M Roadster Audio Round 1 Diary

• April 21, 2004
  
  • Audio
    The Metra 44-PW530 arrived from audiooutfitter.com. I should've been smart and looked in my trunk before buying. There's no way to get it in there. lafayetteradio.com is wrong. I might be able to fit the 44-PW32.

• April 16, 2004
  
  • Audio
    The Metra 44-PW530 shipped from audiooutfitter.com. It's coming UPS ground, and scheduled to arrive on April 21st. UPS tracking # 1Z6922270343535726

• April 15, 2004
  
  • Audio
    I ordered a Metra 44-PW530 from audiooutfitter.com for $38.73.

• March 2, 2004
  
  • Audio
    I am considering a power retracting antenna, if I can fit one in the stock location. I don't listen to AM or FM radio very often, but when I do I'd like better reception. My Alpine head unit has a power antenna output to put the antenna up when the tuner is on and put it down when the tuner is not in use. Crutchfield has the Metra 44-PW6, which looks reasonable. It looks like it needs 10.5" under the fender; that might be impossible.

    lafayetteradio.com says a Metra 44-PW530 fits the Z3. I'm thinking the 44-PW32 might be better, it only needs 8.5" under the fender.

• August 12, 2003
  
  • Audio
    I should've updated this page a long time ago...

    I have long since returned the rear 4" rear speakers. They weren't providing anything of real use. I'm now running the Alpine MRD-F752 bridged for the left and right front speakers. I put the factory rear speakers back, and they're not connected to anything. I also replaced the 6-channel MicroXLN cable with a 4-channel MicroXLN cable. so I don't have dangling RCAs in the trunk.

• August 8, 2002
  
  • Audio
    I took a picture of the amp in the trunk for someone on a message board:
    

    Those black corners at the bottom of the amp are electrical tape on the carpet, marking the position of the amp. Three full-length strips of the hook part of 2" velcro are on the back of the amp, but there's nothing adhered to the carpet. The hook part of the velcro sticks to the carpet like glue. The amp has not once moved even a little bit, and it's quite difficult to pry it off the carpet. In fact, the velcro holding the trunk liner to the trunk gives before the amp comes off of the carpet, if you just pull up on the amp and don't hold the carpet down at the same time.

    I have a good amount of spare cable length on the amp, to permit pulling it out of the trunk without completely disconnecting it. I can snip a few cable ties and set it on my rolling toolbox/worktop without disconnecting anything. The power and ground leads go around the amp (hot is visible in picture, ground is behind amp in picture) because they're too thick to just bundle up under the trunk liner somewhere. Of course, I've never had to do remove the amp post-installation, but I can if the need arises... :-)

    Looking at this picture and my calendar, it's probably time to trim the cables and do the final finish work so it doesn't look like it's just sitting in there. It's not terrible, and I do keep my trunk clean, but 2 properly placed holes in the carpet would allow me to hide nearly all of the wiring. So would endcaps, but apparently Alpine doesn't make them (Rockford-Fosgate is a better choice in this regard).

    Note I can still get mine and the wife's golf bags in the trunk at the same time. No complaints here about the loss of trunk space. However, note that the DW///M Mobility Kit consists of glass cleaner, Speed Shine, interior cleaner, towels and disposable wipes, not a useless air compressor. ;-) You can squish a bottle of Armor All glass cleaner and Griot's Speed Shine into the bin for the M Mobility Kit and it won't move. Shove your small towels, interior cleaner and wipes in a bag and stuff it behind the bottles, put your microfiber drying towel in its bag in the spare space under the carpet on the right, roll up a big cotton towel in your window blanket when you put the top down, and you can detail at any time. :-). Before someone flames me about Armor All, the glass cleaner is the only Armor All product that ever touches my cars, and I can't discern a difference between it and the Griot's Window Cleaner I use when I'm at home. A lot of the key to cleaning glass is in the wipes. Any reasonable glass cleaner will get at hard water marks/etches, but the wipes are a huge part of getting streak-free windows. I use Griot's disposable wipes (the blue ones).

• May 24, 2002
  
  • Audio
    I'm still very happy with the Sunfire subwoofer.

    Tonight I picked up a new panel removal tool and hope to go at my tweeters this weekend.

• May 2, 2002
  
  • Audio
    I'm so glad I didn't dig right in to making a subwoofer enclosure. I picked up my Sunfire subwoofer yesterday, and installed it today (would've done it yesterday if I hadn't been attending a Red Wings playoff game). Just what I was looking for; I can hear and feel kick drum, the enclosure doesn't resonate like the original HK enclosure, the mounts are machine screws with threaded nut clips (no rattle), and it dropped right in according to the instructions. As IndyZ noted on the www.bimmer.org message board, the rubber spacers are intended to push the rear panel out a bit to accomodate the excursion of the rear-firing driver and passive radiator.

