
*Playing a frequency too high for a driver is much less likely to cause damage, so long as you aren't throwing too much power at it. In this scenario, the driver is not able to oscillate very much (if at all). Why could this be a problem? Because the driver oscillating causes air movement which not only produces sound but also cools the voice coils. So, you can damage a speaker by playing too high of a frequency, but you have to be throwing enough power at it to overheat the voice coils...every speaker is of course different, but if you are well within the speaker's rated power, you should be fine.

To be 100% safe, probably best to just not hook the mids up until you have all 3 channels separated. I just wanted a little extra treble in the meantime cuz my sub is loud compared to the rest of my system right now. Mmmm...bass :love:

So, how are mine hooked up?

My mids/tweets are currently being driven on the same output channel, and they are hooked in parallel such that my ms-8 terminal sees a 2-Ohm load. At 2-Ohms, the MS-8 is rated at 30W, so roughly 15W of power is sent to the mids and 15W is sent to the tweets. This also means that my mids and tweets see roughly the exact same signal input. So...what input signal are they seeing??

Currently, I have the mids/tweets crossed over at 4kHz with the door woofer. So signals above 4kHz are sent in full to my mids/tweets, and signals below 4kHz are attenuated (this one is set to 24db/octave IIRC) before being sent to the mids/tweets. This is why i say i am currently running a "2-way" system, as the output channels going to my front speakers are divided into 2 areas of frequency range: those above 4kHz, and those below 4kHz. It's basically the acoustical equivalent of a 2-way component system. So, now that I know I'm sending frequencies higher than the intended range of the mid, and I know how much power is behind them...I need to ask, what's the power handling capability of my mid?

For power ratings, I read on DIYMobile that these components are roughly rated at 25W RMS for the tweets, 50W RMS for the mids, and 100W RMS( yeah buddy) for the door woofers. Based on the above logic, my mids should not be seeing damage.

Regardless, I bought a 3-way component set. This 2-way nonsense with a 3-way set will most likely be fixed by Monday Pics of the wiring job will be taken.

if you ran an amp (150 watts RMS) to the set with no DSP could you just run the passive setup ?