**** volvo for how they designed the inner skin and how it has to be removed. What you dont see in this photo is the fact that the window has to be removed in order to get the plastic inner door skin out to access the outer skin. I was looking into this and taking peeks at it over the course of the entire day. It was clear that the window needed to be removed, but removing it was not obvious. Not a single one of the access holes in the top of the door allow you to access the clips that hold the window in. It wasnt until kevin came in and we both looked at it hard until he figured out how to do it. Once he figured it out, it wasnt bad. But figuring it out ******. I should probably do it again and take detailed pictures for anyone else with this car who might want to do this. Once we got the window and inner skin out, the OEM deadener was removed, and ResoNix Squares were applied. I think i used 4.5 per door (which is 4.5 square feet). Butyl rope was added to the gap between the outer skin and crash bar to help even further. 25 Blackhole tiles were added to each door before the inner skin was reinstalled (not pictured). Once that was done, the inner skin (which didnt receive any deadening since it is strong enough on its own and shaped in a way that would make it very difficult to apply effectively) was reinstalled and the GB60 baffles were installed. 2 layers of ResoNix FD2 were added around the GB60 to seal it to the door card to "couple" it to the cabin and funnel all acoustic energy through the grill and outside of the door panel instead of allowing a lot of it to get "lost" and cause problems behind the door panel.
The OEM Hardon Kardon amp is located under the passanger seat. This amp and the processing inside of it may be essential into some of the tuning i do for the 2 seat tune/setup. Regardless of what you think, Harmon has more advanced processing and upmixing going on in here than anything that is offered in the aftermarket. Might as well utilize it, while also giving me access to all speaker wires since the molex plugs on these door specifically make it seemingly impossible to run new wire. These make Mazda door molex plugs look like a walk in the park. I will most likely have to drill a hole and make another boot to get a wire to the tweeter since the oem midrange and tweeter are on the same channel with a basic passive crossover at the tweeter. At the end of the day, i have to grab 10 speaker signals from this amp. Front left and right midbass, front left and right highs (midrange and tweeter), front center channel (2 mids and a tweeter on a passive crossover), rear left and right doors (passive 2 way set up in the door), left and right rear deck speakers, and sub. The reason im deciding to grab ALL of these signals isnt because its necessary. Its because i want to, again, utilize the Harman processing to its full potential and have the option to use or not use whatever signal may or may not work. I have a reason to believe that the rear door signal and the rear deck signal are not the same. I will be evaluating the signal soon enough and post my findings. Unfortunately the Helix DSP Ultra only has 8 channels of analog inputs, so i will probably put the rear deck signal into the V Twelve so long as it is a clearly different signal than the rear door speakers. I will not only have to test for response, timing, phase, and input mixing on that channel, but also signals unrelated to music, such as back up beeps, etc.
OEM amp removed. The harness doesnt look like much.. but it will when 23 pairs of speaker wire are run to/from here, as well as 5 extra pairs of accessory power/ground wire and a single turn on wire just in case. 57 wires total. im not even sure how i fit it all, especially considering i ran out of Stinger speaker wire and had to borrow some home audio style wire from another installer i know locally (Thanks Chris). This stuff was stiff as hell, had an extra external jacket, and was a pain to work with since it was so stiff.
So, the green plugs with the harnesses shown above are the outputs of the amp that feed into the processors/amps. The amplifier outputs were then wired to the oem speaker wire harness. The 5 pairs of extra power/ground are under the carpet on the left in this picture, and the 3 extra pairs on the right are to run extra wire for the side tweeters, and the center midrange. Its not as pretty as i'd usually do it and would like it to be, but I cannot stress enough how hard that wire was to work with, let alone when there are over 20 runs of it in one bundle underneath a molded foam backed carpet.
Spare tire lasted like 5 days lol. Fiberglassing started for the enclosure to house the 3 Illusion C12's. There were a lot of random studs protruding from the trunk floor, that's why some of the pieces of Biaxial fiberglass has holes punched in them. 2 layers of biaxial were set to cure. You can see the red lines i drew with a grease pen to mark where i am cutting the top section off. Yeah, i glassed a much larger area than i needed. Once this mold is trimmed, the sharp bits will be grinded down and many more layers of biaxial will be added. Im honestly looking at a sealed enclosure that is a bit too small for the subs, but i am still confident that they will still play down to 20hz. I have done these subs in very small enclosures before and had good luck. Great luck actually. Hopefully my own car is no different. Next up is getting the Helix V Twelve bracket installed and the amp wired up and actually have some music again.