    I am not using the Sunfire amp, and have no intention of doing so since my Alpine is working just fine with the Sunfire subwoofer. I have done some initial tweaking of the crossover and bass EQ on the amp, and will finish this weekend along with tweaking presets on my head unit.

    The Sunfire is a significant improvement over the factory HK subwoofer. It's also a significant improvement over my hacked HK subwoofer (with Kicker driver). It would be hard to beat in the constraints of the factory subwoofer location. My seat thumps with Carter Beauford's bass drum. As a drumset player, that makes me very happy. I won't be winning any competitions, but there's only so much you can do with a 6.5" driver in the factory space. Kudos to Sunfire.

    As for the Sunfire amp, I have no doubt that it's a very nice amplifier. I've owned Carver gear in the past, and loved it. But in my case, using the Sunfire amp would be going back to using two amps, and if I wanted it to be factory, back to the original HK main amp. That's not going to happen; I love my Alpine amp and it is working very well with the Sunfire subwoofer. The factory door tweeters are now at the top of the list (and the last thing remaining to replace); I have my MB Quart tweeters waiting to be installed from the component set. I don't have a big issue with the factory door tweeters once fed from a decent amp, but they don't match up well with the MB Quart crossover frequency and I'm tired of maintaining odd EQ settings to compensate, and tired of the out-of-phase high frequencies due to me having the 2" and 1" tweeter wired in parallel (same crossover frequency, and these drivers have a fairly wide intersection of frequency response). It's time for them to go, just in time for warm weather. :-)

• January 26, 2002
  
  • Audio
    I managed to route the MicroXLN cable through the rubber grommet, and I didn't have to remove a lot of parts. The key was the fish tape (I happen to have a nice long nylon one from some work I did on our house when we moved in). I have zero audible noise. Since I finished while the sun was still shining, I had to go out and drive for a few hours to test it. :-) It was 40 F on my way home, but I was nice and cozy with the top down (windows up, JD windscreen installed, heater on, heated seats off since that made it too warm). Probably a bad idea since I've got the flu, but what the heck, we don't get many 40 to 50 F sunny days in Michigan at the end of January!

    To route the MicroXLN cable, I removed the rubber grommet and removed the driver's side roll hoop. I did not have to remove more trim, nor the roll hoop console. I did remove the screws to the piece of trim that's under the roll hoop, and rocked it up and forward a bit to route the cable by it going from the subwoofer hole to the driver's side of the car. This piece is glued at the front, but it hinges up and forward more than enough without trouble and without coming unglued. I routed this part of the cable path using the fish tape, then used the fish tape again to get it to the trunk. I fed the fish tape from the trunk, grabbed the looped end of it from the roll hoop access hole with a wire coat hanger, then zip-tied the MicroXLN cable to the fish tape and pulled it to the trunk. I had to pull fairly hard, and of course had to wiggle it a lot to get the big plastic splitters through the grommet hole (because it's already used for harness, antenna, etc.), but it's in and it works dandy. All I need to do now is tie down some wires in the trunk and put all the carpet back in.

    I used the 6 meter (19.68 feet) MicroXLN cable. I wound up with about 2 meters (6 feet) of spare cable in the trunk (my amplifier's inputs are on the driver's side, fairly close to the grommet). The 5 meter cable would be better, but I didn't know what cable path I'd end up having to use when I started this project so I bought the 6 meter knowing it's better to err on the long side than the short side when running a cable. :-) I wouldn't try anything shorter than 5 meters because it wouldn't leave much slack to work with while routing the cable, and it's good to have a little slack if you need to move your amp around in the trunk once in a while. I left about 18" of slack at the head unit side (enough to pull my head unit out and rest it on the top of the gearshift w/o stressing the cable).

    So, the test drive... awesome. I got on the local interstate, which is 3 lanes each direction with a 70 mph speed limit (and around here, even the tractor trailers are going at least 10 over). Drove a few miles to pass the local truck stop so I could drive adjacent some tractor trailers. Turned up the volume (Bare Naked Ladies in the CD player), and I couldn't hear the truck but my ears weren't bleeding. Hooray for clean power and decent kickpanel drivers! The subwoofer enclosure is still annoying at highway volume; I can hear it resonating. It sounds like the loudest resonant frequency is just under 200 Hz, but that must be an overtone because my crossover is set well below 200 Hz. I can't wait to build my new subwoofer enclosure and finally be rid of that annoying problem (if the factory one was just less resonant, it'd be a whole lot better). In the meantime I'll optimize the crossover and gain settings and save a few tweaked equalizer settings on the DSP in the head unit.

