Project White Noise

[ThirtyThreePointThree]

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.

I actually do have plans for a spare tire eventually. The 3/4" MDF is temporary to have a good mounting base because I was tired of hearing stuff slide around when I would take a corner at fun speed ;)

I'm planning on building a box with shelves to place up against the back of my seats to house all of my amps/DSP, and this box will be all one unit with the sub enclosed as well. It should be far enough back that I should still have spare tire access, we'll see how that goes though...Like the hinge idea btw.

For the wiring question, I was lazy and just spliced into the existing wiring infrastructure(there will be pics of this mess under the driver's side kick panel in a few days when I run the tweeter channel lines). I haven't spent much time looking at how painful the routing through the door hoses would be...I'm thinking super painful as newer cars only have more wires. With the stock 18AWG wires, I'm not too worried about signal to the mids, but I am worried about the door woofer. I'm eventually gonna throw somewhere around 70W RMS at it...

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[ThirtyThreePointThree]

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

Absolutely. These speakers are rated at 250W RMS PER SIDE, so you could actually throw up to 250W RMS at the input of each crossover.

 

[neozeric]

Absolutely. These speakers are rated at 250W RMS PER SIDE, so you could actually throw up to 250W RMS at the input of each crossover.

My plan is to run an LOC to the amp and run that into the included [assove crossover and using factory wiring to the 3 separate speakers. Amp runs 175 Watts RMS bridged at 4 ohms. Any problems you see?

 

[TheColorRed]

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.

LOL...this is funny because I did the exact same thing in the exact same spot.

Thank you Ford for putting a bolt only on the negative battery terminal and not on the positive side

 

[Bryman]

My plan is to run an LOC to the amp and run that into the included [assove crossover and using factory wiring to the 3 separate speakers. Amp runs 175 Watts RMS bridged at 4 ohms. Any problems you see?

In this case where would you mount the PP passive crossovers - by the factory amp in the kickpanel?

 

[neozeric]

In this case where would you mount the PP passive crossovers - by the factory amp in the kickpanel?

Yes up by the factory amp somewhere, then steal the factory wires to run to the speakers

 

[ThirtyThreePointThree]

My plan is to run an LOC to the amp and run that into the included [assove crossover and using factory wiring to the 3 separate speakers. Amp runs 175 Watts RMS bridged at 4 ohms. Any problems you see?

Not other than you'll need to run your own tweeter lines from the crossover output.

 

[neozeric]

Tweeters are not separate wires from the amp?

Will the factory wiring be ok for the 6.5 driver?

 

[ThirtyThreePointThree]

Tweeters are not separate wires from the amp?

Will the factory wiring be ok for the 6.5 driver?

No, there's only the leads going to the mids from the kick panel area. I actually still have not found exactly where the lines split either lol. It's probably tucked into the door somewhere

That's the whole reason why I've had to do what I've done, and why I plan on running tweeter lines this weekend :-)

As for the factory wiring being okay, idk for sure yet either. Knowin me, I'll probably chance it and then see how it sounds

 

[neozeric]

Thanks. Looking forward to seeing your results this weekend

 

[ThirtyThreePointThree]

So I got off work early tonight and was able to get the tweeter lines run, so I finally have a 3-way system set-up.

Crossover Settings:
*Sub/Door Woofer: 63 Hz
*Door Woofer/Mid : 400 Hz
*Mid/Tweet: 4000 Hz

I'll be playing around with the tuning/calibration over the next few days, so I'll post up some opinions of the set-up after that.

For my tweeter lines, I used 2-conductor wire wrapped in techflex for protection against the metal/sharp edges, held down with electrical tape:

To run the lines, I taped the wire to a coat hangar and used the hangar to push through the small openings in the dash area. Here's some pictures of the tweeter lines...

Driver's side:

Passenger's side:

I was incredibly relieved to find that there was some space directly behind the center of the dash that I could run the passenger's side line through:

and out and into the driver's side area!

then the wire got tucked up into the carpet behind the pedals

and it comes out at the driver's side kick panel area along with the driver's side line that was dropped

Once the lines were staged, I snipped my connections to the rear speakers and connected these channels to the tweeters. These are channels 6 and 7 on my MS-8.

