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Neal

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Everything posted by Neal

  1. Also put a loop back Most plug at amp end to test. Cluster gongs continued to work so Most fibre ring ready.
  2. Next area was extending Most. ( disconnect battery ) Found earlier that my base audio did have Most digital audio bus between the idrive and the Speedo cluster. Needed to tap into Most and complete a Most ring to include the Mobridge amp. Got a Y adaptor which is installed behind the idrive unit. The y adaptor has three plugs , two female and one male The idrive to cluster section as two connectors that are unplugged and y cable is inserted Connections Idrive male to Y cable female Cluster female to Y cable female Mobridge Amp 5 meter extension male to Y cable female Ordered a most cable grommet trying to follow real oem. The grommet and y adaptor needed Tesa tape as didn’t quite clip in. Y adaptor had universal connectors rather than bmw. Not a problem though. Wrapped y cable with Tesa tape to avoid rattling behind dash location.
  3. Front door speakers installed over the weekend. Process similar to rear doors. Front door connectors are slightly different allowing for more connections such as mirror radar , side cameras , comfit access etc. Process for taking off the door cards are the same, although, most YouTube videos have the window controls pried out from the armrest side. It’s straight forward to use a pri tool from the inner door card and push them out. Wiring for the front doors slightly different to the rears the front tweeters are running active so have dedicated amp channels. I put a bass blocker capacitor in line to protect the tweeter from getting low frequencies by mistake. Used a foil type which is typically used in higher end crossovers. Used a 18 Microfarad value which will start to drop frequencies below 2800 hz and a 6db rate. In hindsight I should have used 22 uf as will tune tweeter to run from 3500 hz up. 18 uf may interfere a bit at 3500 hz. Will see what happens when I do an RTA. The capacitor is quite large , but there is enough room within the door card. Wrapped it in Tesa tape and used fabric Velcro to mount it. Removed the inner door trim and replaced it the Harman Kardon version. Was quite fiddly for the first one , The focal tweeters a bit deeper than the HK ones so the trim backing and tweeter is up against one of the door mirror bolts. The door trim will fit , but it’s tight. Running new speaker wires a bit easier than rear doors. Easy access via bottom door membrane. Just gently pull away until enough access to get loom in. Repeated the sound deadening install as per rear doors. Also used Tesa tape on door clip mounts to stop door card rattling with loose clips. Added a neoprene seal to speaker ring which will sit against speaker adaptor face. Improves sound from the door mount.
  4. The voice coil on these vents to the top as well which doesn’t help. Although the later speaker grills have a cover portion over the speaker vent. I’d pull the woofer out and connect to home stereo and see if it plays clean as a starting point.
  5. Also thinking with the cic upgrade there are various coding options so you probably want top hifi coding which uses the Most optical digital transport and has a quite flat sound response.
  6. I’m not 100% sure on the E61 , but quite a few of the underseat BMW woofers use the side sill as part of the speaker enclosure which acts a bit like a leaky sealed enclosure of roughly 16 litres of air space. Sealed enclosure will give a gradual rolloff on lower bass frequencies unlike bass reflex style where it creates a peak lower down. I think the issue you may have is your simply running out cone travel or the voice coils are a bit stuffed at maximum excursion. What that means is that you need a combo of a woofer that moves more and has more power to go louder. Many of the aftermarket woofers are less efficient and have similar cone travel to the HK woofers. So drop in options without more power won’t go louder. Option to go lower in bass would be an Earthquake sws 8 inch series as they have twice the cone travel of the HK. But they need considerable amount of power to go 30% louder. Musically they have good 40-50 hz bass , but loose a bit of detail further up the bass range. If chasing some chest thumping bass a boot area subwoofer ( 10 or 12 inch ) is a better way to go so you’d end up doubling bass output ( or more ) Otherwise , focal / Rockford / Morel / ESB etc options in my opinion are good if you want to increase in midbass performance and possible detail, but néed a larger sub to fill in the bottom end.
  7. Next was mounting speaker and sound deadening. With the focal es100k series a speaker adaptor is required. With mounting speakers or speaker rings onto a metal surface you want a form of isolation between speaker and metal otherwise you get a ringing effect or distortion of the music. The 3d printed adaptors came with a weather seal that followed curve nicely. Created a gap for speaker wire and used crimp terminals on wire ends. For the door deadening I used Dynamat which just happened to be on special at Repco. I went with a 5 sheet system so one for each door and half each around the underseat woofers. Nice thing about dynamat is that it’s odourless so the car doesn’t smell like a shoe factory post install. Only covered the metal parts around the speaker mount area and put the majority on the door card. A quick knock test and the door metal was a bit quieter and the door card was really good. Obviously full treatment of inner door and replacement of door membrane would yield better results but not prepared to go that far. One door down , three to go.
