Major JBL stereo upgrade but keeping stock HU

Yes the plastic might stop the water infiltration but it does very little to stop the road noise

 

So after running the speaker wires to the 4 doors ,next was finding the best accessible place for the front passive Crossovers. I mounted the rear crossovers in the rear with my amplifiers but did not have enough room left on my amp rack for another large pair of crossovers. I found that the two 3- way Focal crossovers would fit behind the lower glove box so that's where I decided to install them. Accessing them for the built in tweeter switches for tuning is as simple as opening the lower glove box then removing the Black arm coming from the strut to the right side of the glove box and then pressing slightly inward on the right side of the box to open it fully which reveals the crossovers. I decided to bolt mine to the box which leaves 4 small bolts showing when you open the glove box. You could just remove the foam factory insulation on the back side of the glovebox and use a good two face adhesive tape, but I like the mechanical attachment a little better. here are some pics of what they look like mounted.

 

So now that I had all the Kilmat applied to the 4 outer door skins, I turned my attention to sound treating the 4 inner door panels. I chose to use the Soundskins Pro for this part of the project. I carefully removed the wiring harnesses on each door and as I did I marked the hole location with a red sharpie. Next I took clear plastic sheeting and temporarily taped it to the inner door skin using blue painters tape. I used the super thin painters drop cloths from the local HD because it's very inexpensive and easy to see thru. I first tried using a thick adhesive backed clear plastic like they use for protecting new staircases but it was a bit TOO sticky and did not release easily off the Soundskins Pro after making the markings for my holes on the first door so I switched to the thin clear plastic which proved much easier to work with.

 

Then just lay out a piece of the Soundskins Pro and tape the clear plastic to the sound treatment again using the blue painters tape. The Blue tape makes it easier to work with ,make adjustments to the sheet to get it nice and flat as you work and easy to remove when done. I used a leather hole punch kit, ($10) 0n Ebay, to make the holes for the wiring harness attachment points where I traced them from the plastic. I cut the outline of the door panel last that I copied to the plastic first cutting with a utility knife thru the clear plastic and and the Soundskins Pro at the same time.

 

Then it was a matter of carefully placing the Soundskind Pro onto each inner door panel and reattaching the wiring harnesses. You can see in the pictures of the naked doors in prior pics, that there are two large openings on each of the 4 doors. I had originally planned to make a plastic panel for each of the 8 holes and attach them with nutserts, but after opening the removing the 4 door panels I noticed that none of the areas pressed to make to inner door panels had a flat area and that there were multiple depths to the panels making it impractical to fabricate and install a flat panel. So what I did instead was this. On the largest hole of each of the 4 panels I attached a piece of the 10"x16" Kilmat over that hole from the inside of the panel with the sticky side facing the inside of the car. Then when I applied the Soundskins Pro over the panel the two adhesive surfaces adhered together making a pretty Solid covering over the opening. The smaller opening on each door was small enough to not need the Kilmat applied to the inside and the Soundskins Pro by itself seemed to have enough rigidity.

 

Wiring. The next phase was running all the wiring. The rear doors are a two way component system each with a separate woofer and tweeter and the front soundstage is a true 3 - way system. Believe it or not this little Prius ate up 120" of the KnuKoncepts 14 ga speaker wire. Here are the runs. Two wires, per rear door, one for each rear door tweeter and one for each rear door woofer, from each rear door to rear of car amp rack in spare tire area. One front left channel speaker wire feed and one right front channel speaker wire feed, from glove box crossovers to rear of car to amp rack. One left tweeter in drivers side sail panel, one left mid-range in factory dash tweeter location and one left front door woofer, all to glove box crossovers. One right tweeter in passenger side sail panel , one right mid-range in factory dash tweeter location and one right front door woofer to glovebox tweeters. about 10 ' of 12 ga KnuKoncepts speaker wire from Sub woofer to amp rack. 10" speedwire from factory amp located under front passenger seat back to amp rack to feed Audiocontrol DSP. Two cables from light switch panel on dashboard by drivers side knee back to amp rack. One of the plugs will be for the remote bass knob on the sub amp and the second one is for the remote knob for the DSP.

