Figured I should start a build log since I've gone through so much trial and error in getting this stereo to sound good.

 

I'm already done with most things but I did take pictures along the way so i'll get that all uploaded when i get photobucket or imgur figured out.

 

I bought my passat almost a year ago, the weekend after black Friday to be exact, and knew immediately that it needed some love in the bass department.

 

I had a rockford p-300-12 powered enclosure lying around that i once had mounted in a big self-propelled sprayer that i basically lived in for 3 summers, threw that in along with a rockford loc, rockford rca's, and some ebay 4ga cca to get it powered.

 

That sounded awesome for the average non-basshead and would suffice until i found a real solution....

 

Did some searching and found this great place! After searching and reading here for hours I decided on a Fi BL 12 for a sub and a BRZ1200.1 hifonics amp to power it since i'm a poor college student and can't afford a bc, aq or saz lol

 

I built a vented box for the BL that was 2.68ft^3 tuned to 28.5hz

 

After I finished the box I had to stuff foam above the headliner near the upper brake light and under the rear deck to stop some rattling. Installed some dampener (dynamat and ebay stuff) to the trunk lid, under the trunk carpet on the floor, and rear deck from inside the trunk. dampener helped a ton.

 

After the substage I realized that the stock front stage was not going to cut it... I knew that I wanted to fill some of the lacking upper bass frequencies with some volume so I was looking for the biggest components I could get for a decent price. Ended up getting the xr1800p components from Kenwood. They've got a big 7" woofer and an oversized 1 3/16" tweeter with external crossovers. currently the set is being powered by a dusty old pioneer 4-channel amp GM-x524. I'm not perfectly satisfied with the front stage for now since the amp likes to protect at high volumes and I've got some fuzzy distortion from the tweeters in certain frequencies. once i change the amp to the GM-d8604 class d 4-channel from pioneer I think it will get much better as I have the older GM-d9500f version in my s10 that never protects and has no distortion until extreme volume.

 

also ran another 4ga run of cca to the trunk and a distribution block when I added the second amp.

 

Also changed out the stock HU for a Pioneer Avh2600bt touchscreen unit which is fantastic for the money.

 

I decided that the box was tuned too low so I chopped 10.5" off the port giving me a 2.88ft^3 net volume tuned to 32.2hz and was much happier!

 

Now for the real reason I'm starting this build log.. I'm going to try a 6th order bandpass to keep this 'new to me' low end rumble and get back the awesome upper frequency volume from my mtx square sub in my s10 for when i want to blast the 50hz Flux Pavilion bass cannon!

 

Much more to follow, including pics for the above^ stuff!

Here's a pic of the HU installed with the Metra dash kit.

 

These are of the tweeter cover and the mdf piece i had to build to get the tweeter to fit into the stock location without having to chop up the stock tweeter cover

 

Here are the door woofer pics along with the mdf ring i had to make to get the stock speaker pods to accept the woofer. It turned out really nice but was kinda a pain to sand, attempt fit, sand more, attempt fit, sand more.....

Here's the box and the BL 12 in all its glory

Here's a good view of the vibration isolated amp rack with some holes for cooling

Looking very good