Dear Tesla Motor forum,
My Tesla Model S is by far the most fun car I have ever owned. It drives superb, it is faster than most other cars and it has all these great bells and whistles.
At ordering the car I knew the audio would be disappointing. Also the € 2800 audio upgrade was anything but impressive. Not enough power, resonances and the lack of punch an mid-bass performance is just not on par with the rest (and cost) of this great car. So After delivery my plan started to upgrade the audio. If the car would have been OK, I would have left it alone, but now I decided to upgrade I kind of got carried away. (I have this problem more often)
I worked (as an equipment developer) for over two decades in high end audio, owned set that cost more than a P90D with all options. Today I am more into listing to music than listening to sound. I prefer vinyl or watch movies in a full blown Atmos surround set.
My goal was to stay within the upgrade cost, as I wondered that this should be enough to get a decent quality sound system in this car.
Well I think I succeeded, the car sounds awesome. I missed two exits yesterday enjoying the music. This thread describes the component choices and work done. I built the subwoofer myself and all the car work is performed by Carsounds in Etten-Leur, The Netherlands.
The sub is a 43 liter closed enclosure that fits exactly in the trunk cavity. It house two JL audio 10” woofers. Two 10” sound tighter than one 12”. I decided to go for a closed enclosure as the bass is more controlled and punchier. You need a bit more power. A perfect tuned ported enclosure also needs to be bigger.
I think a single 10” in half the enclosure volume would have been OK as well.
The enclosure has no parallel surfaces except for the sides. This cavity in the car has a strange shape, but for a bass enclosure this is actually very positive.
In the doors the speakers are excanged by an Audison Voce K6 compo kit (with the great Voce AV1.1 tweeter) and in the back doors a Voce X6.5 coax set.
In the two gaps in the trunk left and right of the sub the two amps were placed. A 4 channel JL Audio XD400/4v2 and a mono XD600/1v2.
Why new amplifiers and not just use the original amp. This has two reasons. The non-upgrade audio set delivers probably something like 25W in 2 Ohm and 15W in 4 Ohm (the original speakers are 2 Ohm, the Audison are 4 Ohm). This just isn’t enough, even with more efficient speakers.
Another reason is that I don’t want the door speakers to produce sub-LF audio. Even though the space in the doors are big enough to do that, it makes the panels resonate even more. If you cross-over the sub at approximately 80Hz, and the doors as well, the speakers in the door have a much easier task.
Caution: There was an unforeseen issues with the sound in the rear door speakers. After a few hours of tweaking It sounded Ok but something still wasn’t right. The Voce X6.5 sounded clean but very bright with no mid-bass. A very different character than the front door set. That puzzled me for a while. When I swapped the front inputs to the 4 channel amp with the back (very easy with RCA connectors) the bright sound moved to the front……
Suddenly it became clear that the rear speakers are very equalized by the Tesla amplifier to compensate for the lack of a tweeter in these doors.
So I am no driving the rear speakers from the front signal (a simple switch setting on the XD400/4v2). Disadvantage is that the control of the front/rear from the tesla controls don’t work anymore. So I need to add another control (possible with the XD400/4v2) or hope Tesla can disable this equalization.
The two JL woofers are connected in parallel and then become a 2 Ohm load to the amplifier that delivers 600 Watt in that impedance. This is more than enough, so the amp has an easy task and doesn’t even run hand-warm. The door speakers are 4 Ohm, so the XD400/4v2 delivers a solid 75Watt per channel. After an hour of serious listening this amp runs just hand warm.
I don’t think this set will have any influence on the range. With the amps cranked to more than comfortable sound level the Iphone Remote S app showed a 300W extra energy usage so on a 2 hour trip with this volume it would limit the range by less than 3 km or 2 mile (and you would be deaf for the rest of the week). A non-issue.
An important part of the upgrade is dampening of the door panels. All three layers of the door got extra dampening treatment and a total of 30 sheets were used in the 4 doors. If you tap the door from the outside it sounds dead, the rest of the car doesn’t. An added advantage is that less noise comes in (or goes out).
Well, see below pictures for the details. I am very happy with result. Perfectly executed by Herman from Carsounds and a thru concert room in my car with enough power to throw a house party as my son tried yesterday.
