Simplicity In Sound

10/22/2026

For the past twenty plus years, I have prided myself on a few things in building systems. Integrity, sound quality, wiring organization, daily usability, and stealth.

I am constantly trying to find ways to maximize those aspects when designing and fabricating…often forcing myself to wire in very tight spaces and spending a lot of extra time designing grilles and covering panels.

The easiest way to accomplish a virtually OEM trunk, used to be a fake floor, and gradually I became known for this design theme. This still applies today, but more and more newer cars don’t come with nearly enough room under the floor anymore, which has made me adapt.

One brand of popular vehicle that always was NOT good for fake floors, has been Audis. Late model Audis usually feature their 12v battery smack dab in the middle of the spare tire well. This not only takes away space, but also means anything made to reside above it would make servicing the battery much more difficult, which takes away from the daily usability aspect.

So when this customer with a 2023 Audi S5 Sportback came to me with the idea of greatly improving up on the factory B&O system while maintaining a completely stock looking interior and keeping virtually ALL of his trunk space, while still having a fair amount of bass output, it presented a unique challenge that I have not quite faced before in my career.

Thankfully, with the advent of some newer products, namely the Arc Audio blackbird and night hawk amplifiers, as well as the Wavtech Thinpro subs, this made the concept possible. After a lot of measuring and planning, I got to work.

I performed all of the work on this project.

For signal, as with all late model VAG cars before the most current years, the stock signal is MOST150 optical and can be used via a NAVTV Zen V unit. However, this car is pretty unique in that it is an audio transitional year car and have some quirks about it.

The stock BO amp in the trunk is NOT fed by the MOST150 optical plug and only powers some of the interior speakers, the headunit, residing behind the glovebox, powers the remaining speakers and has an optical output that loops throughout the car to other modules but interestingly, NOT the BO amp.

With guidance from NAVTV, I made my own MOST optical loop adapter and added in the ZEN V upfront in the kick panel, and the car was recoded to accept this and send a pure audio signal to the Zen, which then sends out a pure aftermarket compatible digital signal via toslink into an arc audio blackbird DSP amp, this powers the interior speakers with 8 x 75 watts RMS, and controls an identical sized Arc Nighthawk sub amp sending 800 watts RMS to the sub.

For the front stage, we went with a full suite of Audiofrog components. The GB60 was installed into the stock lower door area, with a lot of effort taken to sound proof the stock door as the stock BO midbass fires sideways out of a semi circular grille opening. The GB25 midrange went into the stock mid door location, installed via a HDPE adapter, finally, a pair of GB10OE tweeters for Audi, went into the stock pillar tweeter locations. I also looked at the dash mid location for the tweeter but felt that this location was too far down and away from the grille opening to work well. The oem rear door speakers were retained as rear fill, and all other speakers were disconnected. When all is said and done, we have a 100 percent stock interior.

For the amp rack, I took apart the stock mounting brackets in the driver side of the trunk, one was a three tiered affair housing two modules and an open top, while other housed the stop amp positioned above the first rack. Higher rack was adapted to house the nighthawk, while the top tier of the 3 tiered rack, has the blackbird. It was a tight fit but all fits in there cleanly and securely. Additionally, because this was the weird year with the analog input amp, the stock amp had to remain plugged in to power the OEM mics in the car, so that piece was wrapped in foam damper to prevent rattles and located between the two amp racks and zip tied to secure in place. This is easily the busiest thing I have done in a stock amp rack location, but when the front cover is on, it is completely hidden away.

The sub mounting, presented its own set of challenges. On the passenger side, there is a pop out cubby that was never used by the customer. Behind this area, there is a fair amount of depth. But there was a catch. About 4 inches into it, there is a beam that cut down on the top and backside of this area, making the opening into the space behind it much smaller. This means a traditional high powered sub to satisfy the customer’s bass requirement would not have fitted as the basket itself would be too big fit into the opening defined by this beam. But with the Wavtech Thinpro 10, and its ultra shallow design, I was able to piece together a rather complicated enclosure out of quarter inch mdf and then reinforced it from the inside via 5 layers of fiberglass. This enclosure opens big enough to fit the front of the sub, then drastically tapers down at the back and top to clear the beam and then extends out as far as it can go to provide air space. The sub fits with less than a quarter inch to spare on the top, but it fits just fine.

