Honda Build Up : the sound system

My Honda EG9 has been back with me for about a week. Total build up cost amounted to roughly RM3,000. This includes inspection of the welds, rewelding work and installation of a manual gear box in place of the automatic box.

The results include better ride comfortability and fuel efficiency. Not to mention the car having better pick-up and top speed. For a drive around car it has a lot to offer under the hood. Too much to offer in fact.

I've finally had the time to fit in my sound-system which is the topic of this posting today.

Essentially I am using a MoHawk Component Sound system for the front portion with a (cheap) pre-amp and 2 SONY 2-Way power amps. One amp is directly routed to my 10 inch SONY sub-woofer and the other to the MoHawk system. My head unit is a SONY.

All the sound system came from my previous car the Malaysian made Kenari - the Malaysian version of the Japanese Daihatsu MOVE. It was suited for that car but as I discovered may not be well suited to the Honda.

In my Kenari the sound system was super-fly but in the Honda it is lacking. Basically the shape of the car is problem. The Honda is a saloon car, rectangular in shape. The Kenari was boxy-shaped and smaller in size.

In a saloon car, sound travels further and you will notice that there would be a "dead-sound" area down the middle of the car. "Dead-sound" is a funny thing. You hear sound but its mono in a stereo environment. Hard to explain, you need to hear it to know what it means.

Basically what happens is that the right and left speakers cancel each other out towards the middle in my Honda. One solution is to have a middle mid-range speaker situated in the middle of the dash-board. This would feed the empty middle area with sound. This middle speaker would also be a magnet for car-thieves.

Another solution is to have a head unit with sound-staging capabilities. SONY has this technology but it can cost you. If you just want to listen to music on your way to work, the extra cost is not really viable. So rather then changing my head unit, I might add on a middle speaker but I need to hide it somewhere in the middle area of my dashboard.

But fitting in an extra speaker may mean I need to get a better pre-amp or a 4 way power amp. I have been looking around for the SONY 444W 4-way power amp. This is an affordable unit from SONY and hard to come by. Practically every other audio-phile knows this unit is worth the money which explains why finding one in my city is akin to finding the Malaysian Bigfoot.

My 10 inch SONY sub woofer is also causing problems. It's not powerful enough. What was good enough for my Kenari is now not sufficient with my Honda. I may need to upgrade it to a 12 inch. Either that or I merely up the bass volume on both my head unit and the pre-amp. I like music where you can "feel" the bass thumping away.

In my next phase I will be fitting in some electronics to give me better readings from the engine. Will update you all on that once I get them fitted in.