It's been a while since I posted more than a random occasional post on this forum although I have been lurking almost every day. My trek from OEM to a Better Place™ with audio in my S2k has been a long one with a lot of discarded parts now sitting on storage shelves, but I am happy to say that I am finally hearing something along the lines of what I had in mind when I first started.

I started by adding some rear speakers from Lucid. Didn't make up for bad audio from the OEM head unit. I changed out the head unit for an Alpine 9851 with a Sirius radio module and an iPod interface.



Better sound, but the lousy OEM speakers weren't anywhere even close. I yanked out most of the interior and did a lot of sound deadening which helped a lot, but didn't make the OEM speakers sound all that much better. Those came out and I replaced them with some Diamond Audio 651s components which did make a lot of difference. They did lack a lot of punch with the OEM head unit, so the next step was adding in a JL Audio 300/4 Amp bridged to do 150W/channel to the Diamond Audio speakers. I decided that would be good enough for such a noisy car and declared it good almost a year ago.

I kept finding my fingers twitching towards trying to tweak a little more bottom end out of my door speakers and then end result always sounded like Dark Knight's sig line about the similarities between stuffing bass into a tweeter and a baseball into a pigeon - neither one survives.

I recently undertook a journey of some fairly major changes to my S2k to make it a much safer car out on the track and had some interesting opportunities to enhance the sound system in the process. We stripped the interior out to add in a welded in roll bar



which replaced the OEM roll bar and the cross brace behind the seats that most of the OEM interior trim mounts to. The car is far stiffer than it was with the OEM bracing so we didn't lose any structural integrity in the process which is great for the track. The driver's side seat is about to be replaced with a Sparco Modena seat which will be fitted with a Schroth Hybrid III 6 point racing harness.

At the same time however, since I track this car for pleasure and not competition, I took advantage of the situation and added in yet another layer of Dynamat Extreme over the entire interior and the whole area between the front and the back which was now completely exposed. Yes, this does mean that I now have a layer of Dynamat Extreme covered by 3 coats of Quiet Coat in the trunk and the front end and another layer of Dynamat over the top of all of that - this definitely kills of a huge amount of cabin road noise

Since I no longer have a spare tire in the rear end (the roll bar mounts into the space where it used to sit) I had tons of room to move the amp over and get it right side up but still hiding behind what's left of the trunk trim. I also now have a permanent vent space between the trunk and the interior for hearing a subwoofer back there. You are looking at the backside of the passenger seat from the trunk in this shot. Note the layer of VBlock 3 covering the bare metal bottom of the interior. I did put down a layer of Dynamat back here as well, but had the VBlock sitting around from a previous car and figured I may as well put it to use here to cover everything up.



I just got a V1 subwoofer enclosure from wlaurent yesterday and am happy to say that it is nicely doing it's job in the back now. I installed a JL Audio 8W3 v2-6 which is running off of 2 of the 4 channels on the JL Audio 300/4 amp (150W @ 3 ohms). Not the biggest subwoofer by any means, but one that is rated almost exactly for the power I had available from the existing amp and adds in very nice bass I have no trouble hearing with the top down at 60mph. Much nicer than hearing all the door hardware rattle while trying to do the same before I moved the bass back into the trunk instead



The tool kit in the bottom of the well contains a fairly complete set of tools as well os the OEM jack and the contents of the original foam block. It turns out that it fits nicely into the space where the spare used to be when I need to pack the trunk fully and this leaves the whole tire well available in case I really do need it for a flat while on a trip.

The car fits my own needs quite nicely right now as a double duty track car that serves me up with nice sounds as a daily driver and can do quite nicely for a comfy ride to distant track events. It certainly won't please those who are looking for a show car with a fancy finished look and I have added too much weight for the hard core track junkies who are focused on their lap times, but it's my car and this is what works for me

 

I like your approach. Middle of the road. Not show bling and not full race either. Best of both worlds, eh?

 

Yup - great tunes on the way to the track