Afer a long journey of playing around with ways to improve the sound in my 2005 S2k, I am getting close to finishing the journey for now. I am somewhat of a home audio/video nut and have been for many years with a firm mindset that good sound will never be achieved in a noisy vehicle like the S2k. Nonetheless, I still felt that what I was hearing in my car could be a lot better than what was delivered from Honda.

I started out by trying to do simple improvements to the OEM sound system and in the end replaced just about everything to get what I wanted out of my driving sounds. I tried the Lucid rear speakers (still in place) and then added in the matching Kenwood 1679ie fronts before bailing on the OEM HU and getting an Alpine 9851. I spent a good deal of time trying to dampen the road noise without adding too much weight that might detract from the track performance I got the car for in the first place. I followed the descriptions in the threads here for sound dampening carefully and ended up using 2 dynamat eXtreme door kits and 1 gallon of Quiet Car to cover the trunk area and all of the floorpans in the front. I also got the major open spaces that could be accessed inside of the door panels.



The AiNet Sirius Radio and iPod interfaces soon followed, but it always felt like there was no life to the sound I was getting.

The Kenwood 6 1/2" fronts went onto the shelf and a set of Diamond D661s components took their place. I had to get a little creative to get these into the doors given their extensive depth, but once again the threads in this forum about how to build a good set of MDF spacers proved worth their weight in gold and made the task easy. The 1" silk tweeters required a little more thinking outside of the box, but I was able to craft a set of mounting boards out of 1/4" pressed wood that allowed for a surface mount of the tweeters and fit onto the back of the OEM tweeter grills after a little dremel work to the OEM tweeter posts. Last but not least, I removed the plastic door panel guards (?) to create enough space to mount the crossovers for the Diamond speakers.

Finally, this last Friday I had one of the local Portland area Audio shops (Car Toys) install a JL Audio 300/4 Amp into the area above the gas tank to power this whole mess. In this case, the amp is bridged to offer 2 150W channels that feed into the Diamond Audio crossovers. The 5 1/4" Kenwood rears are still powered by the Alpine HU, but their contribution to the overall sound is very minimal.



The end result is completely stealth except for the Sirius antenna sitting in the middle of my dash just behind the windshield.

I don't really want to give up the trunk space for a sub, so my audio pilgrimage will end close to where things stand now with the exception of a Modifry Wired DCI that just got ordered to enhance the audio system controls.

A big thanks to all of you who have contributed to the discussions in this forum - it made my journey much easier with all of the helpful tips that have been posted here. As you might have guessed by now, I am much happier with what I am hearing from behind the wheel at this point.