Once the sub enclosure was finished and bolted in place, I turned my attention to making some kind of grille that takes away virtually no trunk space.

I copied the borders of the stock cubby piece and turned it into a grille with steel mesh and 3D printed Audi ring logo. Then a matching quarter inch plate was fabricated as the inside piece. After some router work and loads of threaded inserts, the finished grille piece secures to the opening with the back piece bolted into it, sandwiching the carpet ledge in between. It is rock solid and took away virtually no space at all. I dyed the carpet a little light to better match the oem carpet color.

In the past, on most Audis of this platform, I have gone to pillars for the midrange and tweeter, knowing that the stock locations of their limits.

This car definitely required more tuning work, especially from the tweeter aspect, as the aiming angle and the small grille opening beams the output a bit and reflects off the dash.

But once tamed, this turned out to be a pretty decent sounding car. Midbass output of the semi open stock grille is actually decent, as they were crossed quite low at 250hz. There was good impact and extension as one would expect from the GB60. The GB25 in the stock mid door location did very well, great resolution and meshed with the tweeter and the midbass well. Only slightly bothered by the grab handle and dash. The tweeter location presented an over abundance of 2.5k to 4k which was reduced a lot, then, after playing with some crossover frequencies by raising them slightly, we ended a very enjoyable top end. Good detail, good airiness and not harsh.

Imaging and staging on the car was pretty decent as well. The center is more smeared than pillar mounting but still defined with in a 6 inch area of the center, width is really good at beyond the pillars, and depth is also above average at the edge of the windshield. height is around 5 inches off the dash.

The subbass truly rocked in this car, seeing a fully stock trunk, with nothing in the spare tire well, yet presenting this much good low end output is quite a trip at first. It easily shakes the interior and ruffles your hair, going all the way down into the subsonic but is fast enough to blend upfront as well. It is for sure to me, the highlight of this car’s listening experience.

Overall, this feels truly like a “have the cake and eat it” type of project. The car lost virtually zero space, shows almost no signs of an aftermarket system, retained his spare and has a really enjoyable system to listen to. If this were my own car, other than perhaps molded a tweeter pod, I would make zero changes to the design and ex*****on of the project.

I for sure consider this the most stealthy project I have ever done, not only because its all hidden away, but because the car itself is not very friendly for building such a project.

Thanks for reading and as usual, please refer to the individual pictures for more detailed explanations of the project.

Cheers,

Bing

10/19/2026

The last time I did a system in the wife’s primary driver was back in 2006, after that, either the stock system satisfied her needs or we weren’t going to keep the car long term.

When we recently picked up this 2026 Toyota RAV4 Woodland Plug in Hybrid though, both of those situations changed. It’s a Toyota so we hope to own this car for a long time, and the stock base audio was absolutely terrible.

So I set out to improve the sound but do it in a way that is as low cost as possible (by our standards) and take away as little space and utility as I can.

I guess you can consider this our “OEM PLUS” system. Lol

The stock Toyota headunit signal is a simple full range front and rear four channel affair, with the usual Toyota allpass filters and delays. This was fed into an Arc Audio Blackbird 8 channel DSP amp, which has enough onboard input processing to make this signal more usable. For front stage, being that this is a base model car and cost was a concern, I went with a set of Arc Audio’s AS250 2.5” wideba**ers, and AS600 6.5” midbass. Both are installed into the top of the dash and lower door stock locations, with ample soundproofing on the doors.

The OEM rear speakers were retained but reamplified and processed for rear fill.

