So I have just purchased a beautiful P575 F-type convertible, upgrading from a V8 R AWD. The new car has the 380w Meridian system which I already knew I was going to upgrade.
The plan was to replace door tweeters and mids with Audison VOCE tweeters and mids, and upgrade the door woofers with Audison prima APS 8R woofers. Use the existing door wiring and thoroughly sound proof the doors. This was performed without a hitch, built a simple speaker bracket from mdf to accommodate the new 8" shallow woofers and it all fit perfectly, good and truly solid.
I then did the fairly well documented rear speaker upgrade using Hertz legend ml1800 7" woofers modifying the existing speaker mount. All of that process went fine, everything really solid.....starting to get excited to see how it will sound. This is where it all goes wrong. My intention was not to use the factory signal for the rear woofers and just leave the rear woofer/mid wiring plug unplugged and instead use the stronger bass signal from the door woofers fas the signal for the rears as well as the door woofers. So after unplugging the two speaker plugs from the factory amp and mapping out all of the wires including belling out the speakers to figure out the correct polarity, the plan was to take the speaker output signals from the factory amp and cut into the wires and solder on extention wires to go to after amp (Audison forza AP8.9/ Audio control LC7i/JL audio 500 mono amp) with the mids and tweeter signal going straight to the Audison forza AP8.9, and the woofer signal going to the audio control LCi7 to clean up the signal and remove any bass roll off, then the door woofer signal to the Audison amp, and the rear woofers to a JL 500 mono amp with remote gain to act as a front rear balance control. In theory, or at least in my head I figured this would be fine......wired it all up and no sound came out apart from the front right tweeter. At first I though perhaps I had blown up the factory amp......so I undone all the wiring and put it back to stock. It once more worked ok.....all door speakers working.......didn't sound too good but I'm guessing that was because the new speakers are 4ohms and according to research the factory speakers are 2ohm so I don't thing=k the factory amp was up to the task of trying to run the more powerful speakers (full disclosure I don't really understand this stuff) but at least I knew the factory amp was ok. Then I though perhaps the speaker wire I used was of a too thick gauge and was causing a dampening affect (google info) so I purchased thinner gauge speaker cable more comparable to the factory stuff. I then just decided to try two speakers from the factory amp output. Wired just the two door woofers from the factory output plug directly into the Audison amp and then send the signal back to the speakers, now no sound from any speakers. It is like the second you tap into the speaker wires coming from the factory amp output the system can detect it and it all shuts down.
Am I being an idiot and missing something simple?
Do I need to use a JL FIX instead of the audio control LC7i line output?
The heart breaking thing is I was so excited to get this car, I started the speaker upgrade the day I bought the car, then Audison messed up the order, followed by the courier company losing the package, so i re-placed the same order to speed things up with next day guaranteed delivery and low and behold the courier company lost that package as well. So after a inordinate amount of phone calls and running around, it took two weeks to receive the speakers whilst my lovely new car was in bits, meaning I have been unable to drive my new car for two and a half weeks. I have now put the seats back in and door cards back on so I can drive the car to a stereo specialist with a big box of cup cakes as a bribe hoping they will take pity on me and take a look at it......the company i usually use for my car stereos wanted £3500 labour alone to do the upgrade, hence I thought I'd tackle the job myself with a friend who is an engineer. That company won't even look at it for me because they said they didn't do the full install so they won't help me. I have left the back panels off so the amp and wires can be got to easily in order to try and figure out what is going wrong.
Please, if anyone has any insights or theories as to why this is going wrong, please share because I am at the end of my rope. I read many forum posts on speaker upgrades on the older F-type and it seemed doable, have Jaguar changed something on the MY2021 cars to prevent us from upgrading the speakers or messing with the audio system?

