[simplicityinsound]

Hey guys,

Before i get into the build log, let me say that this build turned out to be one of our favorites.

As you may know, I have always enjoyed doing installs that has an understated, almost OEM appearance. My perfect build would be one that upon seeing it for the first time, nothing jumps out at you and screams AFTERMARKET, but you realize there is a lot of fabrication involved and the small details slowly starts to flow into your mind.

My own skill set and experience was always a limiting factor before, but now with Joey on board, that barrier has been busted clean through...and in my opinion everything really came together for this projects.

The car is a 2013 VW Touareg Tdi, owned by one of our own forum members. The goals were:

1. achieve a nice level of sound quality utilize the oem headunit

2. maintain as much room as possible in the cargo area and retain the spare tire

3. achieve a look that completely flows with the vehicle's interior

initially, this was going to be a pretty straight foward build, with a simple carpeted amp rack and sub enclosure on the two side walls, but as we got into it, and upon realizing that no stretchy carpet matches the stock shade at all, things took an interesting turn and joey really went all out to make it "factory looking custom"

lets get started.

With the factory navigation headunit, we had to work with the stock signal source. so as customary with any new car's oem headunit, i analyzed the signal, here ist he factory curve with the bass setting slightly elevated (or else it drops out like a cliff below 60-80hz), at very low to pretty high settings, as you can see, for most of the volume setting, there isnt much dynamic eq and its generally flat with the exception of the bottom end and the dip around 125, both of whcih i corrected a lil bit for with the input eq on the dsp:

for processing we used a Mosconi 6ot8DSP, and all tuning can be done from the front seat via a BT enabled laptop:

I installed the amp's remote bass control knob in a blank panel right behind his shifter:

which is actually a lil modular piece that i had to take apart and hide the guts of the bass knob:

lets move on to the front stage, which is all morel.

a set of Morel Elate MW6 woofers went into the stock lower door location. First i ran new speaker wires into the door:

and placed a coupla blocks of focal blackhole tile behind the speaker opening:

then the rest of the door card got some STP deadener treatment:

i then fabricated these spacer rings by match routing the oem spekae mounting flange:

and coated it with several layers of truck bedliner to protect them against the elements:

the spacer was then bolted back in place using oem hardware:

and the morel secured in place:

we also got to use a pair of foam baffle rings from a friend of ours in the industry, it helps to eliminate unwanted reflections behind the stock door grille. it double sticks to the baffle perfectly and when the door card goes back on, crushes it slightly and forms a acoustic seal of sorts.

a bunch of focal BAM xxxl composite damper went onto the door card to both reduce resonance and to provide a barrier between the metal door panel and the plastic door card:

the same process was then repeated on the passenger side:

for the rest of the front stage, we went with a CDM880 dome midrange and a Supremo piccolo tweeter. the decision was made very early on to do them in the A pillars. Originally, i wanted to sink them as much as possible as the customer once again wanted to balance SQ but still keep a low profile.

but upon taking off the A pillars, i realized there is a metal brace, along with a crap load of wires and hoses that prevents me from sinking the speakers in. this means that i had to start from the surface of the oem pillar cover and if i did both relatively on axis, it would result in a very protruding pillar and the tweeter would need to be spaced out quite a bit to precent it blocking the midrange almost completely.

so after some experimentation and drawing on past experience, i aimed the midrange, which is better off axis, more towards the front dome light area, while the tweeters were aimed relatively at the opposite listener.

the one really cool thing that happened is that while flipping through an upholstery book, we found a material that is almost an oem match! the only thing is that it was a headliner with a foam backing. nonetheless, we ordered it.

after some bitching, i managed to peel the foam completely off the front cloth material, and wrapped the pillars with them. this resulted in an oem 100 percent OEM match!