For sub duties, being that this is a plug in hybrid, the bigger battery pack made for no usable space under the cargo floor. After exploring several options, I decided to utilize a stock storage cubby on the passenger side that we never use for an Arc Audio Arc 8. I took off the cargo netting, molded the inside of it to form the backside of the sub enclosure, then spaced out the front baffle to get the interior air volume up to around 0.35 cubic foot (minimum sealed recommendation)

The finished enclosure slides into the cubby and then is permanently secured to the cubby via a series of bolts and nuts. This entire cubby is a snap off panel that allows access to the battery. It functions just like before, albeit with more weight. A ton of sound proofing was done not only on this structure, but the entire side panel of the vehicle. Most of which suffered from metal on plastic, and plastic on plastic contact rattles. So a lot of 3M Thinsulate and felt strips went on to eliminate any vibrations on those contact points.

As a final cosmetic touch, the magnetic front grille of the sub enclosure got a raised Toyota Woodland logo.

For the amp mounting, it was always going to go under one of the front seats. After removing the passenger seat, I realized this car’s floor carpet is quite different than most I have encountered. The front half of the carpet under the seat (near the cross beam) is spaced very high off the floor, and it then drops down to a lower level towards the back.

This means a traditional mounting board would not be able to cover all the cuts in the carpet. Additionally, the high voltage battery pack is directly under the floor and there is no way for me to see if there is any space between the floor and the pack, or if there are any cables laying about. So I made the decision not to drill and bolt the amp rack to the floor pan. Instead, I used a lot of 3M VHB, epoxy bonded to the bottom of the mdf amp rack and secures to the floor panel. I have used this technique before and it is extremely strong, in fact, the reason I don’t do this more often is because if you have to remove the amp rack, you will likely break the wood before it releases from the floor. But for my own car, it will do just fine to not risk drilling into the high voltage battery pack.

To account of the aforementioned carpet level, I built a simple shroud that magnetizes to the amp rack supports, it is at different height front and back and backfilled to perfectly match with the carpet profile, once in place, it only shows the top of the amp. Trimmed in vinyl, it looks pretty cool, though it will almost never be seen.

Knowing just how bad the stock system sounded and the fact that I used as cheap of a speaker as we would ever use on a customer’s car, I wasn’t anticipating a lot when I powered on the system.

But I was very pleasantly surprised. After some tuning, I feel like these Arc AS speakers are priced well below their performance tier. The AS250 wide ba**er does an admirable job at producing from 400hz all the way up, they are more tame on the top end than the Gladen Zeta 70s in my Subaru, and is by nature, smooth and mellow. Even when bouncing off the windshield. detail is quite good as well. At about 1/3 of the cost of the Zetas, I feel these do an admirable as stand ins. They don’t go as low as the Zetas and there was a little wonkiness around 10k that we worked on a bit, but when done, the midrange and highs were quite nice, smooth with good detail, never harsh.

The AS600 midbass, out of the box, was way beefier than I imagined a lower line midbass would be, and in the car, they did a pretty good job at producing midbass, with good authority, extension and anchoring the bass upfront. They are not the RS speakers nor the Gladen Zetas, but at a full MSRP of $400, I feel these do really really well.

The little Arc 8 actually did a good job in such a spacious cabin. There is no mistaking there is an aftermarket subwoofer in the car. Being that the stock signal has an undefeatable high pass at around 40hz, there really isn’t a huge disadvantage of using an 8 in this case as we did not do a secondary direct streaming source. When tuned up, it can actually shake the rear view mirror, which was not something I anticipated, and being an 8, it is extremely fast and blended great with the midbass.

Once the allpass filters on the factory signal was addressed, the car imaged and staged quite well. Since the allpass filters were only on the lower frequencies, the wideba**ers presented a razor sharp center, enough to overcome the more smeared center of the midbasses, to anchor it with in 4 or 5 inches of the center of the dash. Height is 6 inches off the dash, with width at the pillars and depth at the front edge of the windshield, really quite good from this standpoint.

