INFO: If you are upgrading your door speakers....

[BillAce]

I I sure will. Right now I'm considering using the door location rather then having to build a kick panel and thinking I'll put tweeters in the a-pillar. Probably a simple 5 speaker system with good soundstage, Imaging, full frequency response and enough volume to overcome road noise. Not competition ready like my Evo but really good for a daily driver

[PityOnU]

I I sure will. Right now I'm considering using the door location rather then having to build a kick panel and thinking I'll put tweeters in the a-pillar. Probably a simple 5 speaker system with good soundstage, Imaging, full frequency response and enough volume to overcome road noise. Not competition ready like my Evo but really good for a daily driver

If you're a bit of an audio expert I would love to hear about how you end up specing/redoing the system.

I've sat down and thought through this a bit before, and to do it right the best I could come up with it replacing the stock head unit with one that has some preamp outputs, installing a 5 channel amp attached to the firewall somehow, and rewiring all the stock connectors with lower gauge wire (trying to color match so the manufacturer wiring diagrams would still be accurate). Speakers would be tweeter pods in the A-pillars, 6.5" speakers in the stock locations (the front door would be external crossover to use the tweeter pods, rear would have the built-in tweeter domes), and two subs, one under each seat. The two subs could be fed in parallel from the dedicated sub channel of the amp, and would need to be fairly high impedance because of that.

This would need to be combined with actually soundproofing the interior of the vehicle using Dynamat/Dynapad (or similar) because as it stands it is freaking loud in there, and relocating the factory scissor jack to a location in the boot (I bought the organizer insert, so probably in there). Then the box enclosure for the under-seat subs could be fabricated out of sheet metal and welded into place while all the interior of the vehicle is ripped out for the soundproofing.

I also figured I'd have to run some pretty chunky wiring from the battery to properly power the amp, and then also decently low gauge wire to the subs themselves. For powering that amp I'd probably end up having to really mess about with that gasket on the firewall to get them to pass through there properly. Some aftermarket head units can also communicate with the vehicle's OBD-II port and display additional information about the car, so it would probably be worth looking into that as well, as a missing temperature gauge on our vehicles isn't exactly ideal.

So, all in all, a fairly involved job where everything would need to happen in parallel. To do it properly would also be very expensive. Probably $1.5-2K, depending on the head unit you end up going with. Does anyone know if our Mirage could swallow a sick 10.1" one?

Other financial obligations have come up for me in the meantime, so I've ended up throwing my hands in the air and simply dropping in those J620's, as they are the highest sensitivity of any replacement speakers out there, have a dedicated tweeter dome/internal crossover, closely match the power rating of the stock speakers/system, and a flatter response curve than the factory speakers. Based on my own testing, the factory speakers will be louder and more bass heavy than anything else you put in (they are super lightweight paper cones), but will quickly distort at higher volumes and are, as previously stated, overly bass heavy. The factory speakers are 4 Ohm, rated at 15W RMS, btw.

The biggest problem with audio in this car is just the road noise. It drowns out the (perhaps most important) middle frequencies of anything you are listening to, causing you to want to really crank the volume to compensate. There are serious concerns related to your hearing there, as the now super loud high-frequency noise will absolutely damage your hearing. A similar phenomena has caused widespread hearing damage in what is referred to as the "iPod generation" - myself being one of them. From the article:

I can confirm that due to this hearing damage, if there is any background noise in any situation at all (think, shopping mall, room with a TV on, any public situation, really), I can't understand a word someone is saying while they are talking to me. Believe me, it is annoying as hell, and you do not want this. Because guess who ends up speaking in that generic higher frequency range? Women and children. Enjoy really struggling on dates (with the former, not the latter!).

For low speed driving about town, the J620's are enough of an upgrade for me to be adequate. The upgrade cost itself is also minimal. For anything approaching highway speeds, though, I just end up leaving my Samsung wireless earbuds in and listening through those. They are those sealed, ear insert ones which block out all of the cabin noise, allowing me to hear my music properly at much lower sound levels. You could argue that this is unsafe as it blocks out all noise in addition to just the cabin noise, but there is also the counter argument that earbuds with active noise cancelling would work to block out just the cabin noise while still letting the rest through. Or you could enable audio passthrough to still hear things happening around you. Or that you wouldn't be able to hear anything due to the cabin noise anyway.

Also, PS, there is a long and existing thread related to speaker replacement. Maybe this thread should be integrated into that one. I'm sure most of this information is already listed in there, as that is where I got most of mine from (in addition to making the changes myself at some point in the recent past).

Also also enjoy this info dump. Holy cow - that ended up being long and rambling.

[BillAce]

I'm thinking 5 channel Helix Audison or JL amp with built in processing. 6.5 or 7" in front door location tweeter on A pillar and hopefully a 10" sub in spare tire well with spare if I dont have to build up floor much. Amp under pass seat and freq, phase and time aligned for the seat that my a$$ sits in. Tuning it will take as long as installing but thats fun for me and will be easier when thw goal is to jam on the freeway not impress IASCA judges.

[PityOnU]

I'm thinking 5 channel Helix Audison or JL amp with built in processing. 6.5 or 7" in front door location tweeter on A pillar and hopefully a 10" sub in spare tire well with spare if I dont have to build up floor much. Amp under pass seat and freq, phase and time aligned for the seat that my a$$ sits in. Tuning it will take as long as installing but thats fun for me and will be easier when thw goal is to jam on the freeway not impress IASCA judges.

Yeah, tuning is the black magic that goes with all of this stuff. I know for some home theatre setups, the higher-end A/V receivers come with a little kit the unit can use to tune itself. Wish they had that for cars...

[BillAce]

Audison has a lot with a dsp amp and speakers for the VW Golf. The built in tune is pretty good for an OEM ugrade. I got around 6 versions of the tuning settings from them deending on which seat amd music type. I used one that was close and in about an hour the staging and imaging were solid and yje owner liked the sound. So stuff like that does exist but probably will for all Ferarri models before the Mirage makes a priority list for a plug and play upgrade. :-)

[Eggman]

So stuff like that does exist but probably will for all Ferarri models before the Mirage makes a priority list for a plug and play upgrade. :-)

Mitsubishi already offers a custom tuned Rockford Fosgate amplifier and subwoofer kit for the Mirage. It is plug and play.

At least I think that's what you are referring to??

[BillAce]

No, that is every replacement speaker a sub and an 9ch amp with a DSP that has time, phase, xover, in/out level adjustment and equalization on each channel. They have default settings and it can be custom tunes with their software

[Eggman]

No, that is every replacement speaker a sub and an 9ch amp with a DSP that has time, phase, xover, in/out level adjustment and equalization on each channel. They have default settings and it can be custom tunes with their software

Nine channels? It all sounds impressive but also sounds like it might be out of place on a cheap economy car.

Best wishes and looking forward to your write-up.

[BillAce]

It isn't cheap I'm probably underpowered for the noise in our cabin. But if you're really after accurate sound reproduction in a car it's a great direction. I'm leaning towards similar products from Helix or JL Audio that are compact and more powerful