 

Tying into the factory amp. This phase was pretty straightforward. I used 18 ga. - 9 strand Speedwire to marry the factory JVC amp to my new Audiocontrol DPS . There are 4 channels coming out of the Factory JVC amp ...1) Left Front 2) Right Front 3)Left Rear 4) Right Rear. Thats 8 wires out of 9 in the speedwire. The 9th wire is blue in color and use to run a remote turn on wire to the DSP or aftermarket amps. I did not use a remote turn on in my system because Audiocontrol amps and DSP's use a GTO (GREAT TURN ON ) system that senses the signal coming in from the speaker wires to turn on the system and by the way it works perfectly. I'm not actually sure which wire in the factory harness would be used as a remote turn on ,but some in the chat have used the cigarette lighter wiring for that purpose. Maybe someone here knows which factory wire turns on the JVC amp. I used T- connectors to temporarily tie in the speed wires until everything was hooked up correctly in case I needed to make a change, but the wiring diagram seems to be accurate. Later on when I have time I can go back and make the soldered connections. I did use crimp connectors in my door connections and have had great luck in the past with crimp connections but you just can't beat a soldered connection. I will be going back later and making those soldered connections as well. Here are the factory JVC system colors:
Left Front = + Pink
- Violet

Right Front = + Light Green
- Blue

Left Rear = + Black
- Yellow

Right Rear = + Red
- White

the front factory speaker wire are the High Frequency lines (tweeters) and the Rear wires are the low frequencies (woofers)

 

I wanted to mention that you should also do some sound treating on the door cards as well. Just some extra scraps from the Kilmat or even Soundskinns Pro works well. Also I pulled each clip from the door panel that attaches to the actual door and wrapped it in Tessa tape before re- installing. This also helps to limit rattling inside the door. If you look carefully you can see the Black Tessa Tape on each of the panels attachment clips. Looking at the front door panel you can also see why the foam speaker rings are necessary to direct the sound thru the factory 6"x9" speaker openings. Without the foam rings the sound would bounce around and get lost in the larger opening since I'm only using 6.5" speakers. Even if you were to install 6"x9" speakers back into the front I would still use the foam speaker baffles to seal the speaker to the grill.

 

I noticed that when I went to re attach the door panels that the tolerances were so close that the 1/2" Soundskins Pro was holding the panel out just a little bit making the clips want to pop back out a bit. This May also be because I closed up the openings in each of the interior door skins This was an easy fix. There is a yellow color foam piece on the back of the door card. I just took a hand saw and took 1/2" off the foam . problem solved. Now the panels fit correctly and no longer tried to Pop off. I only needed to trim the larger lower foam piece and nothing had to be trimmed on the smaller top foam.

 

Now that the door cards fit correctly and all the wiring was done it was time for speaker installation. As you may know , the front door speakers on the gen 3 Prius come from the factory with 6"x9" speakers. Mine were JVC but Non-JVC systems are the same size. If you are installing 6"x9" speakers your speaker rings will be different than mine, as I installed 6.5" Focal PS 165 V1 in all 4 doors. The front Speaker rings were fabricated by simply tracing the outside profile of the stock 6"x9" JVC speakers onto a piece of 3/4" PVC. The center cutout was made to fit the Focal 6.5 speakers. Two pieces were attached together for the front speaker rings to make a 1-1/2" thick speaker ring to mimic the factory speaker depth. The rear door Rings were fabricated the same way by tracing the Factory rear speakers but only one thickness of 3/4" was needed. The rings were attached using threaded nutserts installed in the factory speaker attachment holes that were drilled out previously. Before installing the speakers in the rings, this is where I used the IB foam speaker baffles to keep any water or moisture that makes its way inside the door off my Expensive Focal Mid Woofers. The Foam Baffles were first cut in half lengthways then simply stapled to the top of the PVC rings after they were bolted to each door. You can see the Black foam speaker baffle attached to the outer door skin behind the speaker opening

