How's this for an upgraded sound system in an FX35?

T

tjframe

Member
Name
tj
Hi all,

So after a week of living with my new (to me at least) 2011 FX35, I have already decided to upgrade the sound system.

So far I really love this freaking car.. except the Bose system is mediocre at best. My wife's Lexus RX350 has a better sound to it than the much cooler FX and I want more volume, bass, clarity and separation etc.

So after doing a bit of homework on this topic - especially on this site (can't link the threads yet since I'm new) and after consulting with my local installer, I have decided to go with the following system:

- amp and OEM signal processor: Audison Prima AP8.9 (520 watts total, 9 channels)
- front doors: Imagine I61-2V2 6.5" Component / Coaxial Speakers
- front dash: Legatia L3v2 3.5 inch Speakers
- sub: single 10" Rockford Fosgate enclosure

rear door/c pillar speakers will be left alone and faded in, and the center speaker may or may not be bypassed and ignored. The rear sub will be left in place and bypassed in favor of the enclosure.
The technician and I can calibrating the AP8.9 for the best sound staging once its all in hooked up.

As far as I can tell this will be a balanced and nice upgrade at a little over $ 2300 for everything. I asked the shop if the single sub is enough and he seemed to think so. I'm not looking to win any awards for most obnoxious bass in the neighborhood or anything, I just want my Motorhead, Rush, Zeppelin etc. to have a nice clear and punchy kick to it. Fingers crossed it will be done on Friday and i can enjoy it this weekend.

Does anyone here have any experience with the Prima unit? Have I missed anything? Seems like this hybrid amp and processor has excellent reviews and is a pretty nifty bit of tech. The speaker choices come straight from info gleaned on this site.
Would love to hear from anyone with a comparable setup.

As I said before.. I'm enjoying the hell out of this car.. In fact now sorta wish I had bought an FX50. Oh well :)

thx
 
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I personally wouldn't use 3.5 inch dash speakers, Look for a good component set and put the mid in the door and the tweeter in the dash(where the 3.5 goes), Too much to have a 6.5 inch coaxil in the door and a 3.5 inch coaxil in the dash. How is he planning on running the ap8.9? It's a 8 channel amp. I wouldn't use the center channel either.
 
^I wouldn't recommend putting a tweeter that far from the Mid speaker. The sound stage will be messed up. You can always tune the 3.5" coaxial speaker to play the certain frequencies.
 
That's not that far away, but i hear you. My friend with the white fx has his focals set up like i suggested and it sounds great. A lot of sq systems have the tweeters in the A pillars and mids in doors and the sound fantastic. If upgrading with new amps and speakers i don't see why use 3.5 inch speakers, Just my 0.2 cents

---------- Post added at 10:07 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:55 AM ----------

Here's what i would do. Since you like the HAT's, i would get the Unity U61-2, 6.5 inch components. I would still get the Audison Ap8.9, 8 channel amp. No need to spent $100's on any 3.5 inch speakers. If you were replacing all your speakers and not using an aftermarket amp then i would buy cheap 3.5's and run them off the bose amp. You can run 150 watts a side (your amp is underrated) to those components and your front stage will sound loud and full. I would drop the fosgate and look into a Sundown SA10. Those will sound better than the fosgates. Which fosgate sub are you referring to?
 
Thanks for the feedback guys,

As for the dash speakers, yes I've read that the tweeters alone can be put up there and then timed correctly with the signal processor, but as Zebra 555 alluded, I'd rather have the increase range of the 3.5's and just cross them over at a comfortable frequency. Both sets of speakers are already on their way in the mail, so I'm not going to sweat it too much.

I'm not familiar with the Sundowns. Not sure exactly what Fosgate driver they had in mind offhand, aside from the fact it's a single 10 inch. I'm assuming its one from their "punch" lineup. Perhaps a P2D4-10. If that's underwhelming, I might replace it with something like the SA10 down the road. I'm guessing the same enclosure would work for both, no?

Gotta say, this whole type of setup is new to me, so I guess I'll have to actually hear everything hooked up to get a better sense of how it all plays out. This is my first sound system upgrade for one of my cars in many years (since my college days back when removable Alpines were all the rage and everything hinged on 6x9s pushing air from the trunk space ha! I remember lugging that damn head unit around - what a pain. I haven't had a car with a closed trunk in 15 years)
 
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Just wanted to give people an update on how everything turned out.

