2002 V40 (modest) Stereo Upgrade
#1
08-13-2013, 06:28 PM
2002 V40 (modest) Stereo Upgrade
I thought I would relate the process by which I recently upgraded the sound system in my wifes V40 in case it is helpful to other Volvo owners out there. The HU, powered, sub, and speakers in the Volvos are not always straight forward in their configuration and it took a lot of research on this site and others to figure out what I needed to do and how.
I appologize in advance for (1) the lack of pictures, I'll try to rectify that somewhat when my wife gets back into town with the camera, and (2) how wordy this is. I'm just writing it up off the top of my head as I remember it. Maybe I can edit it for clarity and brevity later...
1. Why upgrade the stereo in the first place? The HU had always been buggy since we bought the car in ~2010, but it recently decided to stop playing CDs and refusing to eject them. FYI: I'm not entering any bass contests or an audiophile or anything, so when it was functioning the stock sound system (we have the powered (slightly) sub in the trunk) was pretty adequate for us...
2. HU replacement: So when the HU finally got to the point where it was unacceptable, I just went and got the best deal I could find on a fairly inexpensive aftermarket receiver (got a Sony MEX-BT3000P, on special at Crutchfield). At this point, eleven years after the car was made, even very cheap HUs have a lot more features than the HU-615. So we wound up with line outputs for the sub, bluetooth (hands-free and streaming audio), Aux input for an ipod/iphone and some other bells and whistles that we won't use unless/until we get smart phones. I ordered it along with a wiring harness, single din pocket, and antenna adapter, and the installation went smoothly except for one problem. I wasn't clear on which wire switches on the sub (its was the blue one on my harness which was labeled power antenna which my car doesn't have...). That meant that while speaker signal was still getting to the sub, no power was getting to the built in amp. Having read several places on the internet that this often happens when the stock HU is replaced I figured it was normal, though I now suspect that if I had just connected that stupid blue wire, the stock sub would have worked (though maybe not sounded that great).
3. Rear speakers: I was amazed how good the stock front component speakers sounded with the new HU! However, the rear speakers sounded awful, once the sub wasn't providing any bass. Those stock rears (D pillar) are tiny. For many folks that's not a big deal, but it bugged me, so I got some cheap-ish aftermarket 5.25" 2-way speakers (MTX from crutchfield for $29.99) that purportedly fit. They didn't really fit... until I went after the D-pillars with some tin snips and a hammer. Replacing the rear speakers is not for the faint-of-heart, but I was on a mission! The new rear speakers improved the sound a lot, I suspect my stock speakers may have been blown or just not very compatible with my aftermarket HU because they had this background buzzing noise in addition to just sounding bad. The new speakers had none of these problems, but low frequencies were still noticeably absent from the rear channel.
4. New amp for stock sub: While I wanted the sound from the rear to be more ballanced, I didn't want to dump a lot more money into the sound system and I especially didn't want to lose storage space or add any non-stock looking elements to the cargo area. So I decided to see what I could do about getting (more) power to the stock sub. The wOOx sub looked pretty beeffy, and I've had good luck with enclosures that included passive radiators for producing decent mid-bass and nearly functional low-bass, which was really all I was going for. I figured out what the wires were at the wire harness at the subwoofer opening and decided to try adding the cheapest, lowest-power mono or bridged-two-channel amp that I could find in stock locally. This turned out to be a Kicker DX125.2 amp from Walmart. That's way more power than the stock woofer could possibly manage, but I figured I'd just hook it up and crank it down until the distortion went away.
5. Things I learned about the stock sub along the way: That little ~5-1/4 sub has dual 2-ohm voice coils. So you could run two channels at 2-ohm each, parallel at ~1-ohm total or in series at 4-ohm. The black wire on the power harness is ground, the red wire with the yellow stripe is +12V whenever the ignition is in the ACC or ON possition, and the solid red one is the accessory power from the HU (i.e. only on when the HU is switched on telling the amp to operate as well). That last one is how I figured out what the light blue wire coming out the HU and blue/white striped wire on the hire harness were for. Once I connected those and got +12V with the HU on and ~0V with it turned off at the harness in the cargo area. I realized how easy the install was going to be and went Amp shopping.
6. Why I didn't run a low guage wire directly from the battery: You experienced amp installers may think I'm crazy for just using the stock harness to power the amp, but look at it this way: I'm using a 125 W rms (bridged @ 4 ohm) amp with the gain cranked down so that I'm MAYBE getting 40 W to that sub, this maybe more than the stock amp pulled (I've seen ~6-10 W thrown around various forums), but I'm pretty sure the original 16 AWG wire is up to the task, plus it is already fused at the fuse box just behind the battery.
7. RCA cables: The stock sub has a harness that delivers speaker level inputs, so that would have been an option, but I decided I wanted to be able to control the sub levels a bit more using the HU, so I used the line (low) level RCA output. It's a good thing I made this decision, because I imediately went out and bought an amp that only had RCA inputs so speaker level input would have required an adapter anyway... So, since I had power straight off the harness, all I had to do was tuck an RCA cable from the HU all the way back to the cargo area. This was much easier than I thought it would be and only took about 15-20 minutes.