This is also the only time I have used a singular DSP amp to run an entire system, and once again, the blackbird really impresses. With 6 x 75 watts RMS, and a paltry 1 x 250 RMS on the sub, this car can reach quite a loud volume level without any signs that the amp is falling flat on its face. This amp’s ability to internally redistribute power from the channels that don’t need it (wideband, rears) to those that do really comes through once again and sounds way more powerful than the ratings would suggest.

This install will not only make our daily drives better, but it also opens up a tier of system we previously did not offer. I would just call it an OEM plus system and while I don’t plan to do these that often, the fact that it will come in at about 1500 dollar less than our previous entry point could be well suited for some clients.

Thanks for reading, and in this car, I have decided to provide the stock signal analysis, before and after input processing by the Blackbird, in the build log.

Please refer to the individual pics for more detailed breakdown of the build process.

Cheers,

Bing

10/19/2026

It's been almost 20 years since I last put a system in the wife's car. But this new RAV4 Plug in is gonna be a long term keeper.

So I'm doing something for it... An exercise in: what is the simplist system we can do?

A sneak peak.

10/11/2026

Behold: 1400 Watts of RMS power, 12 channels of DSP, and a pretty powerful 800 watt subwoofer. All installed into an Audi S5 Sportback!!
👀👀🤔🤔😆😆

10/10/2026

Every month I get asked, online and in person, especially by victims of subpar installs: what is the top advice I have for them to avoid falling into the "hack shop" trap.

I've thought about this quite a bit...here is my advice: keep quiet during the consult and see what the salesmen pitches you...

This doesn't guarantee you a stellar result; but it will sure as heck filter out a terrible one.

10/07/2026

Was talking to someone the other day about a civic project and I was reminded of this build from... Gasp! Has it really been almost eight years?! (OP was from well after the car was done)

Still one of my favorites...time sure flies...

This civic came all the way to us from Kentucky for a full sound quality build that is able to compete from time to time and yet remain fully daily usable.

First, Jesse stripped the entire interior and did a layered sound proofing from the windows down with composite CLD/Foam damper, then topped it off with a layer of Mass Loaded Vinyl.

The car features two signal sources, the oem premium system signal was tapped after the stock amp, while the customer provided us with a Hiby R6 high res player as his primary listening source.

Joey fabricated a very cool mounting for the front part of his center arm rest console that securely houses the Hiby, while still allowing to be removed with zero tools. A mosconi RC mini dsp controller is located behind the player for system control. Finally, two switches are located on the back plate of the mounting to activate the front and rear lighting displays within the vehicle.

The front stages consists of a full compliment of the new Focal Utopia M 3 way set, with a 6.5 inch midbass, 3.5" midrange, and the TBM tweeter.

The midbasses are installed in the stock lower door location, Joey molded the TBM tweeter into the factor sail panels, while Joey and I teamed up to make a pair of A pillar pods for the midrange, which due to the sheer size of the drivers, flows onto the dash a little bit for a cleaner look.

One of the design stipulations by the customer from the start was to locate a subwoofer upfront in the passenger foot well, and Jesse did a great job integrating the Focal Utopia M 10" sub in that space in a .5 cubic foot sealed enclosure. The enclosure features lighting to show off the sub, and has two grilles, a fully hidden carpeted grille for daily driving, and a vinyl framed see through grille for display at comps and shows.

The customer also desired some ambient interior lighting, so i built two sandwich lighting platforms under each seat that casts red light in all directions for that purpose.

For rear fill, we chose a pair of Focal PC130 5.25" coaxials, installed on the rear deck.

The brain of the entire system is a Mosconi 8to12 Aerospace DSP, taking both the 6 channel analog input from the stock source and the digital coaxial input straight from the Hiby, from there, the processed signal goes to a trio of Mosconi Pro amps, and Pico2 mini amp, with a bridged 2x320 watts RMS on the midbass, and 4x120 on the midrange and tweeter, with nearly 1000 watts going to the sub, while the rear fill is powered with 80 watts a piece.