So I ended up with:

Legatia L3v2 3.5 inch in the front dash
Imagine I61-2V2 6.5 woofers in front doors (tweeters not used) high pass crossover at 250hz, 24db
stock woofers in rear doors
10" Fosgate (Punch line) subwoofer in standard box in the back

mid dash and rear tweeters not used

driving it all is the Audison Prima AP8.9 (520 watts total, 8 channels X 35w + 1 sub pre-out) amp and OEM signal processor. I had him bridge the front doors to 70watts/channel.
Sub is powered by an Audison AP1 D amp (310 watts at 4 ohm, 540 at 2 ohms)

Installer also put dynamat in the front doors

--------------------
Thoughts:

When I first heard the new setup I was very under whelmed and the mids/highs were horribly muffled. I talked to the installer and he told me he had set up the signal processor inputs and timing, but left all the eq and channel outputs flat since he knew I was going to fiddle with everything myself. After 2 days of breaking everything in, I installed the Audison app on my laptop. Communication between the 8.9 amp and the PC via a usb cable.

This was my first time messing around with a dedicated program for managing the sound, and wow - this program is amazing. Not sure what other signal processor use, but I can never go back now! The app gives you amazing control over every channel + the sub, including total output levels, crossover types, db fall-offs, crossover points down to 50hz increments , timing, and a 10 band EQ with adjustable floating control points to get very precise eq curves.

After about 30 minutes I had everything tweaked to my satisfaction, and holy crap did this system come alive. Sounds amazing now! The amount of fiddling and tweaking the Audison app gives you is a revelation compared to what I was used to back in the 90s (last time I had an aftermarket stereo)

The first thing I did to really punch up the system was hop over to the 3.5 channel and give the eq a nice upward curving boost. The flexibility of the app is incredible, but almost too much - you have so many overlapping effects and interconnected variables. You can tediously change 5 things to sound "just right" and then change a 6th control and suddenly it all sounds off again. But the enhanced upper end improved the sound 90%

Everyone on the forums seems to feel that the rear 6.5s in the dash should be faded or even turned off all togther, but my wife and I both agreed that sounded bad and I mixed the front and back doors to give a much more inclusive feel to the bass. I like that enveloping sound-stage effect. I gave the rear doors the same crossover points as the front doors. Front doors are at about 90% of max, and the rears are at 100%. I played with the eq curves of each to keep them from overpowering each other around 150hz. This was a snap with the processor app controls

I think I'm going to upgrade the rear door speakers soon in fact. FYI the standard BOSE driver magnets are laughable. Can't believe Infinity put such lame speakers into this "luxury" car. Not sure about the rear tweeters. I'm thinking but they wont be needed, but then again I didn't think the rear doors would be so important either. If I chose to add the tweeters back into the system, I'd need another amp to give the rear of the car enough umpf since I would have to unbridge the front doors to use all 8 channels again. I have the unused tweeters from the 6.5 components in the front doors. The front of the car gets LOUD.

One final thought. Now that I have good system, its amazing to me just how much variation in recording quality and characteristics there is from one song to another. On a low end setup everything just sort of turns into a wall-o sound. I ended up trying to split the difference on "Tom Sawyer" by Rush and "Foreplay/LongTime" by Boston since they had a nice balance of drums/percussion, vocals, etc. Of course after getting them to sound perfect, I jumped over to some other songs and everything sounded off again. The low end on "Sleep to Dream" by Fiona Apple and "Army of Me" by Bjork is insane. First timer I've ever heard those songs with a dedicated non-factory sub-woofer. Good stuff.

Don't think there's any way to do a per-song equalization steup, though it would be great to have.

Sry for long post. Hope it wasn't too boring but I just wanted to share my experience for anyone else who might find the info useful. Especially the Audison control app, which is a must-have for me from now on. I just looked up the Fosgate 3SIXTY.3 which has a similar extensive GUI controls. I'm guessing most of the others do as well, though what I sort of liked about the Audison was the small amp size and processor all in one ( about $ 1000) The msrp on the 3SIXTY.3 + two 4 channel amps would be around $1300. Ebay has the JBL MS-8 for 450.00.

One last thing: This a total stealth install aside from the sub enclosure. Both amps are hidden from sight and under the trunk panel. Compared to similarly powered amps, the Audisons are quite small.

xrJQj6.jpg


a few pics showing the GUI of the signal processor app:

W7L1Mm.jpg
 
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:rotfl: thanks for posting this, I've had my 2011 fx35 for about a year and a half and have been underwhelmed and disappointed in the sound system since day one really. My old car was completely custom AV front to back so I thought I would just have to live with this system, never occured to me I could get good sound without totally dumping the factory radio (and thus the navigation and camera and all that). Now I'm revitalized, thanks for the parts list too.
 
maademperor said:
:rotfl: thanks for posting this, I've had my 2011 fx35 for about a year and a half and have been underwhelmed and disappointed in the sound system since day one really. My old car was completely custom AV front to back so I thought I would just have to live with this system, never occured to me I could get good sound without totally dumping the factory radio (and thus the navigation and camera and all that). Now I'm revitalized, thanks for the parts list too.
Click to expand...


