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S Class Audison Upgrade


C Class Audison Upgrade

Yeah, not everyone puts the same value on audio but it doesn’t mean the owners who dislike the sound system merely have misplaced priorities.

But yes, the consensus is that the F’s engines sound is amazing, as is the car’s overall design and execution. The audio however apparently isn’t cutting it, which unfortunately has become the norm in “premium” branded sound systems generally, not just Jaguar’s.

I’m afraid most of the audio budget for the car goes to the brand for licensing their name, whereas the actual hardware is often made elsewhere, by a mass producer with a much less prestigious name (if it has a name at all). A builder either cares about audio and bakes it into the car’s design, or it’s an afterthought they paper over with marquee branding and effusive marketing. It’s that marketing that misleads buyers and pisses me off. They can put the same Taiwanese junk in there if they want but don’t then claim it’s something special. Here’s a tip. If you ever see marketing material gushing about the brand name and a “concert hall experience” hang on to your wallet.

We had an A5 with the B&O. I don’t remember it specifically but it must have been good since I never had to touch it. I’ve discovered it’s less about the name than it is about how the car’s manufacturer approaches audio, and it can be very vehicle specific where some systems by audio brand X in car manufacturer Y’s model range bear zero resemblance to one another.

You basically have to ignore the audio brand and approach each car as an individual basis and evaluate with your ears and no preconceptions about how prestigious the brand name sounds.

Interestingly, manufacturers always choose a brand known for high end home audio that doesn’t build or sell car audio at all. The Burmester garbage in Mercedes is a great example. An entry level Burmester home system is $20,000. A C Class is $40,000. How much Burmester gear is in a C Class? Absolutely zero.

I want to dynamat the doors so at the same time maybe worth putting in the upgraded speaker parts from Jaguar/Land Rover. All this is fairly simple for me to do and not too intrusive change wise.

Is it worth the effort or will I need to update the amp etc to get any benefit from the new speakers (don't want to go down this path and then I may as well leave it as is.)

Would be great to get some feedback from anyway that did this.



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Finally got a chance to audition the Meridian branded system in a ‘vert today. I had to wait for one to show up at CarMax since the closest Jaguar dealer is two hours in any direction.

Overall I thought it was pretty nice sounding, even parked with the top down. (It was on the showroom floor and since I wasn’t buying I didn’t ask them to pull it outside).

I do think any shortcomings are first and foremost in the factory EQ. Also the tone controls are mislabeled. What they call the “subwoofer” are the two 6” drivers on the rear cabin panel. But the 8” dual coil shallow mount subs in the front doors are more ideally suited to handle the low and midbass range. (Those units are the only subs at all in many BMW applications and they’re capable of more punchy lows than you’d ever want).

The rear panel drivers (not the 4” surrounds that share the same module but are unrelated to the “subs”) are best suited for rear fill I think.

I did a search on EBay for LKQ Meridians. First, if you’re considering a speaker “upgrade” to them, get them used from salvage. They’re really inexpensive, and already burned in. Second, those speakers are visually identical to those found in the Mercedes Harman Kardon, the Mercedes Burmester, and the BMW Harmon/Kardon. Same sizes and form factors. Some factory in Hungary pumps out all of this stuff that gets rebranded by the various builders. Not to suggest they’re bad speakers, but they’re probably not actually made by Meredian.

Personally I’d leave the OEM speakers and start with trying to manipulate the EQ. Obviously you can’t crack the baked in DSP in the factory amp but you can use a source with imbedded adjustable EQ to experiment with. I played around with Spotify and it was pretty easy to get the door subs to wake up, and to smooth out the mids.

I think just the base system. It just had “Meridian” on the grilles.

Here’s the Spotify EQ curve I ended up with. Granted I wasn’t on the road with the stereo competing with the exhaust note and road noise. It’s possible that cranking it up to get on top of that stuff is where it falls apart. But it’s nowhere close to the worst premium system I’ve listened to. I’m talking to you, Mercedes. Overall the Jaguar’s is listenable, and the 780 watt premium system is probably more than sufficient.

Also, as an aside, damn those are drop dead gorgeous cars. Impossible to find a bad angle. I’d be willing to put up with a less than stellar audio system and a bunch of other stuff for that car. It’s kind of like marrying a supermodel and then finding out she’s not a great cook. Whatever. We’ll eat out.

