My E38 speaker install

Voodoomelon

Finally, finally, after months of head scratching and heartache do I now have my new audio system up and running in the E38. All factory mids and tweeters are gone, as well as all factory speaker wiring, crossovers, restrictive internal grills etc, as they are all absolute muck. Appalling quality audio considering how much someone would have spent on the car new.

All x4 speakers and tweeters replaced with Boston Acoustics Pro50SE component sets, all run to a matched Alpine PDX-F6 amplifier. All wiring replaced with over 100ft of Streetwire 14 gauge copper wire. 14 gauge wire is a nightmare to fish through the door pillars but I got it done in the end!

Everything works like factory, bass, treble, fade, sat nav, tv, radio etc. Only thing i've lost is the in car phone coming through the speakers, as the factory mids had secondary inputs for the phone output, but hey, I never used it.

I started this in January (see the snow!) and only have it working properly now due to treading un charted territory with the factory headunit/amplifier being in the boot, and working out the best way to feed an external amplifier.

Anyways, some random pics from over the months.

This is where everything feeds back to in the boot. This compartment houses the tv tuner, cd changer, trafficmaster, sat nav, radio tuner/amplifier etc. You can also see where I choose to mount the amplifier. The car battery is located on the right side of the boot which made the install much easier in that respect:



Boston copolymer woofer:


Sitting in the factory pod:



Streetwire cable:



Boston tweeter (three times bigger than the factory ones which were only located in the front doors):


Custom mounted in place:






Front doors had the room for crossovers to remain attached. Custom mounted to the inside of the door cars with anti-vibration backing:






Rear doors are small so the crossovers had to be separated:

Voodoomelon

The nightmare that was fishing the cable through the door pillars. Let us never speak of it again:






Cable coming through into the door panel area:


Radio module/amplifier is behind the carpeted wall, they really making things easy...


Old speaker wire versus new:


De-restricted the inside of the grills and new Boston tags:


It sounds *great* as of today as I have now soldered the x4 factory outputs from the radio/amplifier to female RCA cables (the signal traversing the factory speaker wires is actually a balanced 5V signal) and now have them connected directly into the Alpine amp. This gives as close to a 100% clean signal as possible, whilst retaining all factory functionality.

It goes SOOO loud its incredible, I can't even stand having it loud enough to hear when it actually distorts, its mind blowing how clear it is at high volume. The only let down is the bass response, its pretty average as the factory radio/amplifier only has limited bass/treble control. Alas, a nice sub will sort that out.

Got there in the end! :pac:

vectra

Sounds like a job well worth doing.
Congrats on your effort and dedication.

homer90

EPIC.
Dont have, nor will I ever have the balls to tackle a job like that.

Joe Dolan is sounding good now eh ?

bmstuff

Nice well done
Now you need to upgrade this pre-historic OEM radio of yours :-)

Voodoomelon

Aye, its a disappointment having to continue to use the factory radio/amp, but that means ripping out the 16:9 display and replacing it with a crap looking DIN headunit. Would also loose on board computer and all other functionality that the display offers. Have to compromise somewhere unfortunately!

Ardennes1944

Mind your earsies

vectra

Did you not need to use any
Dynomat?

Voodoomelon

I was going to go down that route but the costs started mounting. The doors are bigger than most so I would have needed about $500 worth.

Also dynomat is meant primarily for installs where the woofer is mounted just in the door card and uses the door as the speaker cabinet. My woofers are in their own pods so i don't think it would have made much difference. There's no vibration or rattling and I have replaced all the door card clips so there's nothing loose anywhere.

One thing I want to go back and improve is the amount of polyfill in the woofer pods, a chap in the US suggested stuffing them with as much polyfill as possible and then take out a third of it. It turns the sound energy into heat and makes the speakers sound "larger" than they are. Interesting stuff. BMW only installed a single slither of 5mm polyfill in each pod.

rocky112

This is amazing!!! Voodoomelon...excellent...