 

The PVC I used to fabricate the Speaker rings was originally White in color put I sprayed them semi-gloss Black with Rustoleum spray cans made for plastic so it would be less noticeable thru the factory speaker grill in the doors. The front speakers used the full 2" thick foam Speaker rings from Stinger road kill on the front side of the speakers The rear speakers only fit about 1" thick speaker rings. I did not use the rings designed for the back side of the speakers that came in the kit. I have seen people use wood to fabricate their speaker rings but I feel the PVC or even Acrylic if you wanted to spent the extra $$$ would work better than wood. Wood tends to absorb water and mold. How much wood do you see used in modern cars anyway ???

 

Upgrading the Factory Front Dash Tweeters to 4" Midrange speakers. Many on the chat have upgraded their front Dash tweeters to 3" or even 3.5" tweeters or coaxial speakers. I wanted to install a true 3-way system with a 6.5 Mid-Woofer in each front door, a tweeter in the sail panel and I wanted to see if I could fit a 4" Focal Mid-range in the factory dash speaker location. Turns out it does fit with some modification. If you are going to do this modification I HIGHLY recommend that you FIRST remove the dash pad from the car. Its not really that involved and it's only held in with a few small bolts. I had the dash pad out anyway when I removed the headliner to access the wiring plugs under the dash pad. Removal of the stock dash tweeters simply entails removing the 2 screws that hold in the tweeters and unplugging the speaker plug. Now for the fun part. A Dremel tool makes easy work of trimming the soft plastic. I recommend using blue painters tape around the tweeter area to protect it from scratching. I placed the 4" mid range speaker in the uncut factory opening and slowly trimming a little at a time the first one till the new 4" speaker fit correctly. I then did the same thing for the other side . IB brand 4" speaker baffles were again used under the 4" mid -range speakers but these were left in tact and not cut in half to create a "speaker box" to keep the sound from escaping down under the dash pad. The IB baffles were simply taped in place using aluminum tape but you could use a hot glue also if desired. The speakers in the photo with the green connector plugs are the factory dash tweeters that were removed for this mod. The speaker just above those in the same pic are of course the Focal 4" mid-range speakers. The middle pic is the dash tweeter opening before any cutting was done and the last pic is the installed Focal 4". The Focal component kit came with a set of inline crossovers shown in pic one, which I decided not to use. They are instead protected by the DSP built in crossover and of course the 3 way crossovers mounted in the lower glove box.

 

The next issue was how to get the sound from the 4" Mid Range speaker thru the 2" hole in the plastic factory dash speaker grill. Time for another modification. Once again the Dremel tool proved to be invaluable. First I traced the size of the hole needed onto the factory gill using a gold colored sharpie. Then the Dremel tool was used to cut out the new hole. Then Black colored Speaker fabric was attached to the factory grill using 3M Super 77 adhesive sprayed on the back side only. Use caution when spraying this adhesive it tends go go just about everywhere so use a drop cloth to protect anything you do not want covered in adhesive. Also before spraying the back side of the cloth and grill cover the opening of the hole so that adhesive does not get on the grill cloth where it will be seen from the front side. You can see in the second pic how small the factory opening is compared to the traced outline for the new Mid-Range speakers and why this particular mod was necessary. You might get away with leaving the stock grill alone for maybe a 3" speaker swap but the 4" would just have too much sound blocked. IMHO

 

After seeing the black speaker cloth installed over the stock front dash tweeter grills which now house the 4" mid range speakers back in the car, I'm thinking of picking up a second pair of stock dash tweeter grills from a junked gen 3 Prius and making the same mod but using a dark grey speaker cloth this time. I'm thinking it may blend better with the grey colored dash pad. Once I do the mod I'll post the pics of each to see what everyone thinks will look or blend better .

