Nodge68
Well-Known Member
I'v always felt the Freelander suffered from a rather below average sound system. I replaced the very poor 5 Watts per channel factory head unit when I first got the car. I chose a Sony Xplod MEX-BT2700 which has plenty of features including Blue Tooth connectivity, high power 52 watts per channel internal amp and a built in crossovers for the internal amp and the Sub Woofer pre -out connection. This was a huge improvement on the factory head unit.
I lived with this running the factory door speakers for some time but it always fell well short of punch compared to my wife's Bose Audio equipped VW Tiguan (the best part of the car in fact)
One of my hobbies is high end home audio so over the years i'v built many speaker systems
I decided I'd have a go at addressing the Freelander's average speaker system .
I did some testing of the factory speakers which although very cheaply made aren't to bad sonicily. I ran several test tones from 40Hz up to 20KHz while monitoring the sound pressure levels in various locations in the car, amazingly there was almost no fluctuation in the door speakers response from 60Hz right up to 15KHz !! The speakers could even reproduce 40Hz but this caused break up of the mid range at higher sound levels which is to be expected. So after all this testing I decided that the factory door speakers would do what I needed if I remove the lower frequencies from them.
The next bit was the interesting part for me. I decided a powerful sub woofer was the way to go. I looked at the factory in boot sub the premium audio systems use but decided it was cheap and nasty with a pathetic little drive unit. It is housed in a tuned ported enclosure which makes the most of the limited power it can take but the enclosure is plastic which is a very bad material to make a speaker out of .
So this ment build something along the boot sub idea but make it work properly.
This is what i'v come up with. It doesn't take up much actual boot space except the under floor cubby hole. I made a mock up to test the idea using an old 10" JBL sub driver , I chose this because it is designed to be installed into small sealed (infinite baffle) or ported systems.
I've used a new Clarion 10" sub in the finished install.
I chose to try the system with the sealed enclosure for the time being as it's better at taking high power levels even if it's frequency response is limited to around 40Hz.
So the pics show the various stages of construction starting with making the baffle up to the final Clarion sub install.
The amp i'm using is a cheap n cheerful SPLx 350 watt amp that has been wired as a single channel output. It will supply 190 watts RMS like this which is all that is necessary.
The amp is fitted inside the bottom of the cubby box so is effectively inside the speaker enclosure. The wiring is fed under the carpet emerging inside the enclosure.
I've set the sub crossover to 80Hz and also set the door speakers to only receive frequencies over 80Hz. This cuts any bass distortion in the door speakers to inaudible limits and also allows them to take a bit more power which helps the volume levels.
I'm happy with the sound of the system which is now miles better than anything the factory fitted. The car now shakes when the volume is cranked.
I lived with this running the factory door speakers for some time but it always fell well short of punch compared to my wife's Bose Audio equipped VW Tiguan (the best part of the car in fact)
One of my hobbies is high end home audio so over the years i'v built many speaker systems
I decided I'd have a go at addressing the Freelander's average speaker system .
I did some testing of the factory speakers which although very cheaply made aren't to bad sonicily. I ran several test tones from 40Hz up to 20KHz while monitoring the sound pressure levels in various locations in the car, amazingly there was almost no fluctuation in the door speakers response from 60Hz right up to 15KHz !! The speakers could even reproduce 40Hz but this caused break up of the mid range at higher sound levels which is to be expected. So after all this testing I decided that the factory door speakers would do what I needed if I remove the lower frequencies from them.
The next bit was the interesting part for me. I decided a powerful sub woofer was the way to go. I looked at the factory in boot sub the premium audio systems use but decided it was cheap and nasty with a pathetic little drive unit. It is housed in a tuned ported enclosure which makes the most of the limited power it can take but the enclosure is plastic which is a very bad material to make a speaker out of .
So this ment build something along the boot sub idea but make it work properly.
This is what i'v come up with. It doesn't take up much actual boot space except the under floor cubby hole. I made a mock up to test the idea using an old 10" JBL sub driver , I chose this because it is designed to be installed into small sealed (infinite baffle) or ported systems.
I've used a new Clarion 10" sub in the finished install.
I chose to try the system with the sealed enclosure for the time being as it's better at taking high power levels even if it's frequency response is limited to around 40Hz.
So the pics show the various stages of construction starting with making the baffle up to the final Clarion sub install.
The amp i'm using is a cheap n cheerful SPLx 350 watt amp that has been wired as a single channel output. It will supply 190 watts RMS like this which is all that is necessary.
The amp is fitted inside the bottom of the cubby box so is effectively inside the speaker enclosure. The wiring is fed under the carpet emerging inside the enclosure.
I've set the sub crossover to 80Hz and also set the door speakers to only receive frequencies over 80Hz. This cuts any bass distortion in the door speakers to inaudible limits and also allows them to take a bit more power which helps the volume levels.
I'm happy with the sound of the system which is now miles better than anything the factory fitted. The car now shakes when the volume is cranked.
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