Sweet.

 

I almost forgot to mention the dash kit. I am very impressed with the American International product. I'd looked at a couple of other kits at local retailers and found them to be, well... overly complicated and kinda rickety. The AI kit is robust, simple, and fits perfectly. I can't recommend it enough.

The only warning I would give is that it's so robust the thickness of the mount flanges wouldn't let the short Pioneer-included mounting screws reach all the way into the holes on the radio. Luckily I had some longer screws.

*edit to add*

Also, if you have a healthy sub in an underseat box that's pushed snug up under the seat, it will rattle against the seat tray. I have to keep the box pulled out a little if I intend to really give the system a workout. I push it back under the seat when I want to carry passengers.

Brad

 

As far as your concern for the snugness of the seat to the amp. I had that concern as well when I installed my amps last year. If I remember correctly, there are 4 or 5 vertical bars on the back of the seat. I believe I cut 2 of them off in the area where by amps were located. I used my circular saw to do this, so now the seat foam conforms with the shape of my wall quite nice.

 

Hey not tryin to slam you or anything but you may want to recheck the way your soldering. Because a decent weller should at least be able to solder 4ga in short order without getting cold joints.

 

I learned a nifty trick from an old man who spent a lifetime wiring up stuff in the military.

A 1" long piece of drilled or slotted copper tube the same ID as the cable makes a dandy union (several holes or slots, by the way). Bare the cables back about 9/16" and flux the cable ends liberally by reapeated minor heating and dipping into your flux bucket. Flux the inside of the tube. Insert the ends into the tube and crimp slightly to hold in place. Heat with a small torch until solder will flow into the holes. Keep wicking it in until you can see solder flowing out into the remaining holes/slots, and into the cable on both ends. Heavy heat shrink or a double layer everyday stuff seals the deal.

The hotter the torch the better. Low heat will give time for heat to transfer up the cables and start burning off the insulation. Makes it a bit hard to hold, too.

Brad

 

yeah, we know, but not too much we can do if management wont buy us a good one. And we dont ever solder anything more then ignition wires, so it works.

 

Two month update...

First, the system just plain rocks. It's a great combo for all-around music. If you want more than this setup can provide then you are a truly dedicated bass-head... or stone deaf.

I listen to everything from Metallica to Marty Robbins, Tone-Loc to Tony Orlando, 38 Special to The 3 Tenors. Heck, I even have some barbershop quartet around for those really wierd days (It was the tequila, I swear!). Now that everything is tuned I can put in pretty much any song and dial in the right sound by tweaking the sub level. The sound stage is very good for a simple 4.1 setup. The depth of sound is downright amazing.

The Pioneer doors are clean, clear, and incredibly robust for what they cost. I've driven them to volume levels way, waaaaaay beyond comfortable without any indication that I'm pushing them beyond their limits.

The combination of Image Dymanics ID10 and cheap Atrend box continues to amaze. Bass is tight, sharp, and plentiful, far better than I had imagined the setup would be and perfectly suited to my listening style. A bonus is that it really seems to like the truck, resonating through the seats in a way that adds to the felt power of the music. The bassline in Rihanna's "Shut Up and Drive" is beyond impressive, giving only the slightest hint of distortion at sub volume levels far in excess of anything remotely enjoyable (or comfortable, for that matter).

I rarely touch the head unit anymore, having become by-touch familiar with the remote. The simple fact is that it's far easier to control the unit with the remote than trying to reach and use the myriad of small controls with the teenie-tiny labels. (Okay, I'll fess up. I used to laugh at people who had a remote for their car stereo. After all, the controls were right there so a remote was a geeky status symbol, right? So call me a geek now.)

As for tuning, I played with levels and filter settings for weeks. I finally ended up with the high pass filter set at 80 Hz, the Bass Boost setting just one notch above neutral, and the eq set to 2 dB up on treble and 1 dB on bass. Overall sound quality is wonderful with the depth and warmth for everything from the quietest classical to NIN loud enough the neighbors complain even with my doors and windows closed. I keep the SW level at minus 4 for most listening (range is -25 to +6). I was able to ramp up the Source Levels at the HU and turn down the amp imput levels to the point there is no discernable noise from the system. On most music, including FM radio, comfortable everyday listening while driving is at 23 to 28 on the volume control with "That's just too damn loud even for me!" being at about 50-55 (range is 0 to 65).

I have become a complete MP3 junky. I picked up a USB drive and began mixing and matching songs. Even with a small(-ish) 8 GB drive I can switch between over 1600 songs with nothing more difficult than a simple press of my thumb. I can't describe how much better this is than carrying around, and constantly swapping in/out, three or four cases worth of CD's.

If anyone want's a good, solid setup for their truck that will provide gobs of clean, powerful sound without sending you into bankruptcy, I can recommend this setup without reservation. (Unfortunately Crossfire no longer makes the 705D but finding a decent amp setup shouldn't be any trouble given the HUGE amount of info here on the board. I have it on good authority that Crossfire is coming out with a new 800-ish watt 5-channel but I don't see it on their web site yet).



Brad

 

Had the seat off today to give the connections a check and to snug up the setscrews. Gave me a chance to get pics of the completed install.

All is very well. The system continues to more than satsify in every aspect of performance. I have no problem recommending the identical setup to anyone wanting a superb all-around system that has a wonderfully full, clean sound, but with enough thump in reserve to make useless mush of your inner ear.


The mounting kit, showing how well a job they did getting it to both fit and blend with the factory interior. The handy storage pocket is a definite bonus.






I had to use spacers on the top screws, but with that addition the kit faceplate depth matches up nicely with the factory trim.





The three screws at the top are tapped into the stiffening rail on the back wall. The backer board is compressed down, hard, against 3/8"" foam weatherstripping. It's not going anywhere. Power cable is 4ga braided from a welding supply house. Audio cable is Belden 16ga 100% shielded 2-conductor bulk from an electronics supply (the blue cable was in the truck from a previous owner's install). Main speaker wiring is 16ga lamp cord from a roll that was laying around the garage and the sub cable is a piece of 12ga I salvaged from a previous enclosure. Cable retainers are simple rubber-lined p-straps from the hardware store. It won't win any beauty contests but it wasn't meant to. It's stable, it's reliable, and it works.





The sub enclosure pushed all the way back. I usually run with it pulled out a few inches to keep it from buzzing agains the bottom of the seat pan.




So there you go. Pics, as promised. Just six months late!

Brad

 

Glad to see you are enjoying everything! You should try stepping up to active crossover settings with some time alignment for each individual channel, it'll get even better!

If you have 1600 songs on just 8gb of space, you are truly missing out on a lot of lost sound due to compressed music files. Try uploading your CDs in Itunes using the Apple Lossless Encoder under the import settings, it will import your music uncompressed and in the exact fashion as it was originally recorded in the studio. 8gb of Lossless material will get you maybe 400 songs, but thats because you have no loss due to compression (~4gb for a compressed song vs. ~40 gb for an uncompressed song). You will be BLOWN AWAY by the increase in sound clarity and realism.

 

Yeah, too bad the HU won't read .flac files.

Brad