TheKomoman

This past weekend a friend and I installed an amp and speakers into my '06 C6 convertible. I am going to try to recall what we did and share it in the hope that it gives folks an idea of what they have in store should they choose to do this.

First of all I want to thank my buddy Rob who's expererience and hard work made this possible. I pitched in where I could but I counted on him to point me in the right direction. To do this is a LOT of work, I would guess we spent approximately 16 hours over 2 days. A good bit of it was figuring out mounting, what we had to remove, etc so I'm sure were we to do this again it was probably take more like 8-10 hours.

Equipment:

Alpine PDX-4.150 Amplifier
http://www.alpine-usa.com/en/product...odel=PDX-4.150

JL Audio CL441 Cleansweep
http://mobile.jlaudio.com/products_c...php?page_id=79

Focal K2 Power 165 KF speakers
http://www.focal-america.com/Product...r/k2power.html

PAC AOEM-GM24
http://www.logjamelectronics.com/pacaoemgm24.html


Installation Goodies:

purchased from http://www.darvex.com
Stinger 4 Channel Helix 12' RCA Interconnects
Stinger Helix Series 1.5' RCA Interconnects
Stinger 4 Gauge Ring Terminal (1/4) Hole
Stinger 150 Amp Circuit Breaker
Stinger Custom Pro Translucent 4 Gauge Red Power Wire
Stinger HPM 4 Gauge Clear Power Wire

purchased from http://www.partsexpress.com
50' 14 Gauge speaker wire (it's actually monster but it's their house brand) Part Number 100-145
PHOENIX GOLD G60 FIREWALL GROMMET 9-4 GAUGE Part Number 263-722

We also used alot of miscellaneous spade connectors, butt connectors, solder, etc the kind of stuff you can pick up at Home Depot or Lowes.

I cannot recommend this next thing strongly enough - the Service Manual!!!! When you're trying to figure out how something comes apart, or what that last thing that's holding onto whatever you're trying to remove the manual is INVALUABLE. If you're going to spend money & time for a project like this then the $125 it costs to get a set of the manuals should be a no brainer. I got mine from Fitchner Chevy but they can be had from any of the other GM parts dealers here on the forum as well(Fred Beans, etc).

TheKomoman

The thing we anticipated (correctly) being the biggest pain was the installation of the amp, so that's what we dug into first, at least to get a plan together. The PDX in fact DOES fit into the cubby and had no trouble with the width but the depth can be a BIG problem. After a few trial fits, along with a few expletive-filled fits of a different sort, we finally decided to do without the carpet liner on the inside.

First step is to pull all the rear carpet out. We didn't actually pull it all out until later but we should have just bitten the bullet and gotten rid of all of it. First to go is the carpet across the back of the trunk. Remove the screw connectors for the cargo net and the 2 pop-connectors just below the latch. As you remove the piece you will have to feed the "oh crap I locked myself in the trunk!" emergency pull handle back through the carpet and disconnect the 2 wire connectors from the trunk lights, one on either side. Then the piece just comes out.

To get the full bottom piece out in a convertible you actually have remove the formed piece under the tonneau cover. Get used to closing the trunk, popping the tonneau, closing the tonneau, popping the trunk.. you're going to do it quite a bit as you can't have them open at the same time without a serious risk of damaging both. There are 2 wing-nut still cargo net hooks on the bottom behind the carpet that you must remove and 2 pop connectors that go into the back of the waterfall. Remove the 2 speaker wire connectors and then the piece actually comes out fairly easily:



Once that piece is removed there are 2 screw off connectors on the top of the wheel wells just behind that area as well as 2 pop connectors that are mouned into the brace of the tonneau hinge. While you are in that area go ahead and remove the waterfall. You've already pulled the 2 pops from the back of it to get the carpet out, so now you need to remove the 2 screws (T15 torx) from the top and on the passenger side a little tucked away just under the top there is a pop-connector. At that point if you have XM you should be staring at the XM module.

When you have those removed then close the tonneau, open the trunk and you should be able to remove the rear carpet as one big piece, cubbie lids and all. I managed NOT to get a picture of that, sorry. You have to pull the carpet out of the corners and the best way to get it out is to pull up the middle of the carpet at the back so that you can fold the cubbie lids over and then pull the whole thing out - there are two snaps into the under side of the carpet, one on each side at the inside top corner of the cubbie lid. When that's all done you should have access to the cubbie like this - we used the passenger side cubbie:



To get access to the outside of the cubbie to put a bolt through it we jacked up the car, removed the right rear tire and the wheel well cover. There are a series of screws and a few pop connectors to accomplish this and the brake duct is tied into this. Most are obvious and right in front of you, but there are 2 up underneath at the back of the car and 2 just under the front of the wheel well behind the door.

