E90 320D London shaker

[MünürYılmaz]

TODO:

• Carpet/bed liner the subwoofer box

DONE:

• Upgraded head unit
• Installed tweeters
• Built subwoofer box
• Installed amplifier with subwoofer
• Upgrade amplifier
• Upgrade subwoofers to Sundown SA-12s Rev3
• Upgrade to Focal ES100k
• Installed Hertz HDP 4 Channel Amplifier

With this project I already had the amplifier and the subwoofers from the previous car I owned, but I need to build a new custom box and upgrade the stock E90 gear that I already had.

The first upgrade I went with was the head unit. The stock head unit just distorted an insane amount and couldn't really supply the speakers in the car with sufficient power. It just wasn't loud enough and I wasn't happy with it at all. Also the screen on the head unit was just in bad shape from purchase which is common on these BMW professional stereos.

An example of what it had looked like:

I was looking to upgrade with an ipad or something of some sort but at the time it was way out of my budget. So the only option was to get a double din HU. I really love my pioneer gear because of the quality and 14-band equalizer I thought....come to that a little later.

 

Upgrading the headunit

So I ended up going with the Pioneer AVH-x3800dab

Got the facia from dynamicsounds.co.uk for a decent price compared to other websites

I mean the kit itself does the job but is a bit cheap. Was just glad that it had the wiring hardness and everything to go with it. Didn't have the need to use the extra ashtray so I left that out.

The only issues I had with this kit is that the 2 screw holes at the bottom of the facia don't line up with anything, so you're forced to screw through your interior ? which I didn't like...I ended up using some short stubby screws but in the end they didn't hold up and just fell out. The bottom part of the facia is literally not attached to anything at the moment but doesn't look bad at all.

I'm really happy with the head unit' build quality and customisation capabilities, but as mentioned I mentioned before I was happy except that the unit does have the tendency of freezing completely and sometimes needing a hard reboot...which means switching the car off, taking the key out of the ignition and restarting the car, and even then when the car is switched back on it can take a couple of minutes for the unit to start back up. This has been an issue for many of Pioneers head unit' which really ticks me off.

 

Installing tweeters

So for the tweeters I went with the Hertz Dieci DT24.3 because I've heard good things about Hertz and their sound quality. And because I didn't have any plans on amplifying my door speakers, I thought it would be a good idea to bring the highs up a little since the mids don't have enough clarity.

I did have to butcher the door pillars a little, but after some research on BMW pillars, they already have the precut sections inside from factory, so all I had to do was to drill a hole for the tweeters to sit in and hot glue them in securely which it came out really well!

 

Time for the bass!

The gear I've had from my previous project which is soon to change is my 2x12 Pioneer TS W310D4 and a Autotek 1600.2 mono bridged @ 4ohm which is supposed to push out around 800RMS but realistically speaking probably around the 600 mark which was okay for the time being.

They looked in very good shape but considering they were only getting around 300watts a piece for hours continuously ?

My old box was too wide for the E90 trunk and there was no way I was getting it in. So I had to resort to building yet another custom box (which I did enjoy ? )

I went along and jumped on the RE L-Ported Speaker Box Calculator website...I know I'm gonna get a lot of hate for this but personally I don't know a whole lot about building a custom box and stuff to get the correct outcome, so I went for the easy option of just measuring the trunk space that I wanted the box to take up putting into account margin of error. I wanted the box to be as big as I can get it to be for future upgrades and wanted it to be deep and hit the low notes well. So this was what I came to for my box

Went along and got my precut MDF plates at my local timber store. Made sure all the pieces matched up ready to be glued and drilled

Came out to be perfect and went along and glued and drilled all the pieces one by one with my dad. At this point there was a lot of shouting and arguing but it was fun in the end ?

Even after measuring the box, it only JUST ABOUT FIT ? the trunk entrance is really narrow compared to the space inside of the actual trunk but we managed to squeeze it in 

 

Upgrading the amplifier

Doing some long research and watching amplifiers get dynod, I had a lot of options on which amplifier to upgrade to, but was also limited to what was available in the UK. Most of the amplifier dynod from the US was really hard to get in the UK unless I wanted to pay a hefty import fee/tax. So then I found out that Skar actually sold "some" gear on amazon.co.uk. I did want their big SK amplifiers - preferably the sk-3500 but the biggest amp they had available was the Skar Audio RP-2000.1 which I went with. Very nice build amplifier and is more than enough for what I have right now

Amp came in at work, packaging was really tightly packed and was excited to get this baby in!

For this amplifier upgrade I HAD to upgrade to 0 gauge. So I went  ahead and bought a Vortex 0 gauge kit

Very nice quality bit of 0 gauge and very flexible!

Because my E90 didn't have the winter pack, my back seats weren't fold-able so I had to unbolt them manually which took some time but this mean't my install would be a lot easier

I then wired up my subwoofers to 1-ohm to get the full potential of the amp.....2K watts!!!! ?

This is the settings I went with for my subs. It's actually turned up a lot more than I should since I wanted some head room available from my bass knob just in case I needed that extra bass

 

Upgrade front stage

So I finally got myself to commit to a nice audio upgrade. Did a lot of research online on which speakers work best for the E90 and I came to the conclusion of upgrading to the Focal ES100k because it offered high quality with a bunch of clarity. I didn't go with the drop in Focal replacement speakers because I heard they weren't as good...anyways!

There was no doubt in my mind that I HAD to run these really nice speakers on an amplifier. So I bought myself a second hand Hertz HDP 4. Which I was really excited about hearing. I hooked up the front channel as Full-range to the front 4" Focals with the Focal tweeters as well as the under seat woofers. And the rear channel as high pass to the factory rears as tweeters (high pass).

And honestly what a difference this made! So much detail and clarity throughout the whole frequency range. I could finally get some decent midbass from my under seat woofers and the door speakers along with the tweeters just sounded so amazing and just improved the music experience in general.