PS - if anyone has bought an P575 and wants to get around the exhaust valve issue, it can be done so that the exhaust vale switch operates like the older f-type so the valve stays open all of the time. A company in Germany made a piggy back module that works spot on. Ins

tall was a little but daunting but well worth it. Cost 550 euros plus shipping and taxes.

 

Hope you get it sorted...PS that is such a stunning car...WOW!!!!

 

Simple. You have stuffed up the wiring .

You say you are using the oem door speaker wiring in your system so you must have cut the original harness just after the plug out from the oem amp and instead connected them to your Audison amps. Presumably the wires from just after the speaker wire plug that is still plugged into the oem amp then goes to your audison DSP gear and amps. If you didn’t cut the speaker wiring harness to shreds Did you some how get a new speaker output plug for the oem amp. ?

I don’t see how you can easily swap back to factory to test your system again without hours of reconnecting by twisting or soldering each speaker wire.

maybe you are tapping into the oem system downstream to far down the chain

how about a picture on how you are tapping into the oem system as that will help a lot

 

Just a heads up i have the meridian system in my xf ,ill be installing my same setup in my bosses F-type R ,Its very simple and inexpensive and sounds insane , thats why my boss wanted in his car
ill make a video for the F-TYPE R

 

So to answer your question, yes, it required hours of undoing all of the heat shrink and soldering we did to add all of the extension wires in order to put the wiring harness back to stock. I have included some pics I have just taken, sorry for quality, it's late here in the UK. We cut into the wiring plug just as it comes out of the factory amp (as shown by the blue and grey plugs) to then send the signals to the amps and DSP and then from the amps back into the factory harness to the speakers through the factory wiring. You can see two wires taped together with red tape and things looking a bit messy as this is after we had to undo all of the work we initially did where everything was perfectly soldered, heat shrunk, and all wires neatly tied together and run through the car perfectly and solid as to avoid any potential rattles. The plug you can see under the speaker is the original plug to the rear sub and mid that I chose not to use due to a weaker signal. I don't think we messed up the wiring as we were meticulous to our approach and spot on with each soldered wire. Have we done something obviously wrong that someone can pick up on? Have we cut into the wiring harness at the wrong point?

 

You can see the heat shrink on some of the wires, that is where we cut into the factory wiring.

 

This looks like a mildly difficult task. I'm sure you'll determine what works and why. Please share it when you are done. I don't understand why the sub signal was not used. That signal is the only one adjusted by the sub control on the display, correct?

Anyway, bass drivers located behind the seats are difficult to get "tight". In past 2 seaters, I've put a single 8" small sealed enclosure sub in the passenger footwell. Driven by an equalized amp, and the powerful bass was amazing. Unfortunately, it takes up some room.

 

It's hard to tell from the picture but it looks like you have chosen into intercept the speaker out puts at the right spot BUT why hasn't the OEM speaker wire been cut at this point. It looks like you have tapped the signal but the original wire to the speaker itself is intact as i can still follow the oem wire from the plug down in the loom.

it should be oem amp----plug----join/splice/cut in speaker loom-------audison stuff-audison amp----rejoin speaker wire harness after the cut

your looks like oem amp---plug---signal tapped----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------speakers
----audison stuff ------rejoining uncut ----speaker loom--------------------------------------------------------------speakers




also just in case you are tired i assume you are plugging the speaker wire plugs back into the oem amp right ??

 

Thanks for the reply. The picture has been taken after I had to undo all of the work and rewire it back to how it was factory in order to check I hadn't blown up the oem amp.
So yes....originally what i tried was.....OEM amp--plug--splice in to appropriate wires--audison amps etc-- rejoin speaker wire harness after the cut back to speakers.
When i tried this sound was only coming out of one door tweeter.....and then once i put it back to stock and it worked just fine........I once more spliced into the plug, but just the door woofers this time and no sound at all ..... it's like the second you splice into the wires at the plug, the system knows and it all goes wrong, the oem amp stops working as normal.