Joey fabricated a full enclosed amp rack behind the seat, accessed by flipping the seats down. it is trimmed in alcatara and vinyl, and is lit up with red and white LEDs...the three amps are floating, and with a really cool wiring rack that bolts inside the enclosure and lines up to each and every single amp terminal, i was able to wire the entire thing so that all the wiring follow the same curvature.

in the trunk, I built a simple rack that houses the DSP, the pico2 amp, and the main power and ground distribution blocks, also lit up in a two stage red and white lighting, and in the floor, i built and wired up a rack that holes a 100 amp power supply, and all the various wires, cables and barrier strips, for easy access and service when needed.

I think this is one of the top 5 best sounding cars we have every done, the stage is very wide with great depth and height, with a solid center. the overall tonality can best be described as detailed, yet linear and smooth, with very little harshness. the impact from the upfront sub is absolutely fantastic, and when paired with a superb set of midbasses such as these, they really give the chest a bit of thumping listening to drum solos. the car also sounds "big", with a lot of airy ambiance..really enjoyable to listen to.

sad to see her go back to Kentucky, but i am sure the new owner will enjoy it very much :)

10/07/2026

Building a sub enclosure in a complex and multi angled OEM steel body cavity, BEHIND oem trunk carpet, when there is no carpeted cavity to tape and fiberglass off of, it's a bit like building ur own 3D jigsaw puzzle. 😂

This took a minute but it fits the sub (pretty powerful one) and uses almost every ounce of available room get a decent amount of airspace out of it.

10/04/2026

My first ever vehicle was a 1989 Toyota pickup, regular cab with the 22re 4 cylinder. It’s the vehicle that I regret selling to this day, as it carried so many fond memories and likely will still be running strong today.

Over the past 25 years since her departure, I have worked on countless vehicles of many configurations. Yet not a single Toyota pickup/Tacoma regular cab.

So you can imagine my glee when I finally had the chance to do a proper install in one.

Luckily for us, this current generation of Tacoma regular cabs have a huge amount of space behind the seats, in par if not more so than full size regular cabs and basically is similar to the extended cabs of the generation I had. So now, a properly sized build can go in without needing to constantly worry about depths!

The goals for the project were: to achieve a very nice level of sound quality while still maintaining as much stealthiness and daily usability as possible. The focus was especially on the back wall area, where the customer would ideally like to retain the tool storage and the little bin on the driver side.

Jesse did more of the work on this truck, while I took care of the front stage, the signal integration, and the wiring throughout the vehicle. He also installed a wolfbox mirror with rear bed light camera, as well as finished a customer installed front camera module.

Being that this was a base model audio truck, the signal is a standard (for us) two source affair. Like the base audio 4runner we did last year, this truck also featured a full range, variable signal between the headunit, and the little booster/anc amp under the driver seat. Tapping this signal not only nets us a cleaner source being that it is technically not meant to power speakers directly, but also eliminates the ANC, even though that could be coded out with carista.

Oddly though, this signal is not quite the same as the one I found on the 4runner. It is a lot hotter, I would estimate it to be 8 to 10 volts, and not as flat.

This signal, along with a direct streaming module in the form of a Mosconi MOS-BTS LD4C plug in chip, goes to a Mosconi Atomo 4to8 dsp. Which handles the processing of the entire system. Its compact size makes it preferable to the bigger offerings from Mosconi due to a lack of space, as you will see later.

For the front stage, we went with a tried and true combination of Gladen Zeta 165 midbass, 70 midrange and an Audiofrog GB10OE tweeter, as the fit great in the Toyota stock locations and performs very well. Since this car was a base audio car, we sourced a pair of Tacoma JBL pillars to give him a 100 percent OEM appearance while adding 3 way sound quality to the vehicle.