8. Amp placement: I spent an hour or so looking around online to see if any comercially available amps would fit on the back of the wOOx box. There are a few out there that come close, but I'm not entirely certain. Some of them are only about $30-$40, so if someone wants to get one and stick to the back of the stock enclosure with the stock amp removed, I bet a lot of people would be interested (maybe just me -idk). Ultimately, I just decided to stick the amp in the spare tire area just forward of the spare tire. I tried a few other locations, but that seems to work the best so far. At the moment it isn't screwed to anything, but held in place with sticky back velcro. I may update this if I find a better place/attachment point for it.
9. Stock amp dismantling and subwoofer speaker wiring: I took the amp off the back of the enclosure thinking I might be able to stick a new amp in the space, but it is really a tiny space, so ultimately, I just filled in all of the screw holes with silicone glue and put the speaker and radiator back in the enclosure with just the speaker leads sticking out the back. I don't have much experience with dual voice coil woofers, but I read somewhere that if the signal from two different channels are different, the sound can be distorted. So, I wired up the speakers in series and hooked them up to the amp in bridged mode. This seems to work so far, but I may play around with it down the road.
10. Amp/HU tuning: I put the amp in low-pass filter mode with bass boost on and the gain turned all the way down for the first switched-on test. Nothing blew up when I cranked the ignition. Nothing blew up when I switched on the HU, but the amp did turn on
I turned the volume up to about as high as it will ever be and gradually began cranking up the gain on the amp. I was very impressed by how much travel the passive radiator can undergo before that little sub starts to distort!! At high volume, I could crank the gain up to about 1/3 max before the low bass tones started to cause distortion. I cranked it back just a little extra and then turned the volume down to a more normal level and started to adjust the SW level and EQ on the HU. I couldn't believe it. It actually sounded good!! I had sort of assumed that this project would eventually escalte to my trying to wedge a free-air or custom-enclosed 8"-12" sub into that space in the cargo area before the sound was actually decent, but it looks like I'll be spared 
Bless you, if you managed to read that whole thing. Post up, if you have any questions, and I'll try to update the thread with some pics in a few days.
I appologize in advance for (1) the lack of pictures, I'll try to rectify that somewhat when my wife gets back into town with the camera, and (2) how wordy this is. I'm just writing it up off the top of my head as I remember it. Maybe I can edit it for clarity and brevity later...
1. Why upgrade the stereo in the first place? The HU had always been buggy since we bought the car in ~2010, but it recently decided to stop playing CDs and refusing to eject them. FYI: I'm not entering any bass contests or an audiophile or anything, so when it was functioning the stock sound system (we have the powered (slightly) sub in the trunk) was pretty adequate for us...
2. HU replacement: So when the HU finally got to the point where it was unacceptable, I just went and got the best deal I could find on a fairly inexpensive aftermarket receiver (got a Sony MEX-BT3000P, on special at Crutchfield). At this point, eleven years after the car was made, even very cheap HUs have a lot more features than the HU-615. So we wound up with line outputs for the sub, bluetooth (hands-free and streaming audio), Aux input for an ipod/iphone and some other bells and whistles that we won't use unless/until we get smart phones. I ordered it along with a wiring harness, single din pocket, and antenna adapter, and the installation went smoothly except for one problem. I wasn't clear on which wire switches on the sub (its was the blue one on my harness which was labeled power antenna which my car doesn't have...). That meant that while speaker signal was still getting to the sub, no power was getting to the built in amp. Having read several places on the internet that this often happens when the stock HU is replaced I figured it was normal, though I now suspect that if I had just connected that stupid blue wire, the stock sub would have worked (though maybe not sounded that great).
3. Rear speakers: I was amazed how good the stock front component speakers sounded with the new HU! However, the rear speakers sounded awful, once the sub wasn't providing any bass. Those stock rears (D pillar) are tiny. For many folks that's not a big deal, but it bugged me, so I got some cheap-ish aftermarket 5.25" 2-way speakers (MTX from crutchfield for $29.99) that purportedly fit. They didn't really fit... until I went after the D-pillars with some tin snips and a hammer. Replacing the rear speakers is not for the faint-of-heart, but I was on a mission! The new rear speakers improved the sound a lot, I suspect my stock speakers may have been blown or just not very compatible with my aftermarket HU because they had this background buzzing noise in addition to just sounding bad. The new speakers had none of these problems, but low frequencies were still noticeably absent from the rear channel.