 

double check your connection to the audison, maybe you have wired the high level output from the oem amp to the speaker outputs of the audison and not the input. Other than that check the Audison forza AP8.9 is working by maybe connecting another (not in the car) speaker to each output channel one at a time

"""..I once more spliced into the plug, but just the door woofers this time and no sound at all ..... it's like the second you splice into the wires at the plug, the system knows and it all goes wrong, the oem amp stops working as normal.""

if you are just taking a high level input from the OEM amp it shouldn't cut out the other channels playing from the oem amp. In actual fact the Oem amp wouldn't even know unless you are somehow creating a impedance drop by connecting another speaker.

Try splicing into the door woofers again but just use your monoamp this time instead of Forza and see if all the other speakers cut out.

 

That's what we tried....spliced into just the door woofers and then wired them straight into the JL audio amp to avoid the complexities of the forza amp and the lc7i unit....and then straight back into the wiring harness after the splice....and no joy....no sound at all from any speakers.
y thoughts were the same as yours....we are only tapping into the speaker outputs from the oem amp......how would it know to such an extent it shuts down and stops sending signals as soon as we splice in. I am perplexed.
Shortly i will drive 3 hours to the nearest specialist, cap in hand to admit I must be stupid as I have no idea why it's not working and hope I can convince them to take a look without having to book the car in and wait 4-6 weeks as I know they are busy. I'm hoping cupcakes and offering to pay double will sway them.

 

one last thing to try - take the high level signal wires from where you would attach them to your audison amp and connect them straight to the wires on the speaker output of the amp (ie those new wires you are connecting your audio amp with back to the oem harness)

ie :removing the audison gear completely out of the new loop of the wiring you have spliced in with . this should obviously play perfectly on the oem speakers since they shoulder be going

oem amp------speaker plug----splice in-----new wiring to amp-----new wiring from amp-----original oem harness back to oem speakers.

this will check your new wiring to and from your audison gear (with your audison gear removed from the loop of course to isolate the failure point)

 

I don't know squat about the Audison Forza so if this is a stupid question, I apologize. Can't you hook up a laptop the the DSP and see what signal is coming through?

 

Just spent a few hours speaking with a specialist and apparently it is down to the dsp in the audison forza amp not being configured. You have to configure the amp before you connect it and also tell it what type of signal needs to get sent back to the OEM side of things.
Will try and again with this new info....wire it all up yet again and hope I get some music.

 

Good luck, very nice car. Is that the Silicon Silver color?

 

good luck, they may be right and part of your solution but it doesn't explain

""That's what we tried....spliced into just the door woofers and then wired them straight into the JL audio amp to avoid the complexities of the forza amp and the lc7i unit....and then straight back into the wiring harness after the splice....and no joy....no sound at all from any speakers""

so i think you still have a miss wiring issue.

 

After a lot more work and buying even more fancy equipment, it seems the problem is that the amp is not sending the correct load back to the factory oem stuff and the car is shutting down the amp to protect itself.
The specialist is going to call Audison and see if they have any ideas.
There is no problem with the wiring, we have checked and double checked everything including checking for any dry joints etc. All perfectly soldered joints and all heat shrunk.
This really is becoming an expensive nightmare.

 

In the media stuff put out by Audison it says it can be set give the factory amp the correct impedance.
Have you dug into the DSP's software and made sure everything is set correctly?
I know JagBass and I had to use Audiocontrol's LGDs (Load Generating Device) to have the factory amp not throw square waves and sound like crap but it never shut down.

 

Just waiting for the specialist guy to speak to Audison and ask that very question about the forza amp giving out the correct impedance.
In the mean time I might just go and buy the audio control LGD.

Thanks for the info.....could turn out to be very helpful in a seemingly helpless situation.
Muchisimas gracias.

 

Yes you will need the LDG 60's(GRAY), they are fairly inexpensive and will stabilize the speaker level outputs of the Factory Class D Amp before your amps Hi level inputs.