 

I need to make 2 corrections about this build. The first one is about the year of the project vehicle. My very first post mistakenly states that the car is a 2013. It is not . It is a 2011 gen 3 Prius Model 3 with nav. The second correction is about the Front door speaker rings in post #50. It incorrectly states that the front speaker rings are fabricated out of two pieces of 3/4" PVC for a total thickness of 1-1/2" thickness but this is incorrect. They are actually Made from one piece of 3/4" thick PVC and one piece of 1/2" thick PVC for a total thickness of 1 - 1/4" thick which is the projection into the car of the stock JVC 6"x9" speakers. I did not want anyone going by my inaccurate first measurement and making their rings too thick. I have not figured out how to edit the original post once the time has passed. Maybe someone on the chat can give me some guidance on that . Thanks Gang.

 

OK ...Tweeters. For the rear doors I simply installed the Focal tweeters in the stock upper door locations. I used a Metal 4" electrical box cover to mount the speaker. You could easily make your own mount using acrylic or PVC but I happened to have these 4" medal electrical box covers and tried them to see how they would fit. They are ridged enough for mounting these small tweeters. A 4" round box cover fit perfectly and the two holes lined up perfectly with the stock tweeter mounting holes in the door panels. A piece of Soundskins Pro was applied to the speaker side of the 4" Metal cover to reduce vibration and help seal the install. A small rubber grommet just large enough for the speaker wire to fit thru was put in the 4" cover just behind the speaker and 3 small bolts with nuts and washers finished the attachment of the speaker to the 4" metal cover. 3/4" speaker gasket tape was used to fill in the irregularities in the panel height to aid in sealing the space between the cover and the door card. The stock tweeter screws were used to re-install the new tweeter mount. In the pic you can see the 3 small nuts with washers that hold the tweeter to the 4"metal cover plate and the small rubber grommet that the Focal speaker wire runs thru.

 

Front tweeters for the 3 - way sound stage. I originally wanted to install the front tweeters in the front sail panels close to the mid range speakers that are now mounted in the old factory tweeter locations in the dash. Problem was the only flat surface large enough for a recessed installation was high up on the front sail panels way up by the sun visors. Too far away from the mid range speakers in the dash for my liking. I would up having to install them in the Focal 45 degree pods that came with the speaker kit. I tried to mount them low in the corners right up against the bottom of each sail panel but then I noticed that I could not install or remove the sail panels with the Tweeter pods that close to the sail panels so I wound up having to pull them several inches toward the rear of the car. Not exactly the look I was going for. I wanted to keep them low key and closer to the sail panels so they would not be so noticeable to prying eyes. All the other speakers except for the sub woofer are hidden behind stock speaker grills in the doors and even the sub can be hidden under the privacy shade in the trunk area. Any ideas you guys may have for front speaker placement would be appreciated. Look at the pics and tell me what you think.

 

Lastly ...the sub woofer. A great deal of consideration went into the subwoofer. Both location and construction of the enclosure. While searching forums about the Prius subwoofers I came across the NVX pre- fab sub box made to fit the gen 3 Prius models. It comes in both an amplified and non-amplified model. I knew that I would be using the Matching Audiocontrol mini amp to power whatever sub I installed so I went with the non-powered unit. I watched many videos and tutorials about building your own custom fit sub enclosure for the Prius. It looked like ALOT of work. Working with Fiberglass can be messy and time consuming. I knew that I was already in for 100 man hours of work for this install and that's before building a custom sub box. Not to mention that the smell of the fiberglass resin stays in the car for weeks because it needs to be fabricated inside the car. So I decided to take a chance and order the NVX pre-fab box from "Sonic Electronics" , The sub box arrived packaged like they expected it to go thru a war zone. Very well protected in a heavy cardboard box and lots of heavy pre formed Styrofoam. Always a good sign. The sub box comes with an NVX brand 10" subwoofer pre installed in the enclosure. I decided to immediately replace the NVX sub with a Kenwood KFC-W2509 10" sub that I had from a previous build. The Kenwood sub is slightly larger than the NVX sub so a custom Sub speaker ring had to be fabricated. I wrapped the new PVC spacer ring in grey fabric to match the speaker box. You can see in the pics that the grey carpet that comes installed on the outside of the NVX from the manufacturer matches pretty well with the Toyota factory grey interior panels so we got that going for us. If you have a different color interior than grey you will have to re-carpet the outside of the sub enclosure as I have only seen it available in grey. When the sub arrived I removed the NVX 10" sub and taped up all the openings in the box except where the sub fits in. Water was used to calculate the air space inside the box which worked out to be .7 cubic feet. The optimum specs for the Kenwood sub call for .8 cubic feet so it's pretty close. The range they give is .6-1.0 cubic feet so it should work out nicely. I will let you know how it sounds when I get the system tuned and dialed in and fire it up. The NVX sub box is normally $289 but it went on sale for $249 so I ordered one. After selling the included NVX 10" sub for $50 I would up with a nicely constructed and sturdy sub Box for only $200. I don't think that I could even purchase all the materials needed to build my own box for $200. Plus I saved a ton of time and hassle by not having to fabricate one myself.