  8. Second part was to create hole in door card for oem tweeter mount and grill. Must admit that I was a bit nervous about doing this as getting it wrong could mean new door card. Fortunately BMW have marked the inner door card with an indentation which by my measurement as 51mm in diameter. I also measured the inner side Harman Kardon grill and 51/52 mm is about right for hole size. So by measuring 25.5mm from either side of the circle to create a y axis and then measured up 25.5mm. Checked everything three time and drilled a pilot hole from inner to outer door card. Then flipped the door card as you want to cut through the vinyl first with it supported by the door card material. Stops the risk of the fabric tearing if going other way. Also checked that 51mm hole saw was running true before drilling. Once hole drilled simple case of installing tweeter bracket onto three plastic posts via m6 axial clips. These have a very tight fit so used a 11 mm socket and small hammer to push them on. Also added a Harman Kardon grill to mid bass hole as they are a bit more acoustically transparent.
  9. Was time to get on with a door so I picked a rear first. Principles for rear door. Leave water membrane intact and cause minimum disruption and create no extra holes Modify door card to allow Fitment of OEM tweeter bracket and speaker grill Keep audio wiring path simple and oem like by mounting crossovers in boot Add some sound deadening to help audio but not to make make M3 quieter Allow tweeter to be disconnected via oem connectors should door card be removed First task was to run 4 wires into the door for tweeter and midbass. The rear door speakers are being run in a passive state and have mounted the crossovers in the boot . Simple task of pulling up tab on door connector and adding socket pins to spare positions on connector. Then routing cable via factory door loom path and feeding into membrane using curtain wire as a trace wire. Bit of Tessa tape to secure to existing harness via mid bass speaker hole. Sometimes smaller hands and lack of biceps is a plus 😀
  10. Used curtain wire as a pilot to pull the power wire through back pannel. Cable was wrapped with a protective outer cable and then Tessa tape so it shouldn’t rattle.
  11. Power wire for the AMP is straightforward. On my e46 install do to running A/B amp and a class d sub amp I needed 2 gauge into 2x4 gauge arrangement. Basically a lot of thick cable that could carry 400 amps. By contrast the Mobridge uses class d tech with variable voltage psu so super efficient. So basically the whole system can be run on either a 6awg cable if cable run is less than 2.3 meters or a part run off 4awg if length from battery is beyond that. Context is keeping voltage drop under 3% for cable run at amplifiers maximum power output. I was undecided on cable run path. Across rear boot panel is short enough and run via rear seat path is more like 3.5m. In the end I decided to go back boot pannel and reuse a section of 4awg from my e46 install which I’d warped in a plastic protective out sheathing. Also used a nylon wrap at either end of the cables to ensure cable insulation has plenty of protection. What to ensure of zero chance of the cable shorting on anything post install or car maintenance items such as battery replacement. Made a mdf mount for the fuse which is held in by the battery hold down bracket and routed cable in a manner to positive terminal that won’t interfere with IBS function that disconnects engine power in the event of a major accident. Routed cable in a manner that replacement of battery is ray and nothing needs moving out of way. Earthing the Amp was straightforward. The factory amp bracket has m10 mounting stud in the same manner as the body earthing points. So just cut the Mobridge earth lead to length and terminated it with a 16mm2 6.4mm hole crimp lug. Used a 4 awg joiner on the positive Mobridge lead and added a Cooper ferrule to ensure maximum contact area with hex screw down style joiner.
  12. I decided to terminate the custom speaker loom directly onto a Mobridge TE / Tyco connector. These are similar to the 32 pin connector connector used in Porche / Audi audio systems. There is nothing wrong with the Mobridge options with either a spice harness or a Mobridge to BMW Harman Kardon 20 pin patch cable. But since I didn’t have HK loom ( mine had an ASD used as a amp ) I’d have to crimp wires anyway.. If doing a Mobridge system the it can alsway be argumented with Technic PNP cable options depending on what’s is needed on a BMW install. Technic have a range of cable options. The connector uses amp / te MCP 1.5k and 2.8k crimp sockets. The majority of the speaker pins will take up to 1.5mm2 cable and obviously the smaller 0.85mm2 cable that is used for door speakers . For the subwoofer output the amp runs two pair of speaker wire. For this run I’m using a 2 ohm sub so elected to run two pairs of 1.5mm2 cable. For the underseat woofers I’d run 2.5mm2 which is what BMW do. But in hindsight I should have run 1.5mm2 cable. For those connections I trimmed back the wire a bit so the would crimp onto the MCP 2.5 crimp connectors. With the new harness connector I decided not to also add the rca and power outputs to my loom. 400 rms is more than enough on bass these days so don’t need to supplement badd any further .