During:



After(you can see a drill bit sticking out in this one!):



If you're test fitting at this point I suggest you put some short pieces of speaker & power wire into the amp as it's height is the key and you'll wind up re-drilling holes (*cough*) if you don't. Here's a picture of the amp after being installed, though it's jumping ahead it's a good reference point now:

TheKomoman

We were trying to tackle everything we considered to be the difficult stuff first so the next bit for us was getting power through the firewall. I suppose this could be done without remove the seat and carpet if you were so inclined, but having that stuff out made access to everything quite a bit easier. The seat has the typical 4 bolts and there are a total of 3 wiring harnesses if you have the seats with side airbags. Also there is a nut on the side of the seat for the seatbelt that must be removed, then you have this:



As you can see in that pic, the panel & carpet piece to expose the fuse panel is down. You'll want to remove the trim pieces along the door sill as well because the kick panel covers some things you'll need access to and you'll be running wires along there anyway.

We didn't want to feed our new stuff through the factory grommet to avoid damaging it, so we were drilling a new hole. My buddy removed the fuse panel and Bose amp from the floor to get easier access to everything. He did this one so I'm not certain of where all the bolts were, but he did alot of bitching so there must have been quite a few! This is the spot we finally chose to use:

Outside - pull the battery to get at this area


Inside


The SMC drills fairly easily but as you can see the long glass filaments make for a good bit of mess to clean up. You can see in the "outside" shot the hole for the factory grommet - use this to help orient yourself on the inside. We then used some hot melt ABS glue sticks and the grommet to run the wire through the hole:

Outside


Inside


The wire run was then down the side of the car and up the side into the rear of the car. We also made our ground connection in this area. There's been talk here of using the ground by the seat and this not being sufficient. I'm not sure if the one we chose is the one in question but we didn't have any problem using out. My friend's ****-retentive nature may have something to do with it as we made sure we scuffed the metal of the panel first so that the bolt wasn't the only ground connection and then also coated it in spray-on underbody to prevent corrosion:





Under the hood we installed a 150amp circuit breaker. This may be overkill as well, but better safe than sorry. There is a very convenient mounting spot just behind the wheel well, you can drill in and there's nothing behind it to worry about. Self-tapping screws with small pilot holes do the job nice, SMC is tough stuff and grips well:

Kind of tough to orient yourself to the picture, but follow the red wire back from the positive battery post and it connects to the circuit breaker:

TheKomoman

The next dissassembly job is the center console. I followed cmb13's excellent write-up on installing the PAC interface with the NAV system, as that's what I have, but I'll summarize here as well. You have to remove the console lid first, there are 4 T15 screws that go into the lid. Then remove the 1/2-football shaped plastic cover at the front of the console storage area, this just prys off from the bottom(in '05's the airbag light is there). You will see 2 screw heads, they're either 9/32 or 7mm, not sure exactly but either should get the job done. Then remove the e-brake boot. It makes an awful noise when the snaps come loose but just pull straight up and it will snap out. Then you can just pull it over the top of the handle. This will expose 2 more 9/32" screw heads on the passenger side just in front of the e-brake handle, remove those and pull the trim in front of them away from the console trim. Last thing you need to remove to get this off is the shift ****, or you can remove the boot from the console, whichever you prefer. I preferred removing the shift ****, so you just slide the boot down and remove the T25 screw from the side of the ****, then it just pulls straight up.

Once you have all that removed lift up on the console trim starting at the back by where the console storage is. As you lift up and starting hearing those awful snapping noises begin to pull the trim towards you as well to release the snaps from the dash as well. You have to tug pretty darned hard so you can't baby it. The trim will NOT be ready for complete removal yet, you have alot of wiring connectors to undo. If it's an '06 like mine there will be an extra wiring harness laying under that cover you removed and then there are connectors on the back of the traction control button, both cigarette lighter plugs, the heated seat buttons (if you have them) and the hazard lights button at the top between the vents. The biggest pain of the bunch is the cig lighter at the back of the trim that opens into the console storage. The release is on top of it between the connector and the trim panel. It hurts, you'll have indentations in your skin but you'll get it. When the trim panel is off you need to remove the storage tray and tunnel cover. For this there are 3 nuts - 2 are at the back under lift-up squared-oval tabs and one is at the front just behind the cup holders.

