Page 1: Overview
Page 2: Exterior, Engine, Interior
Page 3: Audio, Car PC
Page 4: System Buildup, Part 1
Page 5: System Buildup, Part 2
Page 6: Bimmerfest '06

This is where you'll see how I built up my system. I did everything myself, and it took hours a day over three months to do most of it. Then over the next six months I spent many hours here and there to finish things up.

Everything done to this car had to be custom, from the dash to the trunk to the box. I knew nothing about car audio before I started, so many mistakes and false starts were made and corrected. But I'm happy with how it turned out. Everything is bolted down tight, all the wires are protected and are of the correct gauge, and care has been taken to just make it look nice.

Anyways, let's start. So as I mentioned, I had three amps I was going to re-use from a previous install (the Arcs), plus the Morel components. For the sub, I chose an RE Audio XXX 15. This sucker weighs about 70 pounds and can easily take 2000w RMS. Here's how it looked upon arrival:

So where was I gonna put it? I wanted a sealed box for SQ, and it obviously had to go in the trunk. I decided to build a 2 cu box myself from 3/4" MDF, reinforced with 5/8" steel rods. To make this easier, I bought my own table saw and router. Here's how the box construction went:

The MDF in front is double-baffled. One mistake I made was cutting the box so that the sub is flush with the front baffle. This made it impossible for me to get my fingers around the lip of the sub to pull it out. The only way to get the sub out of the box is to tip the damn thing over! Unfortunately I couldn't correct this mistake:

You can see that I first tried to use thumbscrews and spacer rods to bolt the sub into the baffle (I put tee nuts in the other side as anchors). Turned out the thumbscrews just get loose after a while, so I eventually just used screw-in bolts:

Now for the testing... the first subwoofer amp I tried wasn't the SoundStream, it was a $2000 Zapco. Unfortunately the Zapco amps have a nasty habit of self-destructing during gain-setting, so I returned it.

Let's walk on over to the car itself for a bit. The box and amps were of course going to go in the trunk, so I stripped it down and went mad with the Dynamat Extreme. This being a high-end Bimmer, it of course already has decent deadening in a number of places, but 2000w of sub is going to require some extra work. I put 2 layers of this stuff basically everywhere:

I bought a bunch of gray and black carpet from SoundDomain with which to line everything in the trunk with. At this point I also removed the rear armrest and hacked out a large rectangular hole in the plastic seatback:

This piece of carpet went on the 'roof' of the trunk with rubber cement:

The spare tire is history. I decided to put the three Arc amps and the H701 in the tire well. What I did was construct an MDF amp rack, carpet it, put the equipment on it, and bolt it down to the car three holes I drilled through the bottom of the tire well:

The box got carpeted too, and placed in the trunk firing forward. (At this point I didn't seal it off from the back of the trunk for improved SPL, that came a few months later.) I bolted the box through holes I drilled in the metal rear deck for safety:

OK now I started connecting stuff together. The Zapco's out, but the SoundStream isn't in yet, because I next purchased an Alphasonik. This worked only a few weeks before killing itself. I also installed a Stinger capacitor at this time, which I removed once the Alphasonik died because it wasn't necessary and just made the wiring too complex:

First iteration of the neons. Later on I removed these four small ones and attached two large ones to the back of the rear seat where they couldn't be seen:

At this point stuff is getting power to it via the 0-gauge hookup to the monster battery on the right side of the trunk (via a bunch of distributors). (You can see me playing around with the remote display for the H701 in one pic.) I tried to ground all components with similar power signatures together; i.e. the Arc amps in one place, the sub amp in another, minor stuff like neons in another. At first I didn't have the H701 grounded with the Arc amps, which caused noise until I moved the grounds together:

Next task was to install the components and run some nice new 16g speaker wire. In the rear deck, we have the Morel mids and tweets for the rear stage. They fit into the same location the factory mids and tweets were. The rear stage components are wired to two Morel passive crossovers attached to the sub box; they are not active:

Now for the doors. The Morel Elate 5 midbass drivers were placed in the rear doors for rear stage, the Morel Elate 6 midbass drivers in the front doors for front stage. (Holes had to be cut for these suckers.) The midrange and tweeter drivers for the front stage went into the factory locations in the front doors.

Getting the 16g wire through the door jambs was the hardest part; several times I had to break out the Dremel to cut more room. As you can see, I also added Dynamat to the doors for additional deadening:

I had to run lots of new wires up and down the car; mostly speaker wire, but also various connections between the Alpine units and the Edirol sound card. Everything is soldered, zip-tied, and protected where necessary:

This being a newer BMW, there was also so much OEM electrical crap lying around that I had to move some of it to other places in the trunk. They even had wires running down to two components that slotted in underneath the spare tire:

Master power for all the trunk equipment is taken off the battery, through a 300-amp fuse. You can see the enormous ground for the subwoofer amp in the picture also: