System Installed

[jgran]

After 9 hours, a couple of beers, several bloody knuckles, and much less swearing than I thought there would be, my system is finally installed.

I should note that every forum, for every make of car I have ever owned has always complained about the quality of the stock system. And without fail, I have always found the stock system to be adequate...until I bought the Lotus. This is going to primarily be a track/weekend car for me, but until I buy the trailer I still need to drive it to the track. Driving 4 hours to Watkins Glen with no radio reception and a single cd player was not very enticing to me. So this is what I did:

I was given this by a friend:
Alpine CDA-9856

Which solved my head unit issue. I wanted a unit that would at a minimum allow iPod control through the unit. It had the iPod cable with it. Unfortunately it was the cable with the older firewire pins so you would get the "Charing is not supported with this device" message when using it with my iPhone 3G. So I bought one of these to solve that issue:

Scosche passPORT Charging Adapter

Given how the stock speakers were universally condemned by everyone here I also bought 4 JL Audio VR525-CXi speakers off of Ebay as well as a set of Jim Clayton's speaker rings.

There is a Larini exhaust on the car which can be a bit loud on the highway so I also felt I needed some more volume from the system, but did not want to go through the hassle of installing a standard amp so I bought this:

Alpine KTP-445 Power Pack

I bought the Scosche Volkswagen harness that waydui detailed in his post and wired it up per Shaggy's instructions. You then just plug the harness into the amp and it has another plug that goes to the head unit.

I also bought this so I could listen to Sirius as well as control it through the head unit:
Sirius dock-and-play for Alpine

The dash removal was pretty straight forward. I used the dash removal instructions by buzzy which made things much easier. The only issue I ran into was wiring up power for the amp. It requires a 15 amp circuit, which I thought had to be switched. I had bought a relay and wiring to install it but was not looking forward to it. Then, after looking at the wiring for the Amp realized that it just needs the 15 amps at the constant power wire, which also has it's own 15 amp fuse. There is a terminal block in the dash that provided the power so I just tapped into that. The amp and the Sirius controller fit under the dash with no problem.

Since the speakers are still only 5.25" I'm not going to get thumping base out of this. But that's not what I was after, I just wanted a system that was tolerable for longer trips. Having said that the difference between this and the stock system is night and day. Since I was given the head unit and already had a Sirius Starmate that I could put in the dock, the price of all of this was fairly reasonable as well.

Not really any new info in this post, I just built on info other members have supplied. I'd like to thank those members for the supplies and info without which this project would have been much more difficult.

[ewalberg]

What was your experience with mounting the VR525-cxi's in the rear? At 2.5" mounting depth, at least one other person has stated that you need some spacers in there to keep it from hitting the aluminum of the firewall.

This looks accurate based on how i'm seeing the fit between by VR600-cx's which are 2.37" mounting depth. The vr600's actually fit snug tight in the mounting hole in the plastic back panel but i'm going to need to create just a tiny bit of clearance between the mounting hole and driver to fit the metal clips that the screws go into... the bolt holes will also need slight modification. The speaker grill has lots of clearance in the recess.

it looks like i might be able to leave the touring foam with only some removal around the deepest spot to clear the capacitor and wiring coming off the back. It may have to flex the back panel slightly to tighten it up though... we'll see when i start removing a little foam how it sets.

My car is in the shop right now so i can't check it, but i may run the wiring for an amplified sub in the footwell so i have the option if i want to add it. I'm thinking to add this one but i don't have my car with me now to see if i'll be able to fit it.

Boss BASS-600 (bass600) Amplified, Loaded Subwoofer Enclosure Systems Enclosed Car Subwoofer Systems Car Audio Car Audio, Video, & GPS Navigation - Sonic Electronix

it's spec'd as higher wattage and it's an 8" inch instead of the 6" kenwood option that some people have put in. Certainly cleaner looking too, and wouldn't be hard to black out the big "BOSS" logo.

I'm getting really excited about having a better system... the base system in my 06 was downright miserable. I don't know how i survived it for so long...

[jgran]

Sorry it took so long to respond...

I merely had to cut out some of the foam behind the speakers in the rear to get them to fit. I just got back from a 4 hour trip each way this past weekend and the system worked great. It could probably do with a tad more bass, but I am content with it and will not be adding anything else.

[noel_audio]

What would happen if you put inplace of the 7.5amp fuse a 15amp fuse?

[jgran]

I would be concerned about the wiring being able to handle the amperage. Also, since the best spot for the amp was behind the dash, it made sense to just hook in to the terminal.

[noel_audio]

Yeah. I had my dash appart last summer and really don't look forward to pulling off the airbag again. I ended up recessing JL TR 5.25" in the front so they are level with the lip of the dashboard (used a hot gun to reshape the air vents) and the LF of JL VR 6" in the back (needed hot knife to make the plastic opening bigger, but they fit depth-wise with the foam in a 2006 & 3Md the xovers to the air distributor box at the front of the car)
Had the CDA-9857 head unit already in and smaller JLs in previously. The system works pretty well, but anything over 20 on the HU and it gets distorted.
So, saw this KTP-445 thing and thought man if I can just push that in through the HU opening and 3M it down to that ledge that is behind the HU I could probably get some better fidelity out of the system by not driving the internal HU amplifier so much.
Anyway like I said, not a fan of pulling that all out again, just was looking for something I could upgrade from my driver seat. Maybe, I'll pull the VM out and see what current is passing through that fuse now and maybe I'll spend the $100 and see what happens...maybe I'll buy a fire extinguisher too....

[noel_audio]

Sorry, 6" TRs in the front and 6.5" VRs in the rear deck, you'd think I know what kind of speakers I had in there since I did it, but that was last year.