This is a personal page about my own wheels, a device usually called the parawagon. It transports me to and from the sites. It drags my gear up the hill, does retrieves, and entertains me when I’m not flying.

The current parawagon is a 2008 model Subaru Impreza WRX-S 230. It’s pretty much stock aside from audio system. My last car ended up highly modified, but this one is a much better platform to start with.

This car is EDM and they decided to put in a full-width spare which leaves the floor about 100mm higher than the USDM version. Unfortunately it leaves just enough cargo space for one or maybe two glider bags at most… a lot less then the old red wagon could carry.
In my old ride I had a 10″ Image Dynamics IDQ10 subwoofer in a small sealed enclosure which I could easily remove if needed. In the new car that is replaced with a Dayton Reference 10″ subwoofer in a ported enclosure of 0.85ft3, ported at 30hz, built into the spare tire well. The box incorporates an amp rack for the four-channel amplifier which is too large to fit anywhere else.
After installation the floor is the same height as stock, under the stock false floor. This leaves a little more room in the cargo area than a stand-alone box would, and is also completely invisible.
The Pioneer head unit looks pretty low-key as is, and the tweeters down there on the factory kick panels should not attract much attention. They’re virtually invisible from outside the car.

The equipment list:

Zed Audio Gladius. Love this little US-made 2ch amp.
Phaze Audio MW-64 mids. Made in Germany. I had them in my old GF body Impreza due to severe limits on door depth and liked them in that car. Now I have more space, I may swap these to something with more midbass authority later. We will see.
LP 26NA tweeters. Also made in Germany. Love them.
Dayton Reference 265HO subwoofer. Made in Taiwan by Usher.
Pioneer DEH-P800PRS. All-singing, all-dancing head unit with wide range of processing options and 24-bit Burr-Brown digital-analog converters. Nervous about the pico fuse issues but what else is out there these days?
Scosche dash kit. Damn Subaru and their stupid non-standard OE HU.
ESX Q120.4 four-channel amplifier. Designed and built in the US by Steven Mantz of Zed Audio. Yes, I have a bit of a fetish about his amplifiers.

I imported all of this stuff new (except the ESX, which was used) from the USA as car audio gear is so ridiculously expensive in Taiwan.

The install:

First step was to get all the power wires pulled in place, 4ga for the 4ch in the trunk and a separate 8ga for the Gladius. I was going to do a big-three (upgrade the power and ground wires in the charging system) but found the stock wire from alternator to battery is already about 4ga. I’m going to leave it be unless I have bad headlamp dimming. The battery to ground was a wimpy 10ga however so I ran an 8ga wire in parallel with it, and that should equal 6ga in total.
16ga speaker wire is run from the trunk into the doors, and more 16ga wire from under the passenger seat to the tweeter locations in the kicks. RCA cables are all in place, a pair to the Gladius and two pairs to the trunk. Yes I think 3 channels would do fine but who knows what the future will bring.
I like to have switches for the amp remotes so I can control them independently of the HU and shut down an amp as I like. I think it makes tuning easier. Subaru thoughtfully left two blank spots for switches on the center console and I installed some very OEM-looking auxiliary foglamp switches there, and a relay to control the remote turn-on wires.

So far I’m really impressed with the build quality of the new gen Impreza vs. the original. Everything fits together much more tightly, there is much more insulation fitted as original, especially on the bulkhead.

It didn’t take long to get the harnesses spliced together and ready for install, since I don’t intend to use the internal amp. The Scoshe dash kit seems to be of good quality and was easy to assemble.

Install into the dash was similarly easy, taking the easy route of removing half the silver trim on the dash.

I got lucky and found some cable trunking that’s a perfect match for the OEM stuff in the car. It pretty much disappears.

The deck installed looks pretty inconspicuous. The last thing I want is a bling bling deck that will invite someone to break into the car.

The deck fired up and worked flawlessly, but…my Gladius died. I followed install procedure to the letter and she just died. Made scratchy musical output for a few minutes and then… died. Output mosfets were all toast and so were the driver transistors.

