Its suspicious to me that this fellow had the opportunity to do a before and after dyno, but chose not to, instead making the argument that even if the dyno did not show improvements, the dyno does not replicate real life conditions and in the real world there are performance improvements. There are are lot of videos on that site that appear to be primarily oriented toward marketing, which is fine, but I'm not buying some of it.

I'm leaving my OEM intakes alone. Same with the exhaust. I drive 100% on the street. I have no need or desire to modify this car to gain power. Its got plenty of power for my use, more than enough actually.

Track and autocross folks - I totally get it. But, the rest of us? Nope. All you accomplish is making more noise which attracts attention, very small performance gains at best, all at the expense of risking reduced reliability and reduced resale value. I do totally get the temptation. But, for me anyway, best to resist. Better to stay focused on keeping the car well maintained.

 

To many here, there is beauty in function over form. The bits that make it go fast have an appeal to our eyes.

The same goes for our ears. We like the sounds performance engines make. But there are db limits imposed on production cars. Engineers have to numb out even the good sounds. From a regulatory perspective, there is no distinction between harsh, annoying noise, and the sonorous beauty of high rpm intake rush.

So creative performance focused engineers must design an intake system that doesn't sacrifice performance, but quells sound. All sound.

But fortunately for us, in this case Honda did so in a way that is easy to undo. Perhaps they even did so hoping we would.

 

I like the sounds as much as the next guy, if not more. I just don't want the attention it brings.

 

putting a J's racing snorkel on the oem air box with no other mods was one of my favourite intakes, very consistent driving throughout the day in hot summer temps, where it would normally get heat soaked by midday. I think the oem intake box still sucks in too much hot air, a snorkel extension is all that is needed. The oem filter is perfect, the box has no real restriction, and the oem intake arm does not heat up as much a metal. The J's racing snorkel also seemed to get some ram intake benefits at highway speeds, and driving through torrential rain never let a drop of water into the box. Great mod if I had to do it over again.

 

^^I agree with you on the snorkel. It feels like the car responds better, of course only when moving.

I think the stock airbox/intake as a whole works very well and honestly hard to really improve on. I added a Spoon OEM replica snorkel (OEM version is so the snorkel opening is right at the grill and you don't need to cut the hood, unlike the other Spoon snorkel designed to be used with Spoon's front bumper and hood), Ballade intake arm and filter with velocity stack . I mainly got the Ballade filter because I needed a new one and the intake arm because it looks nicer and theoretically is a smoother passage for air? I left everything in the airbox stock though.

 

I did the intake mod couple weeks ago and I really do feel the difference. First off, when you close the top lid, you can see how that factory snorkel only feeds air to one small area of the filter while the rest gets a little air around it. The wall blocks most of the air and also designed for sound. After carefully cutting the bottom wall out and drilling the factory snorkel out, the car feels a bit more better on the lower end and it responds so much better with some sound. Imagine drinking through a regular straw as compared drinking through a boba straw, which do you get more volume? This is my thing but to each their own. check out LHTperformance on youtube and he explains a little about the mod. My next plans are to add a AUT cooling plate and HPS intake hose to go with this intake mod

 

Who makes the best replica of the Spoon/J's snorkel?

 

+1

 

So you do all that to gain some extra air, then block the air getting to the intake with a 'cooling plate'?

The OEM air guide directs the air to the intake - see the slots and opening on the guide. With the plate you're blocking off the air coming up

 

Yes, this is true. I think his main point (LHT) was to illustrate that the airbox mod makes power consistently since its not prone to heat soak in high heat conditions. track driving, etc.