    I still haven't installed the tweeters from my MB Quart components. I'm still running the factory tweeters in parallel on each side, connected to the MB Quart passive crossovers. They were not getting enough power relative to the kickpanel speakers, so I moved the tweeter gain setting on the crossover to -1.5 dB instead of -3 dB. This seems to be just about right (not overly bright with EQ set to flat), but I need to listen to some other CDs before being confident about it. -3 dB is definitely too quiet as a base setting, unless you like having no imaging. :-)

    The amp is sweet. It's efficient and even after prolonged loud listening, it doesn't get very warm (it wasn't warm to the touch after an hour of highway listening). It even matches the color of my car (unplanned, but nice just the same). We'll see how hard it taxes my battery in the long run, but I don't anticipate measurable problems; I don't listen to loud music all of the time, and I have no evidence of troublesome current draw during loud listening (dimming lights or instrument panel, etc.). I'm glad I spent the money to get a nice class T amp.

• January 23, 2002
  
  • Audio
    I checked, and I can route the MicroXLN cable through the grommet on the driver's side into the trunk. I do have to remove more parts to get at it, and right now I've got the hardtop on (which means I can't really get to it at all). I need a helper to help me remove my hardtop. Hopefully I'll find one on Friday. I was able to carefully remove the grommet from the trunk, but working on this part of the car w/ the hardtop on is silly. I tried to feed my nylon fish tape, but it's very hard to look for it with the hardtop on. I need to pull some more interior trim, and removing the driver's side roll hoop and its console would help a lot (see http://www.mz3.net/articles/228.html). I don't have Torx 30 and Torx 40 bits in my toolbox (sigh, one day I'll buy a whole set instead of buying them one or two at a time), so I'll need to pick some up at the hardware on Friday evening.

    It's possible I'll pick up noise by doing this, since I will be adjacent a harness in the grommet. However, I don't expect any problems; I don't think there are any major current sources. It should be less prone to problems than the grommet on the passenger's side (my only other option), which carries the main battery leads.

• January 22, 2002
  
  • Audio
    I laid out the Monster MicroXLN cable from the dash through the center console etc. to the subwoofer hole, and from there I patched into a set of Rockford Fosgate twisted-pair RCA cables. I did this because RCA jacks won't fit through the gaps to the trunk. This is temporary, but works fine for the moment. There is enough length on the Monster cable to route it to the hole where the harness enters the trunk on the driver's side, and there's an empty spot in the rubber grommet there. That's what I'm going to try to use. If that looks too difficult to fish through, I'll just make a hole to run it straight through from behind the subwoofer. Note: anyone who tells you that the MZ3 trunk is sealed from the passenger compartment is full of baloney. :-)

    I installed my StreetWires amp wiring kit. I now have AWG4 wire on the amp power and ground, both connected to battery terminals. I tested the whole system as it stands today, and there's zero audible noise. This is good news. I still need to rid myself of the spliced Rockford Fosgate cables and route the MicroXLN cable for the whole run from head unit to amp.

• January 20, 2002
  
  • Audio
    I noticed a small amount of white noise with the volume all the way down and the engine off; presumably microprocessors somewhere. There was also some alternator whine when I listened carefully. I also wanted to take advantage of my head unit's subwoofer pre-amp output, and was intending to run a new RCA pair from the head unit to the amp. With the noise, I decided I wanted new noise-resistant RCA cables for all channels (avoid pre-amp to amp runs through the twisted pairs in the harness). I chose a Monster MicroXLN 6-channel cable. These things are darn nifty; roughly the diameter of a single shielded RCA, and very pliable compared to typical shielded RCA cables (and hence not difficult to route). I bought the 6 meter version from www.6ave.com

• January 19, 2002
  
  • Audio
    I wired the kickpanel speakers to the crossovers. I wired the factory 2" and 1" tweeters in parallel to the crossovers. For fun I temporarily wired the amp to the crossovers and dropped an mp3 CD in the head unit with some Dave Matthews, Bare Naked Ladies, et. al. Wow. I mean WOW. Even with the subwoofer and rear speakers disconnected, I'm getting much better sound, and I've got MUCH more headroom than I ever had with the factory system. It's amazing what a bunch of clean power and a few better drivers (the kickpanel speakers) can do for an audio system. I can't wait to get the new tweeters and rear speakers in, and everying wired up.

    Everything should get wired up this weekend. Then I'll just be waiting for the new rear 4" speakers (which will just drop right in) and trying to find a door panel reomval tool and some time to do the tweeters. By the time top-down weather arrives in Michigan, I'll be ready to roll.