After all that, it should look like this:


There are then 6 9/32" screws to remove - 2 on the AC/heater controls and 4 on the stereo, then they just pull out. To install the PAC module you need to remove the 24 pin harness at the back of the radio. This has a squeeze tab top & bottom and then it pulls out. The PAC module plugs into this and then the factory harness plugs into that. It acts as a pass-through and then also has the 4 channels of line-level output with female RCA's. There's a nice spot just to the right of where the head unit goes to stow the PAC module.

For the NAV unit, after a little help from cmb13 I found that turning the gain on the PAC module all the way to max on each channel is needed. I don't know if that holds true for the non-nav head but I'm guessing it probably does.

The PAC instructions and the FAQ both say that the "B3" wire in that 24 pin pack, a white wire that the service manual refers to as 1457 as I recall, functions as a remote turn-on. We put a meter on this and did not see the 12V drop after turning off the radio. Perhaps we weren't patient enough to give the voltage time to drop, or there's a delay until it drops the voltage to tell the antenna module to shut down... whatever it is we weren't certain it would function so we chose to use the signal detection of the Cleansweep and let it's remote turn on output trigger the amp. We did pull a wire and bury it in the dash in case that didn't work(it did).

We plugged the 12' Stinger 2-pair RCA's into the PAC module and ran it, the cleansweep control wire, the wire as a hedge for remote turn-on and a "while we're at it" pair of RCA's in case I choose to use the AUX input on the Cleansweep at some point down the tunnel hump, up behind the waterfall position and into the trunk. You can also see those wires in the pic above. I chose to mount the Cleansweep volume control on the flat area just behind the cup holders. This is a nice flat spot on the trim panel and also an area near where my hand & arm often are since my car is a manual. I didn't get a pic of that, sorry.

That was more or less Day 1 and as we were getting short on time there are unfortuantely not as many pics from Day 2 but hopefully I got the important ones.

TheKomoman

With the amp installation and power and source wire runs decided on it was time to address putting in the speakers. We started with the pair in the under-tonneau carpet.. so coupe guys should skip this part! You have to cut the carpet cap off the back of that piece as it's glued in place so there's no easy removal. We also had to open up the diameter of the hole as I was replacing the 5.25" with 6.5" midbasses. That carpeting and it's backer is darned stiff and grabs screws very nice, we didn't even need to use clips as backers to attach the speakers. The 6.5" driver mounted nicely in that opened-up hole and we used a hole saw of appropriate size to mount the tweet. There's a nice flat spot just above and to the side of the mount for the midbass where this can be done (2:00 position on driver's side, 10:00 on passenger). We will eventually cap the back of the midbasses, probably with PVC tubing, but didn't get to that during the installation. The result looked like this:

Front:


Back:


The wires for these speakers are very easy, when you put the rear carpeting back in you just use the slots that were there for the stock harnesses and pass it through.

Now for the doors. To remove the door panels you have to first remove the T30 screws, 2 on each door. Driver door has a long and narrow cover you have to pry off just under the handle, then remove the screws. These can be a pain as they didn't want to come out of the door panel for me, but you can tell when they're back out all the way by the awful noise they make. For the passenger door pry off the open button panel from the top of the handle and you'll see a T30 bolt behind it. The other screw is just under the door handle at about a 45 degree angle.

To remove the panels at this point it's the same on both doors. At the bottom of the door almost all the way at the back you will feel a slot. Take a panel removal tool (like a hammer claw on a screwdriver shaft) and push it into that slot - I wrapped the head of that tool with a towel. You could also use a big flat head screwdriver or a thick bladed 1" putty knife, you need something to pry out with. Next comes the really unpleasant part... jam whatever tool you're using into that slot and wedge/pull it towards you until you hear the horrible screech of the pops. Keep it wedged until you can get your fingers under there and yank the panel towards you. Do this all the way around except at the top. Then you can just pull it a bit towards you and lift up, the panel will come off. There is a WONDERFUL single-point wire harness (I LOVE this design). It's a purple connector and you squeeze the tabs at the back and lift up on the handle, the harness will separate and you can take away the panel.