I will just have the pics do the talking

 

[simplicityinsound]

lets take a look at a few build pics.

first the pillars, which was wrapped in a similar cloth material, was coated with resin to harden the surface. i then cut out the ring baffles for the two drivers, with their own flush mounting wall:

the rings were them aimed and seucred to the pillars:

cloth was then pulled, resin applied, allow to harden, and then pillars were reinforced from the inside via a duraglass/resin mixture:

filler was then applied and both pillars sanded smooth:

in order for the colors of the stock plastic and bondo to show through the thin cloth, i painted both pillars with tan spraypaint:

then each pillar was carefully wrapped with the headliner material:

i also stripped and repainted the two grilles with satin black paint so they would match cosmetically:

next comes some pics of the wiring bundle as it goes from the front of the car to the back, the only thing different is the oem battery location UNDER the front seat, where i secured the fuseholder. (who the heck at VW thought this battery location was a good idea?)

 

[simplicityinsound]

so thats it for the front of the car. moving onto the main attraction the cargo area.

as mentioned the idea was for custom yet somehow flow with the lines and colors of the interior.

so we took inspiration from the oem material, which has a tan vinyl, brown vinyl, and silver trim ring look, along wtih of course, tan carpet. this color combo can be see for example, in this rear door panel:

since i forgot to take a cargo area before the build, here is pretty much the same car to give you an idea of before and after

so lift up the tailgate and here is what you see.

two fiberglass addition, one on each side. on the driver side, a single illusion audio Carbon C10XL 10" sub resides in an enclosure of around .7 cub feet, while on the passender side, a mosconi AS200.4 amp powers the midbass with 200 watts RMS and the sub with close to 700. both racks feature a combination of tan carpet, tan vinyl, brown vinyl, painted silver trim ring just like stock, both also has a painted silver mesh to protect them.

i really think pictures dont do this install justice, i couldnt stop looking at the marvel Joey came up this whole week

but here are a bunch of pics of everything:

 

[simplicityinsound]

under the front part of the cargo floor, there used to be just foam and dead space, i used it instead to secure a second Mosconi AS200.4 powering the mid and tweeter with 200 watts each, and a 6ot8DSP controlling everything.
you can see the back of it when you lift up the floor (more pics later)

a final shot of the car from a distance and also of the trimmed oem cargo mat back in place:

so now onto the build pics, and once again, there are quite a bit of skipped steps in between haha, but here are the ones that joey took:

first the driver side carpet was tapped off, a front baffle fabricated:

fiberglass was then laid down, allowed to cure and test fitted in the car:

next the front baffle was trimmed and attached, filler applied and sanded, the extra void had cloth stretched over and resin applied:

filler was then apllied and the entire top half sanded smooth:

vinyl was then applied to the top half, while the bottom was tapped off and ready to accept tan carpet, this was a backed non flexible carpet that matched well but could never be used to wrap around complex shapes:

and the illusion carbon XL wired up and installed:

the two piece ring which took some fancy router work, with the outter one primered and painted silver, and the inner one in factory matching brown vinyl:

for the amp rack, pictures are a bit scarce lol blame joey!

so the area the amp would sit in was tapped off and then later cut away:

to keep the entire rack as low profile as possible, joey fabricated a rack out of 1/8" stock, welded it together, and painted black. and then it was bolted to the car with rivetnuts:

then we skipped foward a bunch and here ist he rack before upholstery:

followed by a singular pic of the start of the trim ring process:

and finally, the entire piece upholstered and installed, along with a close shot of the press fit trim ring:

finally, some wiring related pics of the stuff under the cargo floor, first i soldered and tapped the front output signals from the stock headunit, which ironically, resides in the passenger side rear quater panel:

then i put in a crap load of rivetnuts into the floor, these secure the amp, the dsp, and two distribution blocks. i used plastic spacers of various sizes to level the dsp and the amp:

and finally, a shot of all the wiring below the floor:

so thats it. i think the pics speak for themselves, but for me personally, i couldnt be happier about how it turned out cosmetically.

