I was going to post in the What Did You Do With Your 80 thread but decided to make a separate thread since I have a lot of pictures and might be useful for others in the future.
Over the last few weeks I've been working on a major audio overhaul. Audio was never a priority and I still had most of the factory speakers for the last 7 years. I do enjoy nice sound quality but didn't know the first thing about audio equipment and would never consider myself an audiophile. I upgraded the front door speakers a while back with the cheap Pioneers that everybody recommends but that was about it. When I bought the truck it had an aftermarket deck and I just ran with it.
Now that I'm mostly done with suspension and drivetrain I decided to focus on the little things again. First off, huge thanks to @TYM4FUN I pretty much just copied what he did and he was a huge help answering a lot of my audio newb questions. Here is a list of all the components I used:
- Alpine iLX-W650 head unit
- Alpine KTA-450 amp, 50W x 4 RMS (for door/dash speakers)
- Polk DB652 6.5" coax speakers for front/rear doors
- Kicker DSC40 4" coax speakers for lower dash
- Rockford Fosgate P300-12 300W RMS powered sub
- Metra 70-1761 wiring harness
- Auto-VOX rear view camera (Amazon, about $25)
- MicroBypass Alpine Parking Brake Override
In my view this is about as simple as you could get for a good audio equipment upgrade without going too overboard.
First up was some sound deadening. Used Kilmat CLD (constrained layer damper) + Noico CCF (closed cell foam) on the outer door skins, CLD on the inner door skins and some more CCF on the door cards. I know MLV (mass loaded vinyl) is the way to go for true noise reduction but that seemed like a pain in the ass to install so I decided to skip it.
CCF over the CLD
CLD on the inner door skins
Front doors
CCF on the door cards
It's a huge difference. Before the doors sounded like hollow tin cans and now they are truly solid. It's much quieter driving down the road.
Then I started on the dash speakers. I know a lot of people get rid of these but they make a huge difference. With the right type of speakers you can hear the highs blasting from the dash vs the mids in the doors. Simple speaker swap here.
The passenger side speakers will only fit after you remove the factory amplifier that sits on the ECU
No fitment issues with the driver side
The rear doors are the ones that involve the most work if you want to run 6.5" speakers as you need to do some cutting to enlarge the opening. After the opening was enlarged, I used some weatherstrip foam to seal the gap between the door card and the door skins as these speakers will now mount ON TOP of the door panel vs underneath like the factory setup. This is the foam I used from Amazon. For the front doors I ran two rows of this, essentially giving me a 1/2" tall seal.
With that out of the way the Polks easily mount to the door panel with new holes and longer screws. These things sound amazing with the 50w to each channel.
Front speakers are drama-free. Plenty of clearance with the door closed too.
Now the head unit. This is a mech-less receiver which means it's digital only and has no CD player. This allows it to be super slim. The matching Alpine amp mounts directly behind the deck and gives a very compact package. Even with the amp back there, this package is still slimmer than your standard single DIN CD player. Having the amp behind the deck makes wiring that much easier and allows to use all factory wiring with the Metra harness.
Soldering everything to make it look pretty.
Here's the entire setup, soldered and wrapped. As you can see there are very few connections to make once you have it all wired up. The two plugs at the bottom plug into your factory harness. Then you have your subwoofer/camera inputs and power/ground for the power pack amp. Oh and the other little plug you see sticking out is for my sub's amp remote power.
The Rockford sub. This thing sounds awesome. Very hard bass kicks vs annoying boom boom lowrider bass. The box is mounted upside down to fit better against my fridge, that is why you see the wiring harness going up and over the box. I still need to figure out some brackets or straps to secure this in place.
The head unit itself is great. Has all the modern features and does Apple Car Play/Android Auto. I'm a huge fan of Android Auto for the various app integrations but Google Maps takes the cake. It's hard to not have AA once you've gotten used to it. I only wish Gaia would be added to the support list!
$25 Amazon back up cam works well. The front camera port is currently unused, will eventually install one on the front bumper somewhere.
Google Maps via Android Auto.
