When you have a reputation as a shop that does meticulous exemplary work, you tend to get your share of clients whose cars and audio systems that need fixing! Simplicity in Sound was contacted by a gentleman with a brand new 2014 Camaro SS. He had gotten a new system installed at a local shop with some high quality products, like the Morel Virtus, but he wasn't happy with how it sounded. Bing at SiS took a listen and agreed with his assessment, and a quick look around. It revealed some other potential issues with the build. Hopefully consumers considering an install for their vehicle will find this story instructive.
First, a look at this beauty—which belies the botched car audio system inside.
Below, the front stage and wiring. After taking the car apart, they surmised that the two sides of the car were done by two different people, as there were some pretty glaring differences in how everything was execute.
One side had the tweeter glued to the back half of the pod, while the other side had it secured to the front side of the pod.
Here we found some cut speaker wires and oddly enough, black paint on the front of the board, but nothing on the backside where its exposed to the elements.
The sound proofing treatment on the two doors was also very different. On the passenger side, the stock weather barrier was kept in place, and beneath it, the Dynamat only covered the metal surfaces.
The driver side did not retain the wather barrier, and the entire door was sealed with dynamat.
Both sides feature the Morel passives taped to the door card using Dynamat.
The only wire running upfront was the remote bass knob cable, which was just laying about in the door sill. It's far from the worst we have seen but still pretty peculiar.
Now for what we did to the car. We relocated the bassknob so it is within easy reach of the driver.
We still utilized the stock locations of the door for the drivers, ran a new set of speaker wires into the door.
For the sake of consistency, we sealed each door with Dynamat and then laid down a layer of STP foam to decouple the metal surface from the plastic door card.
SiS used a set of GM speaker adapter brackets, covered the inside with CLD damper, and bolted the Morel Virtus midbass to them. Then the drivers were installed and bolted in place.
The door card also received an abundance of CLD damper to help reduce resonance.
Next, the Morel tweeters, sans grill, on the backside of the OEM tweeter pods to maintain consistency.
Here are some pics of how SiS ran wires from the front to the back of the car, ziptied and organized every few inches.
The rear deck was a part that SiS didn't anticipate spending a lot of time on, but had to re-do based on what they uncovered. You can see the underside of the rear deck which held the Morel Tempo 6x9s. Pretty unpleasant to look at.
While listening to the previous system, one thing the guys noticed there was a lot of buzz and rattle from the rear deck, which surprised them a little because of the amount of Dynamat there, but then they noticed two wires coming from the speaker harness to the bottom of the rear deck into some sound proofing.
Once they pulled that down, it revealed the source of the rattle: the Morel passives were simply held up in the metal cavity by some Dynamat!
The top side of the rear deck wasn't much better. It appeared the stock speaker was removed, the whole area covered with Dynamat, with the pieces were haphazardly folded down and the new speaker pushed into the hole. Since SiS would be converting the car into an active system, they wanted to reinstall the stock speakers, but had to scrape away all the old sound proofing first so the stock speaker could fit.
SiS wanted to retain the stock rear proximity beepers but get as much bass pass through into the cabin as possible. So using the same method as on their previous Camaro builds, they hollowed out the cone of the rear midbass, and retained the bridge mounted high freq speaker.
After scraping away most of the old sound proofing and applying new ones, they secured the stock speakers, and soundproofed the bottom the rear deck with foam to provide more isolation between the cover and rear deck.
As SiS' Bing Xu says, this was the first time he got to hear a before and after utilizing pretty much the same equipment. It really hammered home how much a DSP, running active, and more secure install can do. Imaging and staging was now very good especially for stock location—wide, well-centered with decent center, depth average. Tonality wise, the Virtus really did well in these doors, providing a lot of solid impact and extension and of course the tweeters were nicely detailed and not too harsh. Overall, according to him, it was pretty pleasant to listen to given it retained a stock head unit that doesn't play CDs with a dramatic difference compared to the previous iteration of the build.