sonically, the car is quite good as well, good impact on midbass, i tuned it for very smooth and mellow highs. staging is very high and well centered (right below the rear view mirror), width is suprisingly good for where the speaker are located, and depth is decent. the c10xl does a great job of filling hte cabin with smooth bass, the only downside is that the filter on the stock headunit seem to get rid of some ultra low freq stuff...i think we are going to investigate recoding the HU for flat line level out, as over the past few days, ross-tech, who sells the vagcom, could not provide us with a usable code.

anyway, thats it, thank for reading


i also created a quick youtube video of the front stage and cargo area for your viewing pleasure:

Bing

 

[vwdave]

I have to say that this is one of if not my complete favorite install on this site. great job, I really like the work you did to keep it looking as factory as possible. Great job!

do you know which factory head unit that is? is that the RNS-510? cant get a good look from the odd angle. if thats the RNS-510 then I might change to it, as people have said that the 510 has too much internal EQ.

 

[BlueAc]

Awesome work... As usual. Do you guys have a cross country shipper you use? Lol

 

[vwjmkv]

amazing work bing!

 

[Audio-Concepts]

This build is gorgeous! Nicely done guys!!!

 

[Frequency]

Very nice and understated, did think for a moment there on that initial trunk shot that it was all running off 1 amp. I recall an article from ages ago with Steve Brown (or maybe Chris Yato?) from Alpine talking about their Civic where he said something along the lines of "who says you have to display all the gear if you can get a nice aesthetic with just some of it", which you've achieved in spades here , beautiful.

 

[mark620]

Sweet as usual..

 

[DJTrevLuv]

Awesome job! Super clean install!

Trev

 

[shawnk]

Oh man. So nice and clean and yes definitely has the quality "oem" look.

Just fanstastic!!!

 

[JayinMI]

Hmmm....that looks familiar. lol

That's an RNS-850, isn't it?

I see examples of things I would do differently on the next one.

This looks great. Truly amazing.

Have your hands recovered from the acetone yet? (And do you have a spray bottle of rubbing alcohol handy now? lol)

Glad to see the Mosconi amp fit in that dead space in front of the cargo area. I would certainly use that space, instead of hiding the amp in the right rear corner.

Did you ever get the HU recoded to low level out?

I've been waiting to see this for a while!

Jay

 

[JayinMI]

What do you use to make a mold like that? A lot of guys use 1.5 oz mat, from what I've seen, but I've been wondering if starting my first layer or two with .75 oz mat would be a better start in areas where I have a lot of contours. I've had reasonable success using 1.5oz, but the piece I have in mind has a lot of contours and stuff to work around.
Also, how many layers do you typically use?
Thanks.

Jay

 

[miniSQ]

i can't stop staring at the pillars....totally the best looking pillars i have ever seen...simply amazing.

There may be more to the car...and it may be equally as nice, but i won't ever know, because i cannot get past these pillars....#game over #perfection #omg bob

 

[quietfly]

this build is totally amazing!! the pillars....... DROOL!!!!

 

[12vTools]

Definitely some of the sickest fab out there.
You guys Keep Raising the Bar


IOTY.

 

[slowride]

Bing, another fantastic build. You and Joey turn out some awesome rides. Subtle but great. Does that model have the Dynaudio system? Coding for the RNS in the lowers models are different. Wonder if that would help change that dip. Unless its already done. If we have a Touareg in the back tomorrow I can try to check its coding.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

[rugdnit]

Bing, another fantastic build. You and Joey turn out some awesome rides. Subtle but great. Does that model have the Dynaudio system? Coding for the RNS in the lowers models are different. Wonder if that would help change that dip. Unless its already done. If we have a Touareg in the back tomorrow I can try to check its coding.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

It's a LUX. I figured I there wasn't much point in buying the Executive if Bing was just going to upgrade it. Would love to know about the coding for sure-- THANK YOU!

I wanted to say a big THANK YOU to Bing and JOey! They really delivered here. Couldn't be happier with the install and execution.

 

[rton20s]

Killing it once again. Your guys' work never ceases to amaze me!

That being said, JOey will never get installer of the year if you guys keep neglecting motorized amp racks and flashing LEDs.