Damn amazed at how the premium sound system sounds...

[genphreak]

when you remove that terrible booster amp!

Now it's like the rest of the car, one can be continuously pleased by how well it performs. Before it was an exotically designed POS.

I did this a while back so my 4 stock speaker sets now have 70Wrms driving each one from a premap only head unit.

I also bought a 12" sub, but it gave up after i installed it, so have been running wihtout it, ie just the stock crossover, speakers and new amp and head unit.

I found this out because I only just fixed the sub. Up until now I've been running without it.

I had been posting enthusiastically about it a while ago as everything was going great. But before too long the woofer started to sound like it the coil was blown and it was scratching the magnet as the bass pumped.

Mysteriously though it recovered between drives. Eventually I found the problem- a loose wire in the connector inside the sub-box. So now it sounds bloody great again and really really loud.

When worried I'd blown the woofer somehow I turned the sub down to prevent any damage to the amp from possible coil-shorts. All of a sudden I was driving without anything happening below 100Hz, so I just tuned into news instead of my usual mp3s.

But I got bored listening to all the bad news; it was back to tunes, but without bass. Naturally I pulled the eq and turned off it's crossover limiter- to get bass below 100Hz back into the main system. I had not listened to it before all natural- ie without the sub. I was really stunned by how good it sounded- with no tone adjustments whatsoever!

Best thing you can do is hack the crossover, add a real 4-5 channel amp and optionally add a sub. It truly isn't necessary if you don't blare your tunes or listen to da pumpen tunez you hear me zayy, vhhaaa?

All up it cost a pittance-

Approx cost in US dollars
$100 for the head unit
$100 for the sub and the eq
$100 for the 5-channel amp
A lot of wiring and hassle...

Even without the sub its twice as loud and much clearer, the bass is clean and the music much cleaner and far less coloured.

Given I can play mp3s off SD cards and USB sticks with all this $300 is really great value.

Nick