The Sub:
Building pictures
My Tesla Model S is by far the most fun car I have ever owned. It drives superb, it is faster than most other cars and it has all these great bells and whistles.
At ordering the car I knew the audio would be disappointing. Also the € 2800 audio upgrade was anything but impressive. Not enough power, resonances and the lack of punch an mid-bass performance is just not on par with the rest (and cost) of this great car. So After delivery my plan started to upgrade the audio. If the car would have been OK, I would have left it alone, but now I decided to upgrade I kind of got carried away. (I have this problem more often)
I worked (as an equipment developer) for over two decades in high end audio, owned set that cost more than a P90D with all options. Today I am more into listing to music than listening to sound. I prefer vinyl or watch movies in a full blown Atmos surround set.
My goal was to stay within the upgrade cost, as I wondered that this should be enough to get a decent quality sound system in this car.
Well I think I succeeded, the car sounds awesome. I missed two exits yesterday enjoying the music. This thread describes the component choices and work done. I built the subwoofer myself and all the car work is performed by Carsounds in Etten-Leur, The Netherlands.
The sub is a 43 liter closed enclosure that fits exactly in the trunk cavity. It house two JL audio 10” woofers. Two 10” sound tighter than one 12”. I decided to go for a closed enclosure as the bass is more controlled and punchier. You need a bit more power. A perfect tuned ported enclosure also needs to be bigger.
I think a single 10” in half the enclosure volume would have been OK as well.
The enclosure has no parallel surfaces except for the sides. This cavity in the car has a strange shape, but for a bass enclosure this is actually very positive.
In the doors the speakers are excanged by an Audison Voce K6 compo kit (with the great Voce AV1.1 tweeter) and in the back doors a Voce X6.5 coax set.
In the two gaps in the trunk left and right of the sub the two amps were placed. A 4 channel JL Audio XD400/4v2 and a mono XD600/1v2.
Why new amplifiers and not just use the original amp. This has two reasons. The non-upgrade audio set delivers probably something like 25W in 2 Ohm and 15W in 4 Ohm (the original speakers are 2 Ohm, the Audison are 4 Ohm). This just isn’t enough, even with more efficient speakers.
Another reason is that I don’t want the door speakers to produce sub-LF audio. Even though the space in the doors are big enough to do that, it makes the panels resonate even more. If you cross-over the sub at approximately 80Hz, and the doors as well, the speakers in the door have a much easier task.
Caution: There was an unforeseen issues with the sound in the rear door speakers. After a few hours of tweaking It sounded Ok but something still wasn’t right. The Voce X6.5 sounded clean but very bright with no mid-bass. A very different character than the front door set. That puzzled me for a while. When I swapped the front inputs to the 4 channel amp with the back (very easy with RCA connectors) the bright sound moved to the front……
Suddenly it became clear that the rear speakers are very equalized by the Tesla amplifier to compensate for the lack of a tweeter in these doors.
So I am no driving the rear speakers from the front signal (a simple switch setting on the XD400/4v2). Disadvantage is that the control of the front/rear from the tesla controls don’t work anymore. So I need to add another control (possible with the XD400/4v2) or hope Tesla can disable this equalization.
The two JL woofers are connected in parallel and then become a 2 Ohm load to the amplifier that delivers 600 Watt in that impedance. This is more than enough, so the amp has an easy task and doesn’t even run hand-warm. The door speakers are 4 Ohm, so the XD400/4v2 delivers a solid 75Watt per channel. After an hour of serious listening this amp runs just hand warm.
I don’t think this set will have any influence on the range. With the amps cranked to more than comfortable sound level the Iphone Remote S app showed a 300W extra energy usage so on a 2 hour trip with this volume it would limit the range by less than 3 km or 2 mile (and you would be deaf for the rest of the week). A non-issue.
An important part of the upgrade is dampening of the door panels. All three layers of the door got extra dampening treatment and a total of 30 sheets were used in the 4 doors. If you tap the door from the outside it sounds dead, the rest of the car doesn’t. An added advantage is that less noise comes in (or goes out).
Well, see below pictures for the details. I am very happy with result. Perfectly executed by Herman from Carsounds and a thru concert room in my car with enough power to throw a house party as my son tried yesterday.
The Sub:
Building pictures