  13. Most of the nav and internal lighting controls are using ibus for communication and your theory about activity on the bus is likely cause. The bus is a very low speed serial asynchronous system that works in a party line style so each element will try transmitting and will back off if something else transmitting and try again. With nav coder watch the activity on the bus and see if any device nodes are continuing transmitting. Also check for devices like aftermarket Bluetooth audio gateways as some of those can cause issues ( often a power reset will help ) . Also need to check that no one before your ownership has tapped it for a power source If your getting corruption a way to check is via navcoder on one of the modules. Bluetooth module is ideal if you have one. You’ll see random characters rather than pairing PIN number. The ibus wire colour is primary white with yellow.
  14. The e46 siren / tilt sensor / bonnet switch are the same. Only difference is the interior ultrasound sensor is different on convertible. Mirror isn’t really needed , but it does have the alarm on flashing led. Only other difference is the colour of the interior ultrasound sensor cover. This one is a new Motorsport coloured one. I did intend to put this into my Japan import e46 m3. But traded it last year.
  15. Bump, still have alarm components for e46 for sale.
  16. Welcome , the C1 is certainly a rare car ! Any pictures of some of the BMWs you’ve owned ?
  17. Also spent time in the boot. Front doors are running active so tweeter and door midbass so get a channel each. Rear doors are mainly going to be used for rear fill or turn up a bit when passengers in the rear. So these are running passive crossovers. They might have fitted in the rear door card but learnings from my e46 m3 stereo was that hot glue and 3m tape only held for a few years ( although the crossover in that build were massive ! ) This time I thought I’d mount them into the boot. To be honest they are mounted a bit to close together with the coil spacing but mounting them vertically would inhibit airflow to amp. Each rear door has two sets of wiring for tweeter and mid bass. Cross overs have been set with 0 gain on tweeter settings and full range on midbass. Will use Mobridge to set high pass of 150hz instead .
  18. All adaptors have arrived. The door midbass adapters are really well made. The tweeter mounting rings were good but needs modification for rear f30 / f80 tweeter mounts. The front ones also would have need some tweaking . The focal tweetes cone with some mounting collars , but are 1 mm to wide and 2mm too deep for the BMW HK tweater mounts. I used a demel and took 1mm of each focal mounting collar and took 2 mm of the hieght at the clip points. The BMW brackets also needed some guides removed. Once done the collars clipped into the brackets and then the tweeters press fitted the collars.
  19. They look great, better than any aftermarket adapters I’ve seen for e46. Really like how you’ve done the tweeter adapter to fit into factory mount points in door card. I used 316i blanking plates on my e46 and a 52mm holesaw . Didn’t look that flash !
  20. Door speakers have arrived , change of focal dealer meant that NZ stock needed replenishment, apparently they had ordered a few containers worth. Looked into getting a 3D printer for making adapters for tweeter to fit into Harman Kardon mounts and door spacers . But took an easier route and brought some already made. The rings are via one supplier and door mounts via another both UK based. Easier than using hot glue to mount tweeters and using router to make spacers. Door adapter https://streetwise3d.com/products/bmw-focal-es100k-speaker-adaptors-pair Tweeter rings to fit in Harmon Kardon / Hifi tweeter mounts https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/173714926626
  21. And behind idrive, Green cable is only Most cable in NTB EVo with base audio. Will put in Y adapter to link to new Most Amp cable.
  22. Over weekend completed installing cabin speaker wiring. Two pairs of speaker wire to each door connector for tweeter and door mid bass. Another pair to each underseat woofer position. F80 reasonably straight forward to run wires down either side. Getting to front connectors a bit more involved. The FEM modules covers passenger side and DAB tuner covers driver side. Due care required to move modules out of way for access to connectors. Install also reinforced using nothing larger that 18 awg / 0.85mm2 thin walled cable. Anything larger and it would be problematic fitting connector pins. Running the Amplifier Most cable to IDrive was via left side and firewall took time. Used Tesa tape rather than cable ties to secure as fibre easy to break and doesn’t like tight radius. Routed it underneath looms so no chance of pinching or pressure. 5 metre length was just enough at either end. When taking idrive out I wasn’t expecting to see an Most connection. But despite base audio the F80 LCI uses Most audio between cluster and idrive. Now need a Most Y cable to create a fibre ring between idrive - cluster - Mobridge Amp. Added a wifi antenna to the idrive unit. NTB Evo 4.1 doesn’t use wifi but seeing posts of software upgrades for 6.1 on the older units to enable car play etc. Possible future coding option but does render factory navigation inoperable. Learnings from the weekend is I need to chunk this down to 1 or 2 hour work bundles for health reasons. Super tired but did enjoy doing it.
  23. Is Mike on here ? Previous owner of green machine . Looks great in the flesh
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