2005 Pontiac GTO - Long Overdue Refresh

I've owned this car since 2010, and it's been through a lot of iterations over those 11 years. For 3-4 years, it was a dedicated road course car even ... but I retired it from the track in ~2014, and converted it back to mostly stock form, to turn into a nice daily driver (even though it only gets driven a 2k miles a year or so).

Back then, I put a Pioneer 80PRS head unit it, and dug out my old amps and installed them as well. A Rockford Fosgate Punch 250a2, and a PPI 4240. Definitely two old school amps I also threw some MB Quart components up front, some Tang Band 6.5" subs in the rear deck, and disconnected the rear speakers all together. For power, I installed a two-fuse block under the hood, and ran two 8ga power wires back to the trunk.

So here is where I started this refresh from:







... And this is how the car has been since 2014 until just a few months ago when I decided to refresh the system due to me driving the car a lot more often lately.

At 1st, I just wanted better bass in the car, so I replaced the Tang Band subs + RF Punch 250a2 setup with a Rockford Fosgate P300-12, which is a self-contained 12" woofer and 300w amp, in a sealed enclosure. I also moved the RF amp to the 6.5" door speakers, to give them more wattage, since the punch 250 delivers 50wx2 vs the PPI which is 30wx4.

Here was the result:






This definitely added the low extension I was looking for, but it still wasn't up to par on what I was looking for in terms of clarity.

So the next thing I decided to do was replace the components with something higher end, and get a single 4-channel amp with more power, to simplify the amp setup and significantly clean up the trunk space.

So I picked up some Hertz Cento components, and decided to try the new Toro class A/B amplifier as well. So my end state at that time, was to arrive at the following:




As I started reading more, and planning the install ... I decided that I should do some sound treatment while the doors were apart ... which led me to gutting the interior and treating everything (not just the doors) with second skin CLD, MLV and CCF. Man, what a slippery slope this can be!

Then I started thinking about the power, and questioning the two 8ga power runs to the trunk. Learning about CCA vs OFC, and everything else which comes along with that topic. Having a power distribution like this:



... while it may technically "work", I began to realize it was far from ideal and wouldn't provide me with any room to scale up in the future. So I decided to replace the power and ground wires too ... I mean, I'm in this far, right? So why not ....

So I ended up swapping out the two 8ga CCA runs with a single 2ga OFC run, added two distro blocks in the trunk, 4ga OFC runs to the amps ... for both the power and the ground wiring ... resulting in this:







Ok, so this is pretty good, right? The sound definitely improved all around .... sound deadened, MLV blocking road noise, CCF removing rattles, Hertz components, more power on tap ... I even upgraded the grounds under the hood ... but ... still, I felt the clarity wasn't quite what I wanted.

So more reading, more research, and of course ... I need to tune the system with more than just my ears ....