You can see the harness in the lower right of this pic and the 10" Bose "subwoofer"


To mount the speakers, well I cheated a bit. My business is a machine shot for industrial laminates and I just happen to be a CNC programmer as well. I measure the 10" and 3.5" drivers for size & bolt circle, then I used some approx 1/4" thick canvas phenolic and machined mounting plates. The only thing I left out was the notch on the mount for the 3.5" area, this is obviously a location spot for the assemblers so that the wiring harness meets up to the driver. We just notched it out using a sabre saw and it fit like a charm. Focal has mechanical drawings of their drivers so I was able to mill openings in each of the plates for the drivers I was using. I offset the openings for the 6.5" drivers 1/2" over and down to get them to be more exposed to the grill in the doors. Then it was just drill the mount pattern for the screw holes in the drivers of the mid, for the tweet it turned out to be a very nice press fit.

Here is a series of pics showing the plates, their mounting and the end result:









The drivers and plates don't show through as much as that last pic indicates, the flash really lights them up. You certainly can see the yellow of the mid through the door though. Here's a shot that's natural light, but doesn't show the setup as clearly, but just to give you an idea of the actual result:

TheKomoman

We mounted the crossover in the bottom of each door opening. Clears the window with no trouble at all and there's a ton of space:



As you can see in the speaker mount pics above, we drilled a hole through the door to pass the wire through for the tweet. Did it this way so it could be easily disconnected to be able to remove the door panel.

Passing the speaker wire through into the door was a bit of a pain and the easiest way to do it turned out to be to feed it through the door. It's a pain because you have to pull all that wire, but it was just easier to get it through the accordion cover that way. On the inside there is a squarish rubber grommet that you have to pull off and drill a hole through to get the wire into the car. The grommet will not re-install if you just try to pass it through the edge. The speaker wires then just run along the door jam and up the back into the trunk. On the driver's side we ran the wire across under the tonneau area and then over the right wheel well with everything else. The signal wires we laid down over the middle of the trunk to keep them away from the power wire noise. We hot-glued (ABS glue again) the rear crossovers to the where the trunk floor begins, vertically just behind the seat under the carpet (carpet separates with velcro).

After this it's connection and re-assembly time. I will spare you the tales of testing connections and calibrating the Cleansweep except to say it's a darned good idea to check all your connections before you button everything up!

After we had all the wires run, tested out connections, etc it was time for mounting of the amp and Cleansweep. We used 2" long 10-24 stainless steel screws with stainless steel & nylon locking nuts. The Apline mounting system makes this somewhat of a pain because the screws go all the way through the amp, but a few contortions laters we had the nuts & washers secured on the outside of the cubby. For the Cleansweep we mounted it on the opposite side and just used self-tappers to secure it to the cubby. This space is VERY tight at this point!!!



You have to re-install the trunk carpeting before you can put the piece back in under the tonneau. Secure and clean up the runs of wires and then reverse the removal process described above. Put the big piece on the bottom in first, then the piece that covers the back. Installed that mess of wires doesn't look at that bad, and once the cover is closed you'd never know it was there.



Re-assemble the console reversing the directions above and re-install the waterfall. You can put the seat and doorjam trim back at this point as well.

Now you can put the carpet piece for under the tonneau back in (waterfall must be in first). Slip the speaker wires through the slit in the carpet and connect them to the crossovers. Then put the carpet in place and secure with the "wing nuts" on the bottom of the trunk and the 2 pops into the back of the waterfall. Will look something like this:



Now it's just clean-up time and making sure everything is buttoned back up. Make sure you don't still have any Corvette parts laying in the yard!!!

TheKomoman

I have no doubt I missed or flat out forgot something. If my buddy kick starts my memory I will revise the posts. If you have any questions I'll answer as best I can.

There are more pics than what I posted here, but many are dupes or different angles of the same thing - the freedom of digital clicking. You can see them all here:

http://www.lazyassgeek.com/photos/th...s.php?album=42

I hope this helps somebody out!

cmb13

Wow! Fantastic job and write up!!! I'm gonna need some time later to go through this!

