I've got $750 to blow... where do I put it?

[sjv13 10+ year member]

it doesn't require a CD player.
the 80prs is nothing compared to the JBL MS-8. Pioneer is fairly disappointing in the noise, menu structure, and build quality department. And the MS-8 is flat out a better investment. A lot of people jumped on the 80prs, and after dealing with it, a lot jumped back off. I avoid Pioneer completely after spending 10 years helping people deal with their problems. There are 3 other manufacturers that put a lot more care into their HU design (Alpine, Kenwood and Clarion).

I agree your effort should be one of two things:

1. a MS-8 as described above.

2. focus your efforts on making the front doors as good as you possibly can, including the amplifier quality, and door treatment (absorption, seals, deadening).

both options should result in you running active and not bi-amp. you want to take control over the crossover points and slopes.

the sub and sub amp you have are fine. no reason to change if you are happy.

One problem I have is that my components have integrated crossovers and use caps on the speaker instead of crossover boxes, so it's impossible for me to change the xover between the woofer and tweeter. Will that be okay for the ms8? Is it possible to find them anywhere for cheaper than $800? I'm kinda leaning towards a new 4 channel rather than a DSP.

Any idea how much custom door pods/panels run?

Yes, improving the installation will address so many issues that people may not even be aware of until they get the car apart and start fixing problems. No amount of EQ would get your standard door-mounted woofer to sound its best, and the doors are just one of many possible places to focus on.
One could easily spend $750 on materials from Sound Deadener Showndown and spend a couple of full weekends doing nothing but sound deadening the entire cabin. I know I still have a lot of areas I want to address with my car, but I keep tweaking other things. It's easier to understand putting in a new set of speakers than it is to justify puttng in some boring layers of stuff under the carpet and panels.

To be honest, I really dont know how much longer I'm going to have the car I do right now. I dont want to invest a whole lot into things that I wont be able to take to the new car. I know I'm going to have to leave a set of speakers for the front, a HU, and an amp. I blew the stock speakers, which was what turned me on to car audio in the first place. I also cut the wiring harness off, so the factory HU cant connect anymore, which also means I cant connect a harness to the new HU so I'll need to leave a 2 or 4 channel amp with the car as well. I really like the HU I have now, and I may end up buying a cheaper one to put in the car when I sell it. I got the Polk 4 channel for free, so I'm not complaining.

 

[keep_hope_alive Premium Member]

car audio doesn't have to stay in the car, it can come with you. hacking the car up isn't the end of the world. you can get a box from Walmart that has a cd player and four speakers for next to nothing. power the speakers from the head unit. most people will be fine with it and those that don't would change it anyway. and most people don't want to hassle with an amp and you won't get any more for it. no worries.

integrated tweeters aren't a big deal. you simply disconnect the factory cap and wire them directly, and ideally remove them from the coaxial mount and put them up higher where they do some good. or leave them as coax. the MX-8 doesn't care, and can handle either. note that the MS-8 also has an 8 channel amp included, so buying it means you also get an amp. I agree, it will do the most good if you won't improve the doors.

making doors better and quieter isn't that expensive and lowers road noise. that is one thing future buyers will like.

that said, getting a better 4 channel amp is always a good idea. this time, get one that has flexible crossovers and can run active (the crossover has a x10 or x20 switch to allow high frequency adjustments). hell, I just bought an Alpine MRV-F405 that can do that, and was made in Japan in the mid 90's. and that amp freakin' rocks. back when rated power was real and low distortion.

 

[jar1zx 10+ year member]

I hate to say anything that goes against what keep_hope_alive says since he knows so much and is always helpful in all his post that i have seen. but I have been using pioneer HU for last 15 years + and I have been very happy except the one pioneer I got that I had to ground the RCA's. other than that pioneer makes some very nice decks. I haven't used a entry pioneer tho all have been mid grade or flagship HU's besides one it was the avh3200 and I was happy with it.

 

[keep_hope_alive Premium Member]

I hate to say anything that goes against what keep_hope_alive says since he knows so much and is always helpful in all his post that i have seen. but I have been using pioneer HU for last 15 years + and I have been very happy except the one pioneer I got that I had to ground the RCA's. other than that pioneer makes some very nice decks. I haven't used a entry pioneer tho all have been mid grade or flagship HU's besides one it was the avh3200 and I was happy with it.

it's cool. i'm glad you've had success. they have some nice $1000 offerings that i don't include. anyone is allowed to disagree with me at any time. no worries there.

to me, grounding RCA's is unacceptable. i've spoken with Pioneer engineers. their flippant attitude on the subject disappointed me. but more than the noise, is the terrible menu structure. sub level should be one press away, not buried in a menu. and their manuals are poorly written. /rant

Pioneer does offer a lot of nice features for the money.