Yea I think the important thing is to get a signal processor, it really gives you total control over the rest of the factory system. Even something basic like the Cleansweep unit from JL audio ( which simply flattens out the signal coming from the factory head unit) is miles better than blindly adding amps and speakers. At first I sort of balked at the price for these things since they can run from $500 to $1000 or more.. but they are so worth it if you want to get decent sound. Hell the factory unit only gives us bass and treble controls! My wife's milk toast Lexus RX350 at least has a mid range control AND it sounds way better than the FX!

The Hybrid Audio speakers and the Audison amps are not cheap by any means, but they sound fantastic and the integrated signal processor in the amp is very convenient. I thought about mixing and matching different amps for the subwoofer and the rear speakers, but decided on spending a bit more and staying in the "Prima" line from Audison since they are all designed to work together well with the processor app. Once could easily assemble a great sounding setup for far less, no doubt. I'd recommend coughing up the extra cash for sound baffling - it makes a tremendous difference. No sense in spending thousands on an audio system to have it sabotaged by crappy enclosures.

Next stop for me is to beef up the rear soundstage. I just ordered another set of Imagine 6.5 components for the rear doors (the tweeters will be unscrewed from the 6.5s and placed in the c pillar spots). I'm also adding another Audison Prima amp - the AP4D (260 W x 2) for the rear 6.5s. The 35 watt channels from the 8.9 amp currently driving the rear 6.5 factory speakers will be rewired to drive the new tweeters.
 
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tjframe said:
Hi all,

So after a week of living with my new (to me at least) 2011 FX35, I have already decided to upgrade the sound system.

So far I really love this freaking car.. except the Bose system is mediocre at best. My wife's Lexus RX350 has a better sound to it than the much cooler FX and I want more volume, bass, clarity and separation etc.

So after doing a bit of homework on this topic - especially on this site (can't link the threads yet since I'm new) and after consulting with my local installer, I have decided to go with the following system:

- amp and OEM signal processor: Audison Prima AP8.9 (520 watts total, 9 channels)
- front doors: Imagine I61-2V2 6.5" Component / Coaxial Speakers
- front dash: Legatia L3v2 3.5 inch Speakers
- sub: single 10" Rockford Fosgate enclosure

rear door/c pillar speakers will be left alone and faded in, and the center speaker may or may not be bypassed and ignored. The rear sub will be left in place and bypassed in favor of the enclosure.
The technician and I can calibrating the AP8.9 for the best sound staging once its all in hooked up.

As far as I can tell this will be a balanced and nice upgrade at a little over $ 2300 for everything. I asked the shop if the single sub is enough and he seemed to think so. I'm not looking to win any awards for most obnoxious bass in the neighborhood or anything, I just want my Motorhead, Rush, Zeppelin etc. to have a nice clear and punchy kick to it. Fingers crossed it will be done on Friday and i can enjoy it this weekend.

Does anyone here have any experience with the Prima unit? Have I missed anything? Seems like this hybrid amp and processor has excellent reviews and is a pretty nifty bit of tech. The speaker choices come straight from info gleaned on this site.
Would love to hear from anyone with a comparable setup.

As I said before.. I'm enjoying the hell out of this car.. In fact now sorta wish I had bought an FX50. Oh well :)

thx
Click to expand...
Hello ,
In my experience so far I’ve learned that this Bose system is very technical. It has I think about three amps. The system is setup to protect the speakers it has.
The more volume you give it the bass starts to roll off or decreases. Also you have to deal with separate signals for each set of speakers. I think the theee in the dash are miss and highs, the front doors are bass signal only, the rear doors and tail gate also miss and highs. So you have to make sure you are putting the speakers in the right places.
I have just begun . I could not here the speakers or bass behind me when the system was playing.
What I did so far is installed a crew in Vega sub and a LC2I 2 channel line output converter. This helps with keeping the bass signal when turning up your volume. my next step is to change the dash and rear door speakers.
Hope this was helpful.
 
Gregory Brookes said:
Hello ,
In my experience so far I’ve learned that this Bose system is very technical. It has I think about three amps. The system is setup to protect the speakers it has.
The more volume you give it the bass starts to roll off or decreases. Also you have to deal with separate signals for each set of speakers. I think the three in the dash are mids and highs, the front doors are bass signal only, the rear doors and tail gate also mids and highs. So you have to make sure you are putting the speakers in the right places.
I could not here the speakers or bass behind me when the system was playing.
What I did so far is installed a cerwin in Vega sub and a LC2I 2 channel line output converter. This helps with keeping the bass signal when turning up your volume. my next step is to change the dash and rear door speakers.
Hope this was helpful.
Click to expand...
 
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