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a coupla month back we were contacted by a gentleman with a brand new 2014 Camaro SS. He has just gotten a new system installed at a local shop with some pretty good product (morel virtus, JL HD and stealthbox etc), and he wasn't happy with how it sounded. I took a listen and agreed with his assessment, and a quick look around revealed some other potential issues with the build. After some discussions, we decided on these goals:
1. retain all original equipment and add a DSP
2. dramatically improve the sound quality of the system
3. redo the install to maintain a level of integrity and quality
so lets get started. first, a look at this american muscle:
throughout the build i will show some before pics of what we found, so you can compare it to the shots of what we did.
first up the front stage and wiring. after taking the car apart, we can only surmise that the two sides of the car were done by two different people, as there were some pretty glaring differences in how everything was performed.
starting with the tweeter, one side had the tweeter glued to the back half of the pod, while the other side had it secured to the frontside of the pod:
here is his stock speaker installed before, via wooden spacer, we found some cut speaker wires and oddly enough, black paint on the front of the board, but nothing on the backside where its exposed to the elements:
the sound proofing treatment on the two doors were also very different. on the passenger side, the stock weather barrier was kept in place, and beneath it, the dynamat only covered the metal surfaces:
while the driver side did not retain the wather barrier, and the entire door was sealed with dynamat:
both sides feature the morel passives taped to the door card using dynamat:
the only wire running upfront was the remote bass knob cable, which is just laying about in the door sill:
far from the worst we have seen but still pretty peculiar.
so back to what we did to the car...first, we relocated the bassknob so it is within easy reach of the driver:
and of course, we still utlized the stock locations of the door for the drivers:
we ran a new set of speaker wires into the door:
and then, for the sake of consistency, we sealed each door with dynamat and then laid down a layer of STP foam to decouple the metal surface from the plastic door card:
i also utlized a set of GM speaker adapter brackets, covered the inside with CLD damper, and bolted the Morel Virtus midbass to them.
then the driver was intalled and bolted in place:
the door card, also received an abundance of CLD damper to help reduce resonance:
the same procedure was then repeated on the passenger side:
i then secured both morel tweeters, sans grill, to the backside of the oem tweeter pods to maintain consistency:
next, i ran the wires from the front to the back of the car, ziptied and organized every few inches:
1. retain all original equipment and add a DSP
2. dramatically improve the sound quality of the system
3. redo the install to maintain a level of integrity and quality
so lets get started. first, a look at this american muscle:
throughout the build i will show some before pics of what we found, so you can compare it to the shots of what we did.
first up the front stage and wiring. after taking the car apart, we can only surmise that the two sides of the car were done by two different people, as there were some pretty glaring differences in how everything was performed.
starting with the tweeter, one side had the tweeter glued to the back half of the pod, while the other side had it secured to the frontside of the pod:
here is his stock speaker installed before, via wooden spacer, we found some cut speaker wires and oddly enough, black paint on the front of the board, but nothing on the backside where its exposed to the elements:
the sound proofing treatment on the two doors were also very different. on the passenger side, the stock weather barrier was kept in place, and beneath it, the dynamat only covered the metal surfaces:
while the driver side did not retain the wather barrier, and the entire door was sealed with dynamat:
both sides feature the morel passives taped to the door card using dynamat:
the only wire running upfront was the remote bass knob cable, which is just laying about in the door sill:
far from the worst we have seen but still pretty peculiar.
so back to what we did to the car...first, we relocated the bassknob so it is within easy reach of the driver:
and of course, we still utlized the stock locations of the door for the drivers:
we ran a new set of speaker wires into the door:
and then, for the sake of consistency, we sealed each door with dynamat and then laid down a layer of STP foam to decouple the metal surface from the plastic door card:
i also utlized a set of GM speaker adapter brackets, covered the inside with CLD damper, and bolted the Morel Virtus midbass to them.
then the driver was intalled and bolted in place:
the door card, also received an abundance of CLD damper to help reduce resonance:
the same procedure was then repeated on the passenger side:
i then secured both morel tweeters, sans grill, to the backside of the oem tweeter pods to maintain consistency:
next, i ran the wires from the front to the back of the car, ziptied and organized every few inches: