Lariat B&O Full System Upgrade

[fusseli]

Here's the general dimensions of the B&O sub, if it helps anyone determine a shape or a volume. I'm still trying to decide what to build....

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[fusseli]

It's been a journey the last couple days. I decided behind the seat is too convoluted of a structure to build out of mdf, and that my gear in the larger under seat bin would fit in the spot where the stock sub was. So. The bin has been transformed into a sealed sub enclosure sealed with foam and a compression fit from speed nuts. I measured the volume with instant foam packing and decided not to try and build a box of that shape. This is a bittersweet determination for me. If I knew I would have the mounting depth I would have considered a beefier 8" sub. I'll stick with the Alpine S-W8D4 for now.

The amp assembly went in like a puzzle and I am worried it may need to be changed for the seat to close. Tbd.

 

[Mokume]

REW is a great program. You can get tons of info and help with it at AVSforum.com. You can also pick up an affordable mic like the Dayton Audio UMM-6 with downloadable calibration file from Parts Express.

+1 on sound deadening. Huge improvement for minimal cost and fairly easy to do. In my experience , closed cell foam treatments do more than stuff like Dynamat Xtreme but using both is ideal.

Here's a great video showing how it's done on a Ranger:

Not to hijack this thread, but this video may solve a problem I have with my beater '02 CR-V. Interior road noise at highways speeds in this car is on the verge of deafening, it gave me the ideal to apply sound deadener on the load floor section of the car.
I am certain that it is this expanse of metal that is acting as a sound board...just what I need, yet another automotive project in addition to what I already have pending on the 2020 Lariat...I must be a glutton!

 

[fusseli]

Not to hijack this thread, but this video may solve a problem I have with my beater '02 CR-V. Interior road noise at highways speeds in this car is on the verge of deafening, it gave me the ideal to apply sound deadener on the load floor section of the car.
I am certain that it is this expanse of metal that is acting as a sound board...just what I need, yet another automotive project in addition to what I already have pending on the 2020 Lariat...I must be a glutton!

Yeah someone already posted that video, the guy did a really nice job making a guide.

For the record the B&O sounds good by itself. I would highly recommend to anyone with that system that wants to stay stock but still upgrade to apply sound deadening to the doors and rear wall.

 

[Scottopia]

Fusseli, how much of each did you end up using on the doors and back panel?

 

[Mokume]

I'v

Yeah someone already posted that video, the guy did a really nice job making a guide.

For the record the B&O sounds good by itself. I would highly recommend to anyone with that system that wants to stay stock but still upgrade to apply sound deadening to the doors and rear wall.

I've already ordered 2 sets of Kilmat 80 mil 36 sq. feet material primarily for the Honda, any leftovers will be used on my '20 Lariat.
When you mention the doors, insofar as sound system enhancement goes would it be more advantageous to apply sound deadener to the interior of the door or to just the inner door skin where the trim panel mates too?
Perhaps both?
Road noise is amazingly quiet in my '20 as it is, however I do see the advantages of applying Kilmat to the cab rear wall, that panel is large sounding board as well.

 

[Ranger's My Middle Name]

Yeah someone already posted that video, the guy did a really nice job making a guide.

For the record the B&O sounds good by itself. I would highly recommend to anyone with that system that wants to stay stock but still upgrade to apply sound deadening to the doors and rear wall.

This what what I am considering. I appreciate your speaker upgrades, but think it might be a bit out of my capabilities and needs. Seems to be a big improvement from just sound deadening alone! Nice wrote up and progress so far!

 

[Wayne Kubeck]

Have you decided to upgrade the center channel speaker set up?? And the sub setup you are doing is exactly what I was thinking.....looking at the shallow mount rockford fosgate 8" or 10" subs

 

[fusseli]

18sqft of the asphalt aluminum back stuff was not enough. I used 20sqft for 4 doors, back wall, sub spot, and wish I had got more. The Noisco stuff is a lot thicker than Streetwire, and cheaper. Glad I went with them. 36sqft of the 150mil foam was plenty. In hindsight I would have just gotten HVAC aluminum tape for finishing rather than the name brand stuff that just has their name painted on it.

Yes, the Ranger already is pretty road quiet, but let me tell you, now that I've done that it's luxury car quiet. You can literally talk at a whisper and hear yourself at 45 mph. It's just amazing. The sound deadening was the most time consuming and most work, but absolutely worth it.

Plus, the vibrations I had with the stock B&O are now gone. I have the 6" Alpine Type Rs set to full range, pairs perfectly with the sealed sub. The bass is so articulate and tactile, with no rattles or buzzes, I'm chuckling here. This is not an SPL machine mind you, it just sounds and feels really really good.

Overall the system is simply outstanding. I wasn't sure how much of an upgrade it would be, but as a hifi hobbyist I can say for sure it was worth every penny. It now has the ability to make me giggle with how good it sounds, this was not the case before. Few systems I've ever heard sound like this. This is the first time in a car, to be at this level, for me. The dsp time alignment makes a huge difference. No EQ or anything and I'm pretty happy with here it's at. The Zen was basically plug and play, everything worked on the first try.

I have not done anything with the center channel yet, I have through about getting the tiny cheapest amp I can find for it. I think only chimes, park aid, and phone audio would use that channel.

I'm too distracted with the success right now and need to post more pics!

