After some drama, drama, drama at the car audio installers, I finally got my car back last night. All the channels were where they should be, and the gains cranked up.
I wanted to give a brief summary of the work done to the speakers in the rear, and it may come in handy for other XK8/R owners. Also, I touched on the Rockford Fosgate signal processor, as I can't begin to recommend it enough if you are picky about your music, as it has sooo many features to 'tune & tweak' your sound stage.
Currently in the car is the older 6w0 units from JL Audio.
Replaced by the newly released 6w3s
Allright, back to the project. First thing the guys did is remove the speaker grilles. Here is what the grille looked like prior to getting dirty.
Now, pull off those grilles after getting the tabs bent from the top. (You have to remove that top interior trim piece) Ignore that little red dashed line for now.
Now, to remove the backseat and expose the subwoofer box and wiring. Ignore that circle for a few moments. I'll explain later.
The first they did was fit the new JL Audio 6w3v3 subs into the existing enclosures. After the install and a quick test, they found these enclosures were poorly insulated, so they Dynamatted the entire interior of the box. Mission complete, that really helped.
Now to find a way to mount the 5.25" matching coaxials to the components up front. Here are the speakers that were installed.
As I mentioned previously, the installer found a location just above the bar that was on top of the sub enclosure, and a couple brackets later to the locations shown by the red arros, and these speakers were solidly installed. They were unobstructed on all sides, barely squeezing in there, plus the top trim piece didn't interfere with it either. Since they didn't take a picture of the new speaker installed, I had to 'draw' the location and approximate size on this image.
Remember that other image that i asked you to ignore the dasked circle...well here is again. The installer cut the extra material above the sub so that more of the speaker would be unobstructed frontwards.
Here is the side panel with the extra 'material' removed. you can just barely see the new coaxial above the bar and sub enclosure.
I thought that the partial obstruction of the speaker would hurt the sound quality in the rear, but after a quick test of the rear, it was plenty of volume to help contribute to the overall sound stage produced by the fronts. In fact, when all said and done, the gain on these rear units were several notches below the fronts, and that's WITH the partial blockage of the woofer/tweet.
Seat replaced and grilles reinstalled...clean exterior, no sign of modification.
For the last two days, I've been tuning this thing, trying to get the sound
juuuuust the way I want it, and it's still not perfect.
Conclusion
The old 6w0 subwoofers were by no means poor at putting out adequate bass, in fact, most users will be totally happy with the results. I had been spoiled by a 10" JL Stealthbox for the last 3 years, and therefore, wished for something more. Well, the beefier 6w3v3 subs
did not disappoint! Not only did they hit just a bit harder on those 'punchy' notes like a base drum, but it went lower in frequency than the previous units. Now I could feel those bass guitar notes, say around 40hz. The 6w3s were $150 each, and install was in the neighborhood of $400. Not bad at all.
I'll take the opportunity here to describe the main 'ingredients' of the system - the amps and signal processor.
The amp on the left is a 300watt, mono amp which drives the twin subwoofers only. Gain at about 1/2 on the amp, and -1 on the 3sixty.2. The big amp is a 400 watt, 4-channel amp driving both front and the rear speakers. Perfect power, almost not enough. Gain on that one at 3/4, and -1 on the 3sixty.2.
So, the signal processor that i have blabbed on and one about...
This thing is cool, check out the various screen captures on the different speaker configuration pages. It can be operated by a typical Windows based PC, Mac, PocketPC handheld, as well as a Palm based smartphone. All adjustments are done once the unit is connected via a bluetooth connection.
PC Screen Shot is a little more graphic and visually stimulating...lol. Front adjustments (and i'm too lazy to count how many EQ frequencies you can tune...but it's alot!!)
Moving to the rear...
Notice how you can either link the X-over to both left and right, or you can adjust them separetely. That goes for the time delay and EQ settings as well.
Jumping to the sub channel... notice the 10 separate freqs you can tune your sub too? Instead of a gain and maybe a bass boost, you can actually tailor your sub to focus on what it is good at...and from 20-40 hz, these little 6.5s won't cut it. But at 60-120, this is where the character of these new subs shine. But, it still will play those 40hzs, but why not drop the real lows that can hurt its performance? This processor
makes a good sub even better!
And a couple screen shots from the Palm smartphone (which I own and use to tune mine) All the functionality is there, just on different screens and not as 'pretty' as the PC version.
I almost forgot about the AUX input that you get as well. I haven't played too much with this, but all you do is push your button in on the master volume switch (which doesn't get used much except for in this instance) and the unit switches to the AUX mode. I have this source wire lead running to the unit that just plugs into my generic MP3 player. And, luckily, you get another separate EQ adjustment screen specifically for this AUX input, because as you know, MP3s sound alot different than your radio and CD player. They didn't forget this little item. Only thing I didn't like was that the volume of your MP3 player now plays a part in the system volume. Watch that 3sixty knob, if you leave it all the way cranked up (which mine is just about there) and you plug in your MP3 at say 3/4 volume, you're going to blow something.
[image]http://matt.zenfolio.com/img/v3/p266850498-
Grrr, so the car has to come back for the new trim piece and finish the tweeter relocates. I can live with that. 