4. New amp for stock sub: While I wanted the sound from the rear to be more ballanced, I didn't want to dump a lot more money into the sound system and I especially didn't want to lose storage space or add any non-stock looking elements to the cargo area. So I decided to see what I could do about getting (more) power to the stock sub. The wOOx sub looked pretty beeffy, and I've had good luck with enclosures that included passive radiators for producing decent mid-bass and nearly functional low-bass, which was really all I was going for. I figured out what the wires were at the wire harness at the subwoofer opening and decided to try adding the cheapest, lowest-power mono or bridged-two-channel amp that I could find in stock locally. This turned out to be a Kicker DX125.2 amp from Walmart. That's way more power than the stock woofer could possibly manage, but I figured I'd just hook it up and crank it down until the distortion went away.
5. Things I learned about the stock sub along the way: That little ~5-1/4 sub has dual 2-ohm voice coils. So you could run two channels at 2-ohm each, parallel at ~1-ohm total or in series at 4-ohm. The black wire on the power harness is ground, the red wire with the yellow stripe is +12V whenever the ignition is in the ACC or ON possition, and the solid red one is the accessory power from the HU (i.e. only on when the HU is switched on telling the amp to operate as well). That last one is how I figured out what the light blue wire coming out the HU and blue/white striped wire on the hire harness were for. Once I connected those and got +12V with the HU on and ~0V with it turned off at the harness in the cargo area. I realized how easy the install was going to be and went Amp shopping.
6. Why I didn't run a low guage wire directly from the battery: You experienced amp installers may think I'm crazy for just using the stock harness to power the amp, but look at it this way: I'm using a 125 W rms (bridged @ 4 ohm) amp with the gain cranked down so that I'm MAYBE getting 40 W to that sub, this maybe more than the stock amp pulled (I've seen ~6-10 W thrown around various forums), but I'm pretty sure the original 16 AWG wire is up to the task, plus it is already fused at the fuse box just behind the battery.
7. RCA cables: The stock sub has a harness that delivers speaker level inputs, so that would have been an option, but I decided I wanted to be able to control the sub levels a bit more using the HU, so I used the line (low) level RCA output. It's a good thing I made this decision, because I imediately went out and bought an amp that only had RCA inputs so speaker level input would have required an adapter anyway... So, since I had power straight off the harness, all I had to do was tuck an RCA cable from the HU all the way back to the cargo area. This was much easier than I thought it would be and only took about 15-20 minutes.
8. Amp placement: I spent an hour or so looking around online to see if any comercially available amps would fit on the back of the wOOx box. There are a few out there that come close, but I'm not entirely certain. Some of them are only about $30-$40, so if someone wants to get one and stick to the back of the stock enclosure with the stock amp removed, I bet a lot of people would be interested (maybe just me -idk). Ultimately, I just decided to stick the amp in the spare tire area just forward of the spare tire. I tried a few other locations, but that seems to work the best so far. At the moment it isn't screwed to anything, but held in place with sticky back velcro. I may update this if I find a better place/attachment point for it.
9. Stock amp dismantling and subwoofer speaker wiring: I took the amp off the back of the enclosure thinking I might be able to stick a new amp in the space, but it is really a tiny space, so ultimately, I just filled in all of the screw holes with silicone glue and put the speaker and radiator back in the enclosure with just the speaker leads sticking out the back. I don't have much experience with dual voice coil woofers, but I read somewhere that if the signal from two different channels are different, the sound can be distorted. So, I wired up the speakers in series and hooked them up to the amp in bridged mode. This seems to work so far, but I may play around with it down the road.
10. Amp/HU tuning: I put the amp in low-pass filter mode with bass boost on and the gain turned all the way down for the first switched-on test. Nothing blew up when I cranked the ignition. Nothing blew up when I switched on the HU, but the amp did turn on
I turned the volume up to about as high as it will ever be and gradually began cranking up the gain on the amp. I was very impressed by how much travel the passive radiator can undergo before that little sub starts to distort!! At high volume, I could crank the gain up to about 1/3 max before the low bass tones started to cause distortion. I cranked it back just a little extra and then turned the volume down to a more normal level and started to adjust the SW level and EQ on the HU. I couldn't believe it. It actually sounded good!! I had sort of assumed that this project would eventually escalte to my trying to wedge a free-air or custom-enclosed 8"-12" sub into that space in the cargo area before the sound was actually decent, but it looks like I'll be spared Bless you, if you managed to read that whole thing. Post up, if you have any questions, and I'll try to update the thread with some pics in a few days.
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TroyJones (09-26-2023)
#2
09-27-2013, 09:03 AM
no sound
Hi Jhelm
i have just read your post and have spent the morning doing the same as you with the rear speakers,hacking cutting etc,got my 5.25 inch 2 ways in...
but alas no sound...any idea why? i got positves correct but was wondering if it maybe has an in line crossover reducing my signal.?
Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated
I do have a sub in the back and the removed speakers are philips if that helps!
Its also a 2000 model
Many thanks
i have just read your post and have spent the morning doing the same as you with the rear speakers,hacking cutting etc,got my 5.25 inch 2 ways in...
but alas no sound...any idea why? i got positves correct but was wondering if it maybe has an in line crossover reducing my signal.?
Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated
I do have a sub in the back and the removed speakers are philips if that helps!
Its also a 2000 model
Many thanks
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