jreiter

iTrader: (6)

Equipment used:

Alpine NVE-N852A nav unit
Alpine TME-M760 lcd screen
Alpine CDA-9835 head unit
TRU Technology T-2.100 amp with Burr-Brown upgrade
Dynaudio 240mkII components
TRU Technology T-2.100 amp (bridged)
Elemental Designs e10o.14 sub
Tiff cables and hardware
"Brown Bread" sound deadener
Sony Playstation 2

I actually had this all installed back in March, but I *finally* snapped a few pics tonight. I apologize for my camera's increasing inability to focus properly. I'll try and retake the pics during the daytime so I can do manual focus and get it right.

Anyway, I basically wanted a clean, stealth install that was mostly hidden to the uninformed viewer. I also didn't want to give up my trunk storage space. (The Z needs all the storage it can get!)

The first step was basically removing the entire interior from the doors all the way back. We then covered the whole thing with Brown Bread deadening material, including the rear strut tower bar. (Had extra material, might as well use it.)

Applying Bread to the doors had the added benefit of virtually sealing the door, allowing the Dynaudio drivers to provide fantastic base. A sub was almost not needed! The Dyns are so strong I currently have the sub low-passed at 50 hz. The only drawback (if you can call it that) is that the Dynaudio 240mkII mid is about 7", not 6.5". This meant we had to trim away a small bit of metal from the top of the speaker holes in the doors. This allowed us to slide the drivers up a small bit and clear the plastic door panel. (Otherwise the surrounds would contact the door panel.)


Here is the trunk with the factory mat in place. Move along, nothing to see here... (That's just my jacket shoved under the strut bar.)



Pull up the mat, and you find our complete false floor. We used very high quality vinyl that almost feels like leather. You can see on the two removable panels that we added little tabs to facilitate removal of the panels.



Remove the panels, and you see the equipment. Elemental Designs sub and TRU amps. Despite the poor lighting in this pic, you might notice the paint is Le Mans Sunset to match the car. I imagine some daytime pics will show that better.



Here we have the Dynaudio tweeter mounted in the a-pillar. Had to do some trimming to make the hole large enough to fit the large Dyn tweet, but looks otherwise quite stock.



Here is the Alpine 9835 headunit and TME-760 screen. This is a 2004 model Z, but I retrofitted the 2003 model cubby hole and door assembly. This allows for a much larger screen to be fitted much more easily.



I'm not really a big fan of gaming consoles in cars, but this one was just too easy. I had a screen and headunit both with auxillary inputs... so why not? You can see the Logitech wireless controller. Very nice little piece.



And last but not least, here is the Alpine nav unit, mounted in the factory location. ("mailbox slot") Close the door and it's out of sight.



After all was said and done, the sound is fantastic. This is definitely the best sounding car stereo I've ever owned. The Alpine has a very nice DSP in it, allowing for pretty good tuning. The time alignment feature is heavenly, allowing a very front and center sound stage without doing any physical aiming of tweeters and mids. It also has a 5 band parametric EQ, which allowed me to get rid of a couple of problem areas. (3.2 kHz was a surprisingly harsh frequency that I had to pull way down.) The sub is low passed at 50 Hz with a 24 dB/octave slope, and the Dyns are highpassed at 63 Hz with an 18 dB/octave slope. Using a meter to do frequency checks, I found this setting to provide the smoothest bass response from sub to mids.

That's about it for now!

skank-a-holic

Niiiiiiiiice......

manofsteele2003

iTrader: (7)

WOW, one of the cleanest installs I've seen so far. And the best part, it's all hidden. NICE!

jreiter

iTrader: (6)

Yeah, that was part of my requirement. I wanted it to be hidden, but I also wanted to be able to show it off when needed. One thing I didn't even know about until I owned it for about 2 months is how bright the LEDs are on the TRU amps. Those thigns are *bright*! They're always covered, so I had never seen them. One night, while it was turned on, I pulled off the panel over the amps and all the cars in a 10 foot radius turned blue. Yowsers!

velodev

Very, very nice install.

Just curious, did you go through a local shop for your equipment or did you order from a website/national retailer?

I am in the market for a single DIN to LCD in the storage unit as well and trying to find the best prices/service.

jreiter

iTrader: (6)

The materials (vinyl, paint, etc) all were obtained locally by the shop, as well as the Tiff cables and connectors. The equipment, though, was obtained all over the place. Some from Ebay, some from retailers online. The Alpine screen itself was obtained on Ebay.

If you have a 2004+ model Z and want to put a screen in the cubby hole, you might seriously want to consider retrofitting the 2003 cubby hole assembly in there. It is a much larger hole and much, much easier to work with.

Cryptonomicon18

If you don't mind me asking, how much did you get the Alpine TME-M760 lcd screen for... I was having trouble finding a price on the internet.

jreiter

iTrader: (6)

I paid about $450 used via Ebay. New prices usually start in the high 500's and go up. Check here for good prices on car audio items in general:

http://www.onlinecarstereo.com/CarAu...roductID=12063

Crutchfield is also a great place to shop, but their prices are typically MSRP or close to it. Fantastic service and support, though.

JimRHIT

iTrader: (6)

Do you know the name of the vinyl used that matched the factory look so well. I am now searching for some in order to finish up an installation very similar to yours

Jim

jreiter

iTrader: (6)

Hmm... not sure. One of the shop guys went down to a local place here in my town called "Quality Fabrics." I never actually saw the brand being used, but it was the high quality vinyl they had. One of the only types that was flexible enough to *not* bunch up around the corners of the round stuff.

mumra

jreiter,

First nice selection of components You obviously know a little something about car audio. Really nice install!