 

[jar1zx 10+ year member]

Ya out of 12 or 13 decks most of them flagship pioneers best I have been happy

But that one radio (it was a flagship deck) think it was over 600$ back in 06 I think. I had to run a ground to the RCA's pre outs I wasn't too happy with that one over 600 bucks for a single din non vid deck and I had too go a few weeks not knowing why my radio wouldn't work and found out I had to ground RCA's jacks and warranty wouldn't cover it. That radio did ****. But the rest I have had good luck out of and have been happy with.

 

[sjv13 10+ year member]

car audio doesn't have to stay in the car, it can come with you. hacking the car up isn't the end of the world. you can get a box from Walmart that has a cd player and four speakers for next to nothing. power the speakers from the head unit. most people will be fine with it and those that don't would change it anyway. and most people don't want to hassle with an amp and you won't get any more for it. no worries.
integrated tweeters aren't a big deal. you simply disconnect the factory cap and wire them directly, and ideally remove them from the coaxial mount and put them up higher where they do some good. or leave them as coax. the MX-8 doesn't care, and can handle either. note that the MS-8 also has an 8 channel amp included, so buying it means you also get an amp. I agree, it will do the most good if you won't improve the doors.

making doors better and quieter isn't that expensive and lowers road noise. that is one thing future buyers will like.

that said, getting a better 4 channel amp is always a good idea. this time, get one that has flexible crossovers and can run active (the crossover has a x10 or x20 switch to allow high frequency adjustments). hell, I just bought an Alpine MRV-F405 that can do that, and was made in Japan in the mid 90's. and that amp freakin' rocks. back when rated power was real and low distortion.

Will I be able to power the speakers from the HU if I cut the harness off already?

Also, what I was saying before is that I do know you can take a lot of car audio from car to car, so I dont really want to put a ton into the stuff you cant take from car to car (i. e. deadener).

Also, my speakers are separates, but they just have the "feature" of not needing an xover box. The tweeters are mounted in my dash and appear to reflect off the windshield, and my woofers are in the doors and are pretty well sealed in there. I heard from someone else here that reflecting tweeters off the windshield isnt very good to do. Is this true? Am I missing a lot by not drilling new holes for them?

Lastly, I still have factory speaker wire in the doors. I searched google and experimented for a long time to try to get speaker wire through the doors, but apparently Volvo is notorious for having that be next to impossible. Some people have resorted to even running the wire outside of the boot and drilling new holes everywhere. What I did was cut the harness off behind the hu, then splice in the new speaker wire in and run everything from there back to my amp. Am I missing anything from not having good speaker wire the whole way between the speaker and amp?

 

[sjv13 10+ year member]

Ya out of 12 or 13 decks most of them flagship pioneers best I have been happyBut that one radio (it was a flagship deck) think it was over 600$ back in 06 I think. I had to run a ground to the RCA's pre outs I wasn't too happy with that one over 600 bucks for a single din non vid deck and I had too go a few weeks not knowing why my radio wouldn't work and found out I had to ground RCA's jacks and warranty wouldn't cover it. That radio did ****. But the rest I have had good luck out of and have been happy with.

My Pioneer HU seems to be working fine. I havent needed to ground the RCAs yet either. I only regret it not having a CD player once in a while. But I use the paid version of Spotify for almost all of my music anyways, so it's great 99% of the time. And if I really wanted to (which I have done a few times) I can load lossless versions onto my iPod through iTunes for the albums that actually deserve to be played that way, hahaha.

 

[jar1zx 10+ year member]

Will I be able to power the speakers from the HU if I cut the harness off already?

Not sure what harness your talking about cutting? Never cut factory wire harness on your radio.

If your talking about cutting speaker plug to put new speakers in, that's ok just leave enuf to wire it back if you have too

With new speakers and new deck you can bypass factory amp easy just by running new speaker wires and leaving all factory alone. Just unhook factory speaker plugs and your good

 

[sjv13 10+ year member]

Not sure what harness your talking about cutting? Never cut factory wire harness on your radio. If your talking about cutting speaker plug to put new speakers in, that's ok just leave enuf to wire it back if you have too

With new speakers and new deck you can bypass factory amp easy just by running new speaker wires and leaving all factory alone. Just unhook factory speaker plugs and your good

I'm not sure what I should call it. I cut off the end of the plug which all the factory speaker wires went into, so I then I could splice in the new speaker wire to run it to the back of the wagon.