With the help of Rich, who now owns my old red Impreza wagon, and Steve Mantz, who built it, we diagnosed the amp as having blown all it’s output transistors and the driver transistors as well. Steve helped us choose the replacement components and suggested some other modifications while we were in there. A couple of trips to electronics alley later, some nifty soldering work from Rich, and she was up and running again.

The other bad news was that the guy who was going to build my subwoofer enclosure died. Literally. Guy just fell down dead from liver cancer.

While I was inside the dash I fitted remote 5V power outlet for my cell phone. I bought one of those cigarette lighter USB power adapters and opened it up. Fed it 12V from the accessories wire and dragged a wire over to the lighting controls panel at the left of the steering column. I drilled a tiny hole on the low side so you can’t see it from the driver’s seat, glued a 2.5 DC socket to the back and made a short cable DC to mini-USB. Now I can power my phone in the cradle there without having to drape a wire over the top of the steering column. Looks very clean. My HTC smartphone uses it’s battery up pretty fast when using the built-in GPS.

By now it’s the weekend typhoon Morakot arrived. So, we had a typhoon sitting on our head here, just dumping huge amounts of rain on us. We had about 1200mm of rain in the first 24hrs and other areas got as much 2200mm. There is flooding everywhere. The box-builder’s widow has re-opened for business already but is shut down for the weekend / duration of the typhoon. Instead, I got into the doors to mat them.

A shot of the door trim panel shows Subaru are getting serious about noise. My old GF body wagon had absolutely zero deadening, damping or decoupling material on the panels. Subaru are stepping up their game.

Inside the door there is lots of hole for access to the outer door skin, but lots of area to close up in order to properly seal the door. This is essential to prevent the energy from the back of the driver from escaping and canceling the energy from the front of the cone. This is about the least glamorous part of the install. It’s hard work cutting and trying, cutting and trying these heavy pieces of rubber sheeting, but it’s the heart of the install. Sound quality is all about accurate reproduction and balanced frequency response. The hardest frequencies to reproduce in a car are those in the midbass range, 100hz up to 500hz. That’s because the bulk of the noise the car itself makes, and also the noise from the tires on the road, other cars nearby etc., is in that range. You need either a lot of output in this range to cover that noise up, or you need to block as much of it as possible from entering the vehicle. So you have a double challenge. You have to seal as well as you can the door to help the driver make as much midbass output as possible. You also need to block those very same frequencies from passing through the door and interfering with the signal you are playing. This is why just throwing replacement speakers in a door and hoping for the best just doesn’t work.

At this point my install took a big departure from what I’d done in my old GF wagon. In that car I had followed traditional wisdom of applying damping mat to every inch of metal surface that could be reached, as long as it was later covered by trim or carpet. I had in the meantime stumbled across this site which explained that it’s only necessary to mat the center 25% of any flay panel, and that strongly contoured panels don’t need to matted at all. Net result is perhaps 20kg less weight in mat, several thousand NT$ less spent on mat, and many many hours less install time. Matting every last inch of a door for example is a huge amount of work, and as it turns out, completely unnecessary.
Don, the site owner, also sells mat, so it’s very impressive that he provides this information which effectively reduces his own potential sales by 75%. What is a great pity is that what used to be the best car audio forum on the net decided his ideas were so subversive they banned him and removed all content from the site pertaining to Don or his ideas. Any coincidence that the new owner of that forum is a large reseller of damping mat? Note also that automotive damping mat is simply rebranded industrial product designed for damping the panels of machine tools and other equipment… at a far higher retail price.

Interestingly, the door braces are now used to support and dampen the outer skin by way of these soft caulking pads. Now I know where the improved door closing feel comes from. I only had to add some damping mat between the braces there to get a nice solid thunk from the outer panel. The door photos btw show the stock Clarion drivers. These are now replaced with the Phaze Audio MW-64 units.

The next step is an isolating layer for the noise barrier that will come next. The noise barrier cannot touch the panel which is vibrating, or it render the barrier useless. A layer of 10mm closed-cell foam was cut and glued to the door panel with Super 77 adhesive. I decided to leave the waterproof membrane in there for good measure. Photographed is one of the passenger doors. Since I do not run rear-fill, I have already taken the rear speakers out of the doors and covered the holes to block noise.

