We have a customer from Westminster, Maryland that we have known for over twenty years. A few years ago he bought himself a beautiful yellow 2010 Camaro SS. And like any normal red blooded guy he wanted to make it better. Eventually it was time for us to work on upgrading this Camaro sound system. He was leery about changing out the factory radio because of cosmetic concerns but he also wanted a navigation system that would integrate well with an iPhone5. We explained to him that we now had some good options to install a navigation system in the dash and have it look like Chevy put it there. Now his motor was running! The day he dropped of his vehicle for the navigation system upgrade he was already excited about improving the sound quality of the factory stereo system. As before, he wanted the cosmetics of anything we did to have that factory installed look. We were up to the challenge.
Camaro Sound System Starts in The Dash
First, we installed a Pioneer AVIC-Z150BH navigation unit. This is Pioneer’s flagship unit and integrates well with both iPhone5’s and Android phones letting you run apps off of the navigation screen. Of course it lets him have Bluetooth for hands-free calling and music streaming plus control his music on his iPhone plus Pandora internet radio. This unit also has a very good preamp which is just what the doctor ordered if you are building a high quality sound system. It sends a better quality musical signal back to the amplifiers. The better the sound quality going into the amplifiers means the better the sound quality coming out of them. Pretty elementary, eh?
German Maestro Speakers And Some Tricks of The Trade
In the front doors we installed German Maestro EV6508 speakers in the factory locations for a stock look. But these doors needed help if they were going to cooperate with us in delivering great sound. We installed Hushmat damping material all over the inner door skins to eliminate rattling or resonation. Many people are familiar with this type of product, but we also have two other products up our sleeve to improve sound quality in these doors.
Hushmat makes a product called WaveBreaker that gets installed on the inside of the outer door skin. Here is the technology in simple terms: When a speaker produces sound it does it in what is called waves. When a speaker moves forward it creates what is called front waves and when it moves back it creates what is called back waves.Here is where the Wave Breaker comes in. The outer door panel in a car is very reflective of these sound waves, so when the speaker creates these back waves they reflect off the inner door panel and smack into the back of the speaker, creating distortion and hurting the sound quality. The Wave Breaker effectively breaks up these waves so this does not happen. Very simple technology that works very well.
The second item is not an off the shelf item. For years we have looked for a good solution to seal the front side of a speaker to the speaker opening in a door panel. We knew that a lot of the sound energy was getting lost in the door panel. Fortunately for us a friend of ours thought the same thing. He had a company design trimmable closed cell foam rings that would seal the speaker to the door panel. Now when the speaker is playing all the energy it creates comes out of the door panel. This results in better midbass and much improved accuracy in the sound.
JL Audio Rounds Off Camaro Sound System
Now it was time to move to the back of the car. JL Audio makes a beautiful Stealthbox that comes loaded with 3 JL Audio 10W3 subwoofers, which are very accurate and can get loud when called upon. This enclosure is made of fiberglass and tucks nicely in the trunk behind the back seat with the subwoofers firing towards the tail lights. Jl Audio makes this Stealthbox two different ways; carpeted, or primered where it is designed to be painted. As we can paint small items in our shop, and this car was a beautiful yellow, we suggested to the customer that we paint this enclosure yellow. He agreed. It truly looks beautiful in the trunk.
If anyone has seen the size of the trunk in a new Camaro you know that it is not big. So when it came time for amplifiers we chose JL Audio XD series as they are very compact and sound incredible. We used an XD400/4 amplifier configured as a two channel amplifier so it provided 200 watts of clean power to each front speaker. This amount of power was used so the system would never sound strained when he chooses to turn it up. It also gives the amplifier better control of the speaker, sort of like putting a bigger engine and bigger brakes on a car can make it start and stop faster. For power going to the subwoofers we chose an XD600/1 amplifier which gave us 600 watts of power. One of the cleanest design elements we were able to implement was the ability to completely hide both amplifiers behind the carpeted trim panels near the tail lights. This resulted in no loss at all of cargo space from the amplifiers yet they are accessible in under five minutes when you need access to them.
When the customer arrived to pick up the Camaro we thought it was only fitting to demo it to him with some classic AC/DC. He was blown away by the sound quality, the output level, and the beautiful fit and finish of everything we did to his car. We love it when a plan comes together!