I'm kind of curious to see your sub box and amps with the whole vinyl cover removed. I am still trying to get an idea of how I want to install my eD15A. I am even thinking about putting my JL's back in temporally until I build something....need to get off my lazy ***...

jreiter

iTrader: (6)

You mean you want to see the guts of it? Unfortunately that entire wooden panel is stuck on there with heavy-duty double-sided sticky tape. If I were to remove it (which we've had to do once before due to a bad RCA cable), the tape has to be cleaned off and complete re-done. Ugh. It's pretty much a semi-permanent setup.

Basically, when you remove the spare tire and the large foam blocks that hold it in place, the trunk is huge. Lots of space to work with as long as you don't mind losing the spare. We were able to follow eD's sealed box size recommendations with plenty of room to spare. (Roughly .6 cu-ft sealed. They recommend .5-1.2, if I recall.)

mumra

Thanks for the info. I really need to take the trunk apart and examine it better idea of what needs to be done I guess. I will remove the spare tire to make more room and probably go with a false floor. I think it’s interesting that you use tape and foam cubes to secure the box. I've never seen that done before, but it sounds like it’s very secure from what you have said. From the pics, it really looks like it is an oem setup. That is a look that is not often easily done.

JimRHIT

iTrader: (6)

There's a ton of room in there. I just completed my 2.5 ft^3 box for my 2 12s that are going in. Well, at least I got it glassed and bondo'd. Now I just have to get off my lazy butt and paint it.

Anyways, you have about 7.1" to work with depth wise if you want to make a "true" false floor and not lose any height. I had to raise the whole floor up 1.5" to get mine to work right.

jreiter

iTrader: (6)

Oh, no no. There are big foam blocks holding the spare in originally, to either side of the spare. When you remove the spare, you can also remove those big foam blocks and free up tons of room. We did not re-use those blocks for any sort of support.

mumra

Thanks for clearing that up. I really need to check out the trunk a little more...

jreiter

iTrader: (6)

I've had a couple of questions sent to me via PM, and since they are pretty good questions I figured I'd answer them here rather than privately via PM.

How does the screen look, and what are any PROs and CONs?

The screen looks great. It's even pretty visible in direct sunlight, although that almost never happens due to the position of the door and such. One of the major PROs of the screen is that it is almost a *perfect* fit in the 2003 cubby hole. Literally, no cutting needed. Just a bracket to hold it, or hot glue, or whatever you want to use to hold it in place. I guess there are a couple of CONs, though:

1) High price. This Alpine screen is expensive if you can't find it used. (And even then it can be pricey.)

2) Stupid safety feature on the screen's auxillary video inputs. The screens aux inputs use this idiotic hand brake+foot brake combo safety nonsense which I simply cannot fathom the usefulness of. You cannot simply ground out the foot brake lead like you do the hand brake lead on gps units and such. When wired "as instructed", you have to do some ridiculous hand+foot brake combo action to make the aux inputs go out of "safety" mode and start working. I actually had to buy a 3rd party device which simulates the required hand+foot brake action. You wire the screen's hand and foot brake leads into this. Just stupid. For some reason I can't remember the name of that device, but I'm sure someone around here knows it. It's actually a cool little unit that can do lots of different things, this Alpine trick being one of them. Oh, this is all so you can use those inputs while you are driving, which you wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

The Alpine nav unit has worked well so far, but to be honest I think my Garmin Streetpilot was much more advanced and much cooler with far more "geek" features. One thing that drives me *nuts* about the Alpine nav is how it has two different types of mapped areas: verified and unverified. The unit will *not* give you turn by turns directions through unverified areas. In an unverified area, it has all the road data right there on the screen in front of you complete with street names and everything so you can look at it and know where you are, but that's it. This has really made me angry a few times already. Here are two examples which really frustrated me:

1) My friend lives in San Jose. Huge city, right? It has all the map data for San Jose. However, my friend lives in this large residential area east of 101 off of the Yerba Buena exit. His area is unverified. So even though you're looking at it right there on the map, you can't have it route you through that area. It's just stupid.

2) Over the 4th of July vacation, my girlfriend and I went to Ashland, Oregon. Ashland and all its surface streets and everything were in there, but of course... it was unverified. So I could not use the nav unit to route me around this area which I've never been to. This was unfortunate, because was really excited to use it during that trip, but not one single town we visited was verified.

My little Garmin Streetpilot, though, had all of the same map data (both units use NavTech data), but the Garmin would route me everywhere, no problem. The only drawback to the Garmin was that it only had 128 megs of storage, so you had to plan out your trip before hand and load up the map areas into the storage card beforehand. (Since it can't hold the entire country like the Alpine can.)

Last question was regarding the 2003 model cubby hole. In order to do that retrofit in a 2004+ car, you need two parts. I ordered both through Performance Nissan, and they added them to their site under Interior:

OEM Cluster Lid 2003 350Z Non-Nav (68250CD010)
OEM Finisher for Cluster Lid 2003 350Z (68410CD000)

jreiter

iTrader: (6)

Yay! Elemental Designs liked my install so much, they wrote me up!

http://www.edesignaudio.com/edcar.htm

mumra

Nice one Joe! I like your taste in music as well

tractng

iTrader: (9)

jreiter,

NICE! I like to put the sub there. Does the mat prevent the sub from air flow? Maybe put a two inch tube (down) to help air flow?

Is it flush (floor wise) with the stock stuff? Or you had to raise it a few inces?

What size is the sub?

Thanks,
Tony