I still need to learn how to tune the amps and EQ but so far everything sounds great. I can turn the volume up all the way and have no distortion from the door/dash speakers. The HPF on the door speakers is set to 80 Hz. Anyway, hope this is helpful and makes you guys spend some money
Over the last few weeks I've been working on a major audio overhaul. Audio was never a priority and I still had most of the factory speakers for the last 7 years. I do enjoy nice sound quality but didn't know the first thing about audio equipment and would never consider myself an audiophile. I upgraded the front door speakers a while back with the cheap Pioneers that everybody recommends but that was about it. When I bought the truck it had an aftermarket deck and I just ran with it.
Now that I'm mostly done with suspension and drivetrain I decided to focus on the little things again. First off, huge thanks to @TYM4FUN I pretty much just copied what he did and he was a huge help answering a lot of my audio newb questions. Here is a list of all the components I used:
- Alpine iLX-W650 head unit
- Alpine KTA-450 amp, 50W x 4 RMS (for door/dash speakers)
- Polk DB652 6.5" coax speakers for front/rear doors
- Kicker DSC40 4" coax speakers for lower dash
- Rockford Fosgate P300-12 300W RMS powered sub
- Metra 70-1761 wiring harness
- Auto-VOX rear view camera (Amazon, about $25)
- MicroBypass Alpine Parking Brake Override
In my view this is about as simple as you could get for a good audio equipment upgrade without going too overboard.
First up was some sound deadening. Used Kilmat CLD (constrained layer damper) + Noico CCF (closed cell foam) on the outer door skins, CLD on the inner door skins and some more CCF on the door cards. I know MLV (mass loaded vinyl) is the way to go for true noise reduction but that seemed like a pain in the ass to install so I decided to skip it.
CCF over the CLD
CLD on the inner door skins
Front doors
CCF on the door cards
It's a huge difference. Before the doors sounded like hollow tin cans and now they are truly solid. It's much quieter driving down the road.
Then I started on the dash speakers. I know a lot of people get rid of these but they make a huge difference. With the right type of speakers you can hear the highs blasting from the dash vs the mids in the doors. Simple speaker swap here.
The passenger side speakers will only fit after you remove the factory amplifier that sits on the ECU
No fitment issues with the driver side
The rear doors are the ones that involve the most work if you want to run 6.5" speakers as you need to do some cutting to enlarge the opening. After the opening was enlarged, I used some weatherstrip foam to seal the gap between the door card and the door skins as these speakers will now mount ON TOP of the door panel vs underneath like the factory setup. This is the foam I used from Amazon. For the front doors I ran two rows of this, essentially giving me a 1/2" tall seal.
With that out of the way the Polks easily mount to the door panel with new holes and longer screws. These things sound amazing with the 50w to each channel.
Front speakers are drama-free. Plenty of clearance with the door closed too.
Now the head unit. This is a mech-less receiver which means it's digital only and has no CD player. This allows it to be super slim. The matching Alpine amp mounts directly behind the deck and gives a very compact package. Even with the amp back there, this package is still slimmer than your standard single DIN CD player. Having the amp behind the deck makes wiring that much easier and allows to use all factory wiring with the Metra harness.
Soldering everything to make it look pretty.
Here's the entire setup, soldered and wrapped. As you can see there are very few connections to make once you have it all wired up. The two plugs at the bottom plug into your factory harness. Then you have your subwoofer/camera inputs and power/ground for the power pack amp. Oh and the other little plug you see sticking out is for my sub's amp remote power.
The Rockford sub. This thing sounds awesome. Very hard bass kicks vs annoying boom boom lowrider bass. The box is mounted upside down to fit better against my fridge, that is why you see the wiring harness going up and over the box. I still need to figure out some brackets or straps to secure this in place.
The head unit itself is great. Has all the modern features and does Apple Car Play/Android Auto. I'm a huge fan of Android Auto for the various app integrations but Google Maps takes the cake. It's hard to not have AA once you've gotten used to it. I only wish Gaia would be added to the support list!
$25 Amazon back up cam works well. The front camera port is currently unused, will eventually install one on the front bumper somewhere.
Google Maps via Android Auto.
I still need to learn how to tune the amps and EQ but so far everything sounds great. I can turn the volume up all the way and have no distortion from the door/dash speakers. The HPF on the door speakers is set to 80 Hz. Anyway, hope this is helpful and makes you guys spend some money
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