BT Stiffening Plate: The Verdict

With this thought in mind, I plan to remove my subwoofer and later take the car out for some stress testing, slalom testing, and curve sliding. Don't know when that will be. My wife returns to work in two days, and I get four more after that, so it will probably be during that time.

~ dan ~

 

The more I drive the car, the more I think the plate helps overall driving, and enables the car to dampen more weird forces than it could before. I drove the 25 miles to Fremont and back to visit a hell-hole of a store called Fry's; hit 88mph (and couldn't stop thinking about Doc Brown or this forum) and it was remarkably smooth. The thing is I can't be sure it's the plate and not the new tires, etc. Or maybe that I just forgot how stable the car feels at 90mph.

Either way, it seemed to be better planted on the road.

~ dan ~

 

It's not so tough, really. But you also want to at least replace the tweeters in the front of the car; without it, a subwoofer only adds muddiness to the sound. Trust me; you'll be glad you did this.

For the sub, other than a sub, sub amp, and sub box, you need five things:

(1) A good source of switched +12V (you can get this just about anywhere; it doesn't need to have any sort of current capacity as this only signals your subwoofer amplifier to switch on).

(2) Get comfortable with tapping the +12V constant that comes straight from the battery, and put a fusible link in your wire (the link is, as you'll see, more appropriate to the safety of the vehicle than the fuse built into your subwoofer amplifier would be).

(3) Find a convenient, elegant place to run a ground for the amp (don't just use a second wire back to the battery. That's just not how we roll).

(4) Decide on a signal wire to steal from the outbound (speaker level) side of the amp (I find the best choice is to borrow signal from output to the front door speakers like I did using wire taps, six-inch lead wires, and RCA female plugs from Radio Shack or wherever. This is a bit of a quality sacrifice but it is more convenient and will go unnoticed because it is only feeding a subwoofer. Then you can fade the sound stage a bit to the rear if the subwoofer is a bit too peppy and it sounds great).

(5) Be comfortable taking trim pieces out of the car to run your signal wires (if you don't do this, you're going to have a nasty, visible set of wires running from the area of the stock amplifier to your subwoofer amplifier. That's how I tested my setup. I left it that way for weeks and it was embarrassing because it wasn't hidden).

If you're OK with doing this sort of stuff, then that's great. If you're not, I'd be a bit worried about going to an audio shop as you can tell from reading forums here that they may or may not know what's best for your car.

~ dan ~

Oh, and I forgot to mention: BATTERY CAPACITOR

The car's electrical system errs on the paranoid; you want to smooth out the current draw as much as possible to run your amp. Get a capacitor that's got the capacitance your amp requires for optimum performance.

If you'd like to see a couple pictures of my setups, just ask and I'll go out and take them.

 

It's true that you don't need a capacitor. I have been running my setups without it for years. But occasionally my setup would upset the 2001 Prius' electrical system, causing it to display the triangle and the exclamation car and stop the gas engine. The solution was to disconnect the subwoofer from its power source for a few minutes with the car off, then power it again and turn the car on.

I suggest a battery cap only because of experience, not because of numbers.

~ dan ~