Finally a layer of 3/16″ nitrile rubber sheet. This is the sound isolating barrier which cuts most of the noise coming through the door, as well as closing up all the holes in the inner panel to better seal the door space off from the car interior. It’s heavy, but the mass is what does the job. Mass-loaded vinyl is better for this application, but it isn’t available in Taiwan. The photo shows how it looks through the arm-rest opening after the trim panel is back on.

With the doors done I damped and blocked the trunk in the same way, then moved on to the subwoofer install. With the typhoon gone, the box maker was open again and I was able to get in there for a fitting / fabrication session. It took a full day of explaining and measuring, fabricating and fitting. Finally, the box and amp rack was finished and installed into the trunk.
The same shop also made some thick MDF baffles with which I mounted my MW-64 woofers into the doors, finishing the front stage install.

I installed the Q120.4 in a 3-way set-up. Channels 1&2 bridged to the subwoofer, and 3&4 running the mids. The mids sounded great. The sub was barely moving. After a lot of messing around, I wired the sub just to channel 3 and got much better output. First time I’ve seen an amp make more power from one channel than two bridged. Maybe I need to read the manual some more…

Next morning I was packed and ready for a road trip, with tunes. Bear in mind I’ve had the car for two months and only listened to the stock system for less than one minute. I was up until 1am installing the last of the system and got up at 5am to pack. I was ready for tunes. Really ready.
Firing the car up I noticed I had some alternator whine in the mids. Not too loud, and I figured I’d just have to move the RCA cables around a little until it goes away. Then I stopped for gas. As I braked for the station entrance the disc in the disc player skipped and then started making a whirring noise. I ejected the disc, put it back in. Noise still there. Tried another disc, noise still there. Tried another, noise still there, and now no sound from my amps. Disc out, tuner selected, still the noise is there. Two day road trip with no sounds and now a defective head unit.
To add insult to injury I have no warranty on this brand new deck in this country and Pioneer service here have never even heard of this model.
So I took the deck to Pioneer service in Taipei. At first there was a lot of breath drawn through teeth…
“Ooh, where did you buy that?”
“Dunno if we can fix that…”
Some soothing sounds later…
“Oh, it’s just the like the P80RS, but different”

On the bench there was no noise or any sign of trouble. The deck played perfectly. Lead tech said it was probably a power supply issue, voltage droop on the B+ line. I trust my own big-three upgrade and soldered connections, but Subaru’s wiring? Mmm.
Props to Pioneer service in Taipei. They spent at least two hours trying to replicate my problem, another hour convincing me everything was good, and wouldn’t take a cent for their time. Never mind the fact that I brought them a parallel import and they haven’t seen a dime in profit from me. Thanks guys!

Back at the ranch I ran a new 10ga wire straight from battery +ve, through a 10A fuse, to the deck harness’ own 10A fuse and power conditioner brick. Problem solved. No more noise of any kind. Every car I ever installed into could run the deck off the factory wiring harness no problem. I had the internal amp switched off and yet the P800PRS was showing signs of wanting more juice than the factory wiring could supply. I don’t know if this deck particularly thirsty, or if Subaru’s wiring is especially dodgy on this model year.
So, dedicated power supply for the deck done, I moved my RCAs a bit further away from my amp power wires and that alternator whine is history.

With advice from one of the resident ESX experts on DIYMA, I got the amplifier settings correct for the bridged operation of channels 1&2. Now I had 360W of power to the sub and plenty of output.

The P800PRS has awesome processing capabilities that only a few years ago you would an external digital signal processor to match. It is set in network mode to use four programmable filters to create a fully-active 3-way system. One pair of outputs has only the high-frequency signal for the tweeters, amplified by the Gladius (45W x 2 @ 8ohms). The next pair carries a band-passed signal for the midrange, amplified by channels 3&4 of the Q120.4 (120W x 2 @ 4ohms) and a mono low-pass signal for the subwoofer, amplified by channels 1&2 bridged (360W x 1 @ 4ohms). A full active system allows a huge range of tweaking options not possible with a passive crossover network, and none of the insertion losses from the components in a passive crossover. Win/win.