A few quick comments:

1. Do you think you need a fan for the amp, as it's enclosed? Might cut out the storage box cover and insert one.
2. With regards to the volume of the chimes and nav, my volume went up when I did my installation, not down. You've got several things installed with gain settings; the PAC unit, the Cleensweep and the amps. I wonder if altering the gain would restore your chimes to prior levels. I'm sure you don't want to take apart the dash again to get at the PAC, but since that's the first in the series, that's probably where I'd go.
3. Very impressive mounts for the front speakers.
4. I really like the use of the glue gun for the sealing the hole for the wires.
5. I was advised not to put the crossover in the door for 2 reasons - one is to avoid the potential for water damage, and the second is so I can change the settings easily if I wanted to. Anyway, you probably won't need to and it looks like a nice clean install, and I personally think the likelihood of water damage is very low; just relating my thoughts.
6. I like Yeungling too!
7. I too couldn't get the PAC remote turn on to work, so I used the heated seat fuse with a Add-A-Circuit fuse.

Beautiful Job.....Most Importantly, How's She Sound????

TheKomoman

1. I'm not sure about the heat yet. I suspect I will need to do something, but it's a digital amp and will run signficantly cooler than the equivalent power analog amp.

2. Myopia obviously set it.. didn't even think about the gain on the PAC. That's a darned good point and since the chimes are low it's the likely culprit.

3. Thanks, I was more than a little pleased with the way they turned out!

4. That's all my buddy's experience there. That ABS hot glue stuff is awesome.

5. The door panels aren't really that bad to get at and there's nothing other than tweeter level to adjust. I set the tweet to -3 so I figure worst case it's 1 time to go either 0 (brighter - VERY unlikely with a Tioxid tweet!) or step it down to -6. From what I saw of the door design, moisture isn't a concern to me.

6. Yuengling rocks!

7. Thanks, at least we know it wasn't just us!


And most importantly... WOW, what an improvement. Not that I needed alot of reinforcement on the quality of Focal drivers but my goodness.. And I tell ya what, for having "only" 4 6.5" drivers they do very nicely on bass. They don't have the really low bass but they have a ton of punch - kick drums will do exactly that to you, and hard.

Had practically zero time to adjust on things yet but I can already tell it's well worth the time and money invested.

rothchilds

awesome write up man

bradb

Great write-up and install. I really appreciate you taking time to document the entire process for us. I'm saving this thread for later when I get off my butt to upgragde the sound in my vert.

Again, thanks for the effort.

TheKomoman

Well you planted a thought in my brain big time and there was no way I was going to bed tonight without checking that.

You nailed it. I had left the PAC on the default gain and that just isn't enough for the NAV unit. I turned it up to max on every channel and that helped a ton, and not only with the chimes, etc. My chimes are still lower relative to how they were before but they are audible now, thanks! I'll edit the write up to account for that.

Thanks for the kind words rothchilds & bradb, hope it helps when you're ready.

cmb13

I'll bet it was easier the second time around!

TheKomoman

That was the 3rd time, much easier!

stinky

Nicely done and great writeup, one I'll being referring to later. 2 questions, why the cap on the rear midbass' and can you describe it a little clearer, and second, how much will you take to mock up a set of the door plates for my 6.5" speakers?

Pipedreams

What a great write-up If anyone is interested, I will be selling these exact ultra high quality CNC machined speaker mounts made by TheKomoman. We currently have only 8 sets available. They come with 2 woofer mounts (cut for 6.5 speakers) and 2 tweeter mounts (cut for 1.5 speaker). $50 with free shipping. They are not yet on my site so email or PM me

This tempory link is available to order LINK TO ORDER

Steve Germany

Great write up - this is going directly into the General audio C6 faq!



BTW - for the nav unit I cut the 4 wire pairs leading to the PAC OEM GM 24 and soldered on 4 RCA jacks. This eliminates the need for the JBL clean sweep saving several hundred dollars and simplifing the wiring. Ed - could be a good item for you to offer!

Pipedreams

Corrected sorry, paypal adds the shipping automatically so I reduced the price to $45 and with the $5 that get added automatically it will be a total of $50

TheKomoman

Steve -

I didn't use the Cleansweep because of the output from the PAC - that module is delivering line level that you can connect directly to an amp. I used it because when we did an RTS scan of the output of the NAV head we saw a very distinct "loudness" roll off from around 120Hz as the gain increases. This was audibly obvious when comparing pre & post Cleansweep calibration.

Buddy A

was the clean sweep required b/c of Nav.? Would the PAC adapter be sufficient with the non-nav unit?