 

Sub Enclosure cont... The NVX sub enclosure is model # NVX BOOST BE_TOY-PRIG3 NW 104V2. The 104V2 part of the model # refers to the model of the pre installed NVX subwoofer if you would like to check out the specifications of the included Subwoofer. I basically only wanted the enclosure so subwoofer specs did not matter to me. The box comes with some nice Spring post speaker terminals of good quality. I upgraded the internal speaker wire to the KnuKoncepts 12 ga. Kord speaker wire that I used to run from the sub to the amp rack. The internal wire was then sound treated with foam and Tessa tape to reduce the wire slapping around inside the box. The hand laid fiberglass box looked to be about 6-7 layers and no less than 1/4"-3/8" thick in each place I was able to measure. It has a smooth black colored exterior on the places not covered with fabric and the interior finish was also nice and smooth. I did not do any sound treatment to the interior of the sub enclosure yet. I wanted to hear it un- treated first and decide if any sound treatment is needed. The Box fits perfectly in the factory rear drivers side cubby that used to house the small storage tray. It takes up little to no space in the rear of the vehicle. A big plus in a small vehicle like a Prius. Installation is accomplished by using the supplied nuts and washers that attach to the factory hold down bolt that used to hold down the storage tray. I installed two additional threaded nutserts into the floor below the sub box for some extra attachment points. This sub enclosure with the subwoofer weighs about 20 lbs and I did not want that thing hurling thru the interior in case of an accident. I did find that because of the speaker cover that I chose to use, that I did have to trim about 3/4" off the storage tray that covers the spare tire so that the entire tray could be lifted on the left side and give access to the spare tire without having to remove the entire tray since my amp rack is located there. Secondly when I went to Install the carpeted folding storage area tray that also needed to be trimmed slightly to clear the subwoofer enclosure. Also the rear carpet pad needed to be trimmed as well. Here is a pic of the stock subwoofer grill that comes with the enclosure and fits on the NVX sub.It projects out from the enclosure less than the grill I chose to use with my Kenwood Sub. Using a grill like this may mean not having to do as much if any trimming of the storage tray and the storage cover. And yes I know that the carpet needs a good cleaning!!! See Pics.

 

And that brings us to the last item of the installation project...The amp rack and equipment. The amp rack itself is made from a 1/2" thick sheet of White PVC purchased from the local HD for about $80. I originally planned to use some of the 4'x8' sheet to fabricate the covers for the 8 openings in the door skins but like I said there was not enough of a flat surface to accomplish this. I attempted to try to run most of the wiring inside the cavity of the amp rack to keep the wiring mess to a visual minimum. I brought all the wiring for the speakers, power and remote controls in from the right side leaving some slack as I went along. My thought was to be able to lift just the left side of the tray so that I could access the spare tire. I does seem to work pretty well as you can see in the photo. A simple short piece of bungy cord will be used going from the tray up to the passenger side strut for the hatchback to keep the tray up and out of the way while removing and replacing the spare.