I used the auto time alignment and EQ program with the supplied microphone to do a basic crossover set up, level matching and setting of crossover points and slopes. Auto set up cannot ‘hear’ that the subwoofer is locatable at the back of the car, so I had to tweak the crossover points myself. Also, it doesn’t try to use different points and slopes left and right, though the unit is capable of this. Again I had to experiment to come up with better settings. The time alignment set up is perfect however and nothing I changed made the sound any better.
The flat response I came up with in auto-EQ didn’t please the ears too much so I picked one of the deck’s preset EQ curves which sounded the best with a range of music, kept the shape of the curve while lowering all the values to center around zero, and transferred that to a custom EQ curve. With that done I shifted to listening to pink noise centered on the various frequencies the 16-band graphic EQ and started to balance left / right on all of the 16 bands. The Pioneer can do separate left / right adjustment, which is essential to center the stereo image throughout the whole audible spectrum.

So far I’m very happy with this set up. It stages and images quite well as it is and will only improve with further tuning. Output is more than enough for D&B or rock music. So far I have only heard anything in the bodywork buzzing at absolute maximum volume, which would be intolerable inside the car for more than a minute in any case.

Again a big thank you to Don Sambrook at www.sounddeadenershowdown.com, and a big thumbs down to Ant at www.diymobileaudio.com for attempting to hide the truth in order to profit.

Maybe I will install a SWI-PS later to keep the steering wheel controls. The Pioneer isn’t so easy to control from the faceplate while on the move.

Update 12/20/09

With the audio install done I had time to move onto some handling and appearance mods.

Kartboy short-shifter and bushing kit; shorter, more positive gear changes.

ATE Racing Super Blue brake fluid. Marty had his factory brake fluid boil on him while we were out driving a pass road. I decided to upgrade before the same happened to me.

Hatch chrome trim delete. I hate the faux-luxury look the new WRX has, especially the dumb chrome trim parts. It was a pain to find paint that matched the body color, but I managed to come up with something reasonable in the end.

DIY mesh grille. I hated the original 2008 grille and the market reaction to it was so bad Subaru changed it for 2009, fitting the optional sport grilled as stock. The option grille retails for over NT$9,000 but I cooked up my own replica for about NT$1,500 in paint and mesh.

Update 2/26/10

Now at 15,000km and going stronger than ever, and there are new mods to mention.

Tires. I wore through the stock Yokohama rubber at 13k and switched to Michelin Pilot Sport 2 tires in 225/45ZR17, awesome handling, ride quality and traction.

Mapping. I installed a Stage I map from Torqued Performance via a Tactrix OpenPort 2.0 cable and Romraider software. Power and torque are improved across the board as a result of increased boost (up to 17psi from 14.5psi stock) and slightly leaner fueling (targets of 10.8 ~ 10.5:1). Power is now estimated at 260hp and torque at a whopping 330ft/lbs.

Brakes. Result of all this extra power and traction? Brakes overheating. I followed Marty’s lead and cooked the stock brake pads on exactly the same spot on the same pass road. Upgraded to Hawk HPS pads.

Update 7/6/10

At 22,000km and a few glitches showing up. My a/c compressor clutch died while making horrible noises, almost giving me a heart attack in the process. After some mild threats Subaru got me a replacement part in two days. The compressor is going too but they are going to take at least two weeks to get that part in. Downside of owning a rare car; very few parts in stock.

I have a set of new Koni shocks and strut inserts on the way, to match a set of GRF STi springs I bought from Japan. At the same time I’ve fitted a 22mm adjustable Whiteline rear sway bar and Kartboy endlinks front and rear in an effort to drastically reduce the boat-like wallowing the ‘08 model suffers from. Taiwan didn’t get any important spec changes in ‘09, just the different interior trim and dark grey wheels, so there are no nice take-off ‘09 springs to snap up. There are coilovers available locally or you can go to great lengths to import shocks and springs yourself. The official Koni dealer wanted NT$32,000 for the inserts and rear shocks. I was able to buy the Konis in the US, add a Whiteline 22mm adjustable rear sway bar and a set of Kartboy endlinks, ship the whole package here by Fedex and still pay less than that. No wonder you don’t see many Koni-equipped cars here…