Conversion 1
This was was shipped to us all the way from Sin City. The audio setup for this vehicle presented a huge design challenge. It is not often you put this much gear into a car with a third row seat. Retaining some useable space in the rear seemed like a pipe dream when we went into the project, but a little bit of engineering and planning, we ended up coming away with a high performance system that retains functionality.The front stage consists of Focal Utopia M Midrange and Tweeter along with the Focal Inside I-SUB BMW 2 ohm underseat midbass woofers. A Mosconi Pro 4/10 run our midrange and tweeters while a Mosconi Pro 2/10 runs our underseat midbass woofers. The A-Pillars were fabricated to house the midrange. They were rewrapped in matching Alcantara suede to match the OEM and finished off with a matching grille and silver painted trim ring. The sail panels were modified to house the TBM Tweeters. Because of the size difference of the tweeters, we were not able to retain the OEM RGB light ring. So we created our own fiber ring that utilized the OEM RGB light. This kept the appearance of the lighting intact.
We left the rear speakers factory. The rear speakers were powered off a Mosconi Pro Atamo 4 amplifier which was hidden behind one of the rear panels. The amplifiers were all controlled from a Helix DSP Ultra. Considering the factory signal was not digital, we did not use any type of OEM amplifier interface. We setup 3 separate presets. Preset 1 controlled the factory radio, Preset 2 was connected to the HD BT chip which docks inside the DSP, and Preset 3 was to a analog input from an Astell & Kern SP3000 DAP. Our Helix DSP controller was installed in a OEM panel to the left of the steering wheel. This controls our main volume, subwoofer, and presets.
A stacked baltic birch enclosure was created to perfectly utilize all the airspace under the third row motorized seats. This enclosure houses two Focal Utopia 10″ subwoofers. We created an amp rack that mounts where the OEM floor started. There is about 5 inches of space from the cone of the woofer to the start of the amp rack. Each amplifier was spaced off the amp rack 3/4″ and a square was cut under each amplifier. This allowed air to vent from under the amp rack while also working to cool the amplifiers. No resonance is heard during operation.
The amp rack was built to look like an OEM floor. It is raised just enough to functionally cover the amplifiers. It docks into recessed magnets to lock it in place. The door sill emblem was integrated into the face of the amp rack to make it look like an OEM entry point. Lighting is controlled and synced with the OEM lighting. Finally an Alcantara removable insert was made to dock into the top of the amp rack to hide the amplifiers and create a functional floor. That way this third row SUV still has functional space given we installed 5 amplifiers, 1 DSP, and 2 10″ subwoofers.
