Full audio upgrade and sound treatment

[Alter Ego Trip]

Testing lighting. Matches whatever the theme in the truck is. Only quibble at this point is I hope the crease in the fabric relaxes. Need to finish wiring and mounting amp/dsp and on to tuning.

Happy with how this turned out despite the work.

 

[Alter Ego Trip]

Got the wheels and drop installed. I was planning on going ridetech but had all my maxtrac parts laying around that I never used on my last truck. I really waffled back and forth on drop and ended up doing 1.5 front and 2" in rear knowing the etorque would sit lower. I wish I would have gone 2 in front but have heard too many issues with alignment and rubbing liners. I'll cut the rear coil a bit more as it's 1.5" higher than front (so etorque had no bearing on it) and run with it till I switch out to the ridetech. She definitely rides a bit rougher now and I'm not super happy the new tires are noticeably louder than the oe pirellis. Looks sooo much better though without a mile of fender gap.

 

[Alter Ego Trip]

Well for some reason my pac just doesn't want to play nice. Can't get audio from radio so decided to do final fitment on trim pieces. Pretty much buttoned up other than audio at this point lol.

 

[ZombieSlayer]

D@mn that box looks sexy as hell

 

[Alter Ego Trip]

D@mn that box looks sexy as hell

Thanks. There's still something that just isn't sitting right with me on the design. It feels a little broken up with the individual trim pieces. I may try and incorporate something else that ties them all in together and makes it flow a bit more from end to end. I thought about messing around and trying like a racing stripe that pulls everything together.

 

[Alter Ego Trip]

I have settled on a final piece. Not sure of the color, but either gloss black, yellow, or silver.

 

[emag9874]

That looks great!! Nice work. I did an LMI seat lift and built the box running 2 8w7's.

 

[bshelton8]

Slowly putting things back together. Had to completely redo the adapter plates I made to get things to clear door once snapped back together. I moved from 1/2" to 1/4", and it provided just enough room to add CCF between speaker/plate/door, and still clear grille when reassembled (I think lol).
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I finished covering the final back of the truck in MLV and cut out the amp rack. I originally was going to mount amps next to each other, between the cab and e torque battery, but it puts the amp behind the center seatbelt and I don't want any chance of having an issue should there be an accident. I don't haul a ton of people, but I do assist with our church youth group, so not taking any chances. This really made for a tight squeeze, but I should just be able to get the amps to fit on top of each other, while barely clearing seat belt.

I disassembled the factory mid housing and cut away the internal surround. She was not made for a 3" plus mid.
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I also decided to add some led strips to the doors seeing as they were already apart.
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Finished adding CCF to the back of the trim panels.
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I now need to turn to glassing a trim panel for the tweeter in the sails. I was going to fiberglass and wrap the whole panel but have since opted to add a panel on top. The design will match the mid speaker shape in the door to tie everything together.

What type/brand of light strip did you use?

 

[Alter Ego Trip]

What type/brand of light strip did you use?

Same as the ones in the doors. Silverholder.

 

[Alter Ego Trip]

Tune is mostly done. I am going to change the mid mounting in the dash, as I am getting some deviations in the measurements due to the backwave. Not sure you could actually hear it, but I want it bang on. Pretty freaking smooth curve with the exception of the 200hz mode which is inherent in door mounted mid bass. DS is smooth, PS has the null. I'll play around with the crossover area a bit more to see if I can clean it up any, but a null is a null.

Pulled a little energy out of the 3.5k area which really smoothed out the vocals. This can be run at a pretty good clip without ear fatigue. Stage width is uncanny. I'd love a tad bit more depth, but overall I'm ecstatic with the staging/presentation.

SUB

FULL

 

[Alter Ego Trip]

Modified the dash pods. Was getting some cancelation from backwave. Will re measure and see how it does.

 

[Alter Ego Trip]

Tune pretty much dialed in. I may add a front sub to the mix down the road as Rams have a nasty null in the crossover area right around the midbass. This is due to width of cab in relation to drivers seat. Not much you can do about it. Had to raise xover to 90 to get good sub to midbass phase interaction. That being said; sub localization isn't really a factor until you start running it really hot. On a positive note; the nasty dip at 200 got cleaned up a bit.

Anyone who is replacing the factory dash speakers; make sure you stuff a bunch of sound absorption down the giant open hole in the dash panel. I missed it the first time when I installed them. After closing off the hole in the dash, and installing the covers and surrounding the driver with foam, the response improved exponentially. The after REW plot before EQ looked substantially better than the before plot after EQ.

 

[skyhawk42]

What RTA program are you using? What type of mic setup do you have? The reason I ask is because I went full active and just picked up TruRTA software for my laptop and a Dayton audio umm-6 mic. I haven’t really dove into it much, but I don’t see how to overlay a target eq curve on my screen while I am making live adjustments, so if I can’t figure it out I may look into different software.

 

[Alter Ego Trip]

What RTA program are you using? What type of mic setup do you have? The reason I ask is because I went full active and just picked up TruRTA software for my laptop and a Dayton audio umm-6 mic. I haven’t really dove into it much, but I don’t see how to overlay a target eq curve on my screen while I am making live adjustments, so if I can’t figure it out I may look into different software.

REW. Been using that program in my HT for years. It's what most people use when doing any sort of EQ work.

Mic is UMIK-1. I've used the UMM-6 calibrated from CSL, with good results as well. Pretty much any USB mic with a calibration file will work.

REW is a steep learning curve, but well worth it once you get the hang of it. You can import your own target curve, and REW will auto EQ to match the curve. If you are running a Helix, you can even import the REW curve into the processor. It's pretty slick. I'm not familiar with truRTA so I can't help you there unfortunately.