One of the late additions to the truck, after hearing my own Subaru outback daily driver, was an Audiofrog GS8ND2 upfront acting as an impact augmentation woofer.

I directed Jesse to take away as little leg room as possible and he really took it to heart. Instead of our usual carving a pocket in the foam tray that props up the floor, he eliminated it completely and molded a new enclosure for the AF 8, that resulted in a new floor within an inch of the original floor height. But in doing so, because the enclosure now sat INFRONT of the factory trim panel and carpet curvature, he had to extend the outer shell to butt up against those two surfaces, it sounds easy , but lining up two curved surfaces at the same time was quite a bit more effort than the usual flat front panel of our impact enclosures.

The GS8ND2 sits in a trimmed surface with a mdf/mesh grille in front that hides and protects it. With the stock carpet mat in place, there is hardly any evidence there is anything going on with the floor board.



For the back, after taking it all apart, Jesse built a combo sub enclosure/amp rack that housed two Arc Audio A12 subs and three X2 amplifiers, along with the aforementioned Mosconi Atomo 4to8 DSP.

The sealed enclosure of 2 cubic is on the passenger side, putting the subs as far away from the listener as possible, and extends to below the amp. Two X2 600.4 4 channels power the front stage with 150 watts RMS per driver and bridged 300 watts on the Audiofrog GS8ND2 impact driver, while a X2 1100.1 sends 1100 watts RMS to the two A12s.

The entire structure is bolted to the factory plastic structure, then the structure as bolted back through the enclosure to the back wall via stock mounting points. With plenty of sound proofing in between to eliminate rattles.

The equipment is trimmed in the same graphite black vinyl with some concave lines for added visual appeal. And a full length mdf/mesh grille, with a raised Tacoma logo, hides and protects the entire structure. all the plastic on plastic/metal contact surfaces in the back was lined with felt, to eliminate contact buzzing and rattles.

From the first time I powered the system on with just basic gain and crossovers, I knew this truck was gonna be great sounding. And after tuning with Mike, I would say this is one of the best, if not the best sounding Tacoma/Toyota pickups we have ever done. From a midbass impact standpoint, this could very well be the best.

The truck imaged and staged very well, with a solid center behind the factory screen, width is pillar to pillar and height at about 8 inches off the dash. Depth on a truck is never super great, but this is at the edge of the windshield.

Tonally, the gladen/af combo always provides very nice midrange and highs with great detail, airiness but never fatiguing. Impact out of the zetas and the Audiofrog is out of this world, with drum tracks feeling like the sticks and hammers are pounding you in the chest. I couldn’t help but chuckle at some of the songs I played on it.

With the super short cabin and the well-sealed enclosures of this truck, the ultra bottom end was never going to be superb with the windows closed. But the two A12s does an admirable job going down to 30hz or so, with no sense of pulling to the back since they are low passed at 65 hz thanks to the front impact woofer. This is pretty difficult to achieve in a regular cab truck with the subs directly behind you, but this Tacoma pulled it off in spades. With the windows rolled down, the ultra bottom end bass is tremendous, an easy 5 to 6 dB gain vs the truck closed up.

With their reputation for lasting forever, I can only imagine the smiles this system will bring to the client over the next years…or decades 😊

Thanks for reading, and as usual, please check on the pictures for more detailed info on the build process.

Cheers,

Bing

09/24/2026

Another day, another wiring job on 10lb of stuff in a 2lb bag. 😆

09/21/2026

When I demo my E63 system to a potential customer, I frequently will pull off the magnetic top cover so they can see the wiring organization and install integrity under the surface. To me, what goes on unseen in a build is just as important as the superficial appearance.

If u r looking for potential shops to work on your car, especially on a custom project; I highly suggest u ask to see the "guts" of their demo vehicle or a project they are currently working on.

How a shop wires and secures things under the top layer speaks volumes on their overall attention to detail.