 

[jar1zx 10+ year member]

Maybe you just cut the amp wires. Was it going into a box with heat sinks on it? Just don't cut the wire harness that plugs into the factory radio. If you cut the amp wires to bypass factory amp this is where it gets fun. Take a 9 volt battery to find each speaker, when you locate each speaker watch to see if speaker pushes out or pulls in when you touch the 9 volt to wires. If it pulls in you have negative and positive backwards.

I'm thinking you cut wires so you could still run factory speaker wires to speakers with new radio. If not and you run new wires you just wasted a lot of time. If you cut wires in front of factory amp you just shot you self in foot as tho's wire are signal output from factory deck and have no amplification.

 

[winkychevelle 10+ year member]

The way he has his wires run is fine. I had to do the same thing on my Cruze before the dash kit came out. Basically his factory speaker wires are run to the trunk now instead of the deck.

I would check the polarity on all the speakers first

Add seals inbetween the speaker mounting ring and the door panel

And get some kind of dsp whether it be

Pioneer deh80prs

Alpine 149bt with TuneIt app on phone

Jbl ms8

Arc audio ps8

Audison bitone

Rockford 360.3

Alpine cda 9887,9886

Good processing can go a long way but without sealing the doors up and damping the rear wave it can only do so much

Try aiming your speakers more at you this will bring more detail from higher frequencies that don't disperse well. You may have to turn you amp down for your tweeters a bit though as on axis they can be quite loud but that's a good thing

 

[sjv13 10+ year member]

Maybe you just cut the amp wires. Was it going into a box with heat sinks on it? Just don't cut the wire harness that plugs into the factory radio. If you cut the amp wires to bypass factory amp this is where it gets fun. Take a 9 volt battery to find each speaker, when you locate each speaker watch to see if speaker pushes out or pulls in when you touch the 9 volt to wires. If it pulls in you have negative and positive backwards. I'm thinking you cut wires so you could still run factory speaker wires to speakers with new radio. If not and you run new wires you just wasted a lot of time. If you cut wires in front of factory amp you just shot you self in foot as tho's wire are signal output from factory deck and have no amplification.

lol, no. My car didnt have a factory amp. It had a regular old HU and all the speakers attached to it via a harness, and they all ran off of head unit power.

Then I got a new HU and a 4 channel amp. I didnt want to run new speaker wire through the doors, and all the speaker wires were already concentrated into the plug, so I snipped off the plastic connector piece that would ordinarily plug into a head unit. Then, I read a wiring chart and found out which colors were what, and then proceeded to splice the new speaker wire into the correct ones and run the wire back to where I have my amp and connect it to the correct speaker wire outputs of the amp.

All I'm saying here is that I think I'll need to sell the car with a HU w/ at least 4 pre-outs and with a 4 channel amp, since I cut off the plastic piece that would ordinarily plug into a head unit to let the speakers be powered by it.

 

[sjv13 10+ year member]

The way he has his wires run is fine. I had to do the same thing on my Cruze before the dash kit came out. Basically his factory speaker wires are run to the trunk now instead of the deck.
I would check the polarity on all the speakers first

Add seals inbetween the speaker mounting ring and the door panel

And get some kind of dsp whether it be

Pioneer deh80prs

Alpine 149bt with TuneIt app on phone

Jbl ms8

Arc audio ps8

Audison bitone

Rockford 360.3

Alpine cda 9887,9886

Good processing can go a long way but without sealing the doors up and damping the rear wave it can only do so much

Try aiming your speakers more at you this will bring more detail from higher frequencies that don't disperse well. You may have to turn you amp down for your tweeters a bit though as on axis they can be quite loud but that's a good thing

I'm pretty sure all my polarities are correct, I never in this thread mentioned anything about that haha

Also, I do have my speaker mounting rings sealed nicely. I definitely noticed a difference when I did so, especially on snare drum hits. One problem I have though is that the space behind the speaker is sooo tiny. Basically it's just enough room for the magnet and that's it. The doors came with a piece of metal that goes right behind the magnet and seals it off from being able to use the air space between the inner and outer metal panels as type of enclosure. So essentially my speakers are in the tiniest little box you could imagine, with just enough room for the magnet (but snares sound amazing, haha).

 

[naughtyca 10+ year member]

if you are not planning to keep the car

4) Just get a new battery (no big 3) and try to run an upgraded substage (around 1000rms).

 

[sjv13 10+ year member]

if you are not planning to keep the car
4) Just get a new battery (no big 3) and try to run an upgraded substage (around 1000rms).

Do you think I'd be able to run something like an AQ1200 plus my 4 channel on a single run of 4ga from the battery, to distro, split to each amp? Or am I going to need to buy some 0ga?