Here's a picture of the driver's side tweeter connection. It looks pretty much the same on the passenger's side as well. I had the A-pillar sitting in my lap at the time. Once it's connected, the wires are just bunched up in the a-pillar

Here's some pictures of the craziness behind my driver's side kick panel

This one is kinda zoomed out. The right wires are coming out of the factory amp and are going up to my MS-8 input. The left wires are the orange wrapped wires coming from the MS-8 hooking up to the factory speaker connections as well as my newly ran tweeter lines:

Here's a closer look at all of the connections. Make note of the blue/red and grey/black wires. These are the power and ground wires for the factory amp respectively. DO NOT CUT THESE WIRES. You can also see a small blue wire with a white line hooked up to a red wire. That's the factory amp remote lead. The red wire I spliced into it goes to my trunk to turn on my MS-8 and sub amp.

I'm going to update my original post as I got the chance to take pictures of the MS-8 Input/Output wires that I was missing

Thanks for reading. I'll post some opinions of the set-up after a few days. After that, I'll be hooking up to an amp and building an enclosure for everything

 

[CooterK]

Hey man, just wanted to pop in and give you my suggestion for your battery terminal. I use this thing for every install I do, its basically a requirement for me at this point if any of my friends want me to do work on their car, they gotta order one. I'd get one ASAP and get the power wire off that fuse box. You are going to have a hell of a ground loop and the MS-8 auto calibrate isn't going to like that at all.

http://www.knukonceptz.com/mobile-audio/battery-terminals/sp/ultimate-positive-battery-terminal/

Also like to point out that your power wire is routed through the hole that the Redline hood struts use, if you ever planned on getting those. Your install looks great so far though man.

 

[Bryman]

Wow, great update and pics. I have to admit though that I am beginning to lose my nerve seeing how much is involved here. Do you know what gauge the factory wires to the speakers are?

 

[ThirtyThreePointThree]

Hey man, just wanted to pop in and give you my suggestion for your battery terminal. I use this thing for every install I do, its basically a requirement for me at this point if any of my friends want me to do work on their car, they gotta order one. I'd get one ASAP and get the power wire off that fuse box. You are going to have a hell of a ground loop and the MS-8 auto calibrate isn't going to like that at all.

http://www.knukonceptz.com/mobile-audio/battery-terminals/sp/ultimate-positive-battery-terminal/

Also like to point out that your power wire is routed through the hole that the Redline hood struts use, if you ever planned on getting those. Your install looks great so far though man.

Thank you!!! I don't hear any whine like I have before from a ground loop, but I can hear a slight hissing noise which just sounds like a noisy overall signal. I'm thinking about re-doing my ground bolt connection and sanding the area down to bare metal to address this, but I will definitely look into your suggestion as well. You raise a good point with the loop. I may wanna get this one fixed before I throw my 4 channel amp on top of everything. Seriously, thanks for the tip on this one :clap2:

Not thinking about getting the hood struts, but good point to raise for anyone out there who may be wanting to do both.

 

[ThirtyThreePointThree]

Wow, great update and pics. I have to admit though that I am beginning to lose my nerve seeing how much is involved here. Do you know what gauge the factory wires to the speakers are?

It looks like 18 AWG, but it may just be standard 22 AWG. I don't know 100%, didn't take that close a look at it as the leads to work with were pretty short.

Don't lose nerve! It's really rewarding as you're getting it done, just like all modding and tinkering is . I will say, I have spent a fair amount of time over the past few weeks getting everything set-up, but I've been taking it slow and doing everything in increments. If I did it all at once, it probably would have taken me less time. So far I would say it's been worth the effort cuz every day I drive to and from work now it just puts me in that much better of a mood(even with traffic that negates most of the fun aspects of a mustang), and that's what a car should be about :cheers:

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