Not that I’ve lured you here with an adorable pitbull, I did some car stuff this weekend.
Installed a 10"1010 JBL Subwoofer into the stock location in my LS400 and added an Alpine MRV-500 to power it. Wiring the power cable from the battery in the front all the way to the back, and tapping into the ACC wire on my headunit was a sweat-dripping task that took me like 4 hours in the 90F heat. Had to remove the back seat completely, and pull up all the passenger side door sill trim pieces. But it’s all in now, now a wire to be seen, and it BUMPS.
The 10" sub is a lot bigger than the old 8inch. My Nakamichi sub died just after I bought the car and I threw in a Sony sub from a home-theater box to tied me over until I could afford to waste some money. The stock sub was 5 ohms which is a really odd rating that just isn’t made anymore, so dedicated amp and subwoofer was the way to go.
Big thanks to Echo51 for sharing the knowledge on how to get my sub signal to the new amp. The Nakamichi system uses its stock amp to high-pass/low-pass filter the signal to each speaker. So the stock amp is acting as a pre-amp to the Alpine in the trunk. I had to chop and hammer a lot to get this bigger sub to fit but it worked out well I’m very happy with the results. All my hackery is well hidden and function-over-form is fine with me. I also picked up a cool new tool for installing the self-tapping screws for the sub itself. Being in the rear parcel shelf, a drill didn’t fit at all, so i got this 90deg drill attachment from Home Depot for $20 that made the task a breeze. Of course half way through my drill died, so I still need to install a few screws.
Very satisfied with the results and everything I learned in the process, cannot wait to drive to work in the morning! PS I have an OPPO decal in the mail for my rear window, I have a decal on my older LS that is languishing until I have a need for the second car, I’ll post a delicious OPPO decal-ing in the near future. Night OPPO