My last 5% to get to 100 is to go back to the rear doors with better foam rings, gonna add the Roadkill rfk I mentioned a few posts back. That and the 5ch amp fits where it is but i may have an overheating issue because it pretty uniformly gets pressed on by the back seat carpet. I may mod the back of the back seat for more air space.

The front B&O speakers are pretty impressive for stock but not good enough for me. More than meets the eye, I still declare. The cones are impressively stiff for paper and there are extra foams in the front doors Ford skipped in the rears. Notably, the front speaker brackets are a dead ringer for the Metra F150 speaker brackets, so minimal foam is needed to seal to the cabin airspace, unlike the rears.

 

[fusseli]

The rear speakers need tall foam rings like these using the Metra 825605 brackets. The front speakers are shown before I cut the foam down to about 1/2", not much is needed in front since the speakers are close to the door skin already.

I mounted the component's crossovers in the hole in the door frame circled since it's a bump out already there is a perfect space, it's also in range of the speaker plug and central to the woofer and tweeter. I adjusted the tweeters to -6dB since the Ranger has really good tweeter locations that are already ear level and pointing at you as possible, Alpine gives 0 to -8 in 1 dB increments. If anything I would go one more to -7 since I can barely "hear" the tweeters directly otherwise they blend perfectly.

 

[fusseli]

I was able to get the rear panel back in over the sound damping but had some trouble since the old retainer plugs aren't long enough anymore, I can't use them. I'll have to find some longer replacements. For now it's held in well enough from the top plastic piece and from being compression fit in by the 1/4" mdf amp board I made. I put speed nuts in where the B&O amp bolted in so my amp board is cinched in solid, and holds the rear panel in. I also stuffed acoustic foam into every nook I could find that didn't interfere with something.

I had an oh shit experience with the middle seat belt. Unbolted and dangling it became permanently locked as if the truck had rolled or something. Nothing would unlock it until I finally rebolted it into its housing and that magically made it happy again, trip to the dealer avoided.

The top rear seat was kind of a pain to mount again, the threaded receivers need to be persuaded into position to realign the bolts. There is also quite a lot of deadening material in the Lariat's rear seat I noticed, it's a lot heavier than it looks. This is probably how they quite down the noise from the rear wall vent noise.

 

[fusseli]

My unconventional sub enclosure seems to work so far. Rather than using the storage tub I decided to use the entire storage bin chassis itself, lined with asphalt deadening to block all the holes. Put a perimeter of foam in to seal the subwoofer baffle that I made down, which is a firm compression fit via #10 speed nuts I put in the original retainer clip locations. I filled the whole space loosely with Acousta-stuf (the real deal).

If I have issues or decide to change later I would consider the fiberglass enclosure for that spot like the one on ebay Australia.

There's a bar in the seat that the sub needs to be lined up to avoid otherwise someone and or the seat could crush it, which is why my sub is forward in the corner like it is. I made my sub baffle out of 1/2" mdf with a 1/4" mdf brace glued in for more rigidity, for 3/4" total, but this combo along with no storage bin gets the surface as flush as possible without a bottom mounted sub. Otherwise the bottom of the seat is a hollow space with flimsy carpet, which my sub actually slightly protrudes into.

 

[fusseli]

Shockingly, the Alpine Type-R tweeters actually snapped in to the rings from the OE tweeter mounts! To be sure it was solid I hot glued them anyway, and decided to put in the foam rings behind them since Alpine provided them.

 

[fusseli]

I didn't solve the mystery of the OE B&O tweeter channels. The wiring comes in from the head unit or something, not the B&O amp, yet Sync was smart enough to turn off the tweeters when I had the B&O amp disconnected. Beats me. I didn't need to solve this since I just ran new wires ~12" from the component crossovers.

In bigger and more controversial news, I am 90% sure that the Zen A2B has removed the enhanced engine noise!!!! Driving in sport more and spiritedly, the extra characteristic noise is definitely not there anymore. Nothing but the very muffled engine noise from outside. Neener neener to the non-Lariats!

Lastly, here's all the B&O stuff together.

 

[P. A. Schilke]

My unconventional sub enclosure seems to work so far. Rather than using the storage tub I decided to use the entire storage bin chassis itself, lined with asphalt deadening to block all the holes. Put a perimeter of foam in to seal the subwoofer baffle that I made down, which is a firm compression fit via #10 speed nuts I put in the original retainer clip locations. I filled the whole space loosely with Acousta-stuf (the real deal).

If I have issues or decide to change later I would consider the fiberglass enclosure for that spot like the one on ebay Australia.

There's a bar in the seat that the sub needs to be lined up to avoid otherwise someone and or the seat could crush it, which is why my sub is forward in the corner like it is. I made my sub baffle out of 1/2" mdf with a 1/4" mdf brace glued in for more rigidity, for 3/4" total, but this combo along with no storage bin gets the surface as flush as possible without a bottom mounted sub. Otherwise the bottom of the seat is a hollow space with flimsy carpet, which my sub actually slightly protrudes into.

Hi Fusseli

Okay, based on our development of the Ranger Tremor, the sub required a specific volume of the cavity with a tinny lattitude of plus or minus. What does your sub require vs the volume you created? I hope your volume is within spec.... Otherwise, as we found out on Tremor, we failed quite a few Subs. To little or too much seemed to be the deathnell of the speakers.

Best,
Phil Schilke
Ranger Vehicle Engineering
Ford Motor Co. Retired

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