I had some good success playing around with the EQ settings in my I-Phone. You can find just about any combination. I plan on doing the speaker upgrade in the spring for sure. I like to GT my car and enjoy some nice tunes when just trucking along. Thanks for the tip on the used. I figured it to be about $700.00 new for my 770W system.

Off the top of my head, Rock Or R&B presets would be a good fit. Unfortunately you can’t create custom curves in IOS, but if your ITunes files are local (not streaming Apple Music) try the EQu app. It’ll play your ITunes files, is extremely flexible and doesn’t add coloration or processing artifacts.

The Prima as you mentioned has 6 inputs, and you’ll just want to make sure you get a full range signal into it from the amp one way or another . (The output is internally configurable in a variety of channel assignments. There’s no correlation between how you set up the inputs and assign the outputs. Just get a full range into the Prima and you’re good).

With the mids and tweets in the doors on independent channels from the amp, you’d pull tweet L & R (2 channels), Mids L & R (2 more channels) and the door woofers L & R (6 input channels total). To get the signal for the rear panel subs you’d tell the Prima to derive the sub signals from the front woofers

If you use one channel for each of the mids and tweets, you’d have two powered channels left for the door woofers and two remaining for the rear panel subs.

If you opt to put the mid/tweets together, you’d free up two channels that you could then use to bridge the door woofers so they’d each get twice the power. Of all the speakers in the car, the 8” door subs will most benefit from additional power.

You could also bridge the door woofers AND have each mid and tweet on its own channel, then add the sub amp to the 9th unpowered pre amp output and use that to power the rear panel subs as you proposed. That signal will be mono however.

I think the nomenclature by Jaguar is confusing. The true subs are the 8” units in the doors. The rear panel (6”?) should be treated as rear fill, not as subs. The nice thing about the Prima is that you get to decide what role each speaker fills. A good set of midbass woofers in the rear panel, bandpassed as such, would probably be the best use.

In other words, treat the rear panel speakers as if you were doing a sedan and they were in the back doors. Let the 8” dual coil door speakers handle the bottom end. You would omit the extra sub amp and leave any speakers you orphaned on the factory amp. The channel assignments would look like this:

1 Left Tweet
2 Right Tweet
3 Left Mid
4 Right Mid
5 Right Door Woofer
6 Left Door Woofer
7 Left Rear Panel
8 Right Rear Panel

That would be my recommendation

Or put the tweets and mids on a passive crossover and bridge the door woofers:

1 Left Mid Tweet
2 Right Mid Tweet
3/4 Left Door Woofer
5/6 Right Door Woofer
7 Left Rear Panel
8 Right Rear Panel

Either way I don’t think you’ll need a sub amp. The question is how significant would it be to bridge each door woofer (more power) but lose the ability to split off each mid and tweet on their own channels (greater tuning flexibility).

I’ve run both set ups. My S Class was three way active front, 2 way passive rear and nothing bridged. Plenty of power (more than I needed), even in a cavernous car like the S.

We just did a Prima in my kid’s 328i where we couldn’t run three way active since the factory set up was the mids/tweets combined, so we doubled up on those same 8” door subs only to make use of the two extra channels.

(The Jaguar, BMW and Benz all use the same 8” dual coil shallow mount sub. They’re really good units. My DD is a 430i with those under the seats. I bought and auditioned a $500 set of Ghost Sub drop in replacements by Bavsound and ended up returning them. The OEM were warmer, fuller and hit harder. The F has the bones of a good system. It just needs some finessing)
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A note on configuring the Prima. There’s a physical control that lets you select from several pre-set configurations. Set it to zero. Any selection other than zero and you’ll lose the ability to alter the config from the laptop software. Also, run the Deequalization sequence in the initial set up (it can be skipped).

You’re welcome. I’m excited for you (and interested to see how what is probably the first Prima install on an F Type goes). Let me know if you run into any config or set up issues. Virtually every one of the three Prima installs I’ve had done (same unit swapped into each car) gave us some set up headaches at some point. It’s a side effect of it being extremely flexible, which in turn means lots of “moving parts” to get right. Once it’s set up though you’ll never give it another thought.