2014 Chevy Sonic RS Stereo Install

[dkurtz42]

Speaker Wire to rear speakers (back door)

So I ran my ground wire and grounded it. I have ran my power wire and have it ready to attach to the battery. I have my RCAs ran and spliced into my speaker wire (directly from HU). I had pre-run speaker wire so now I'll go into more detail about getting the speaker wire through the door harnesses and into the doors. I’ll start with the rear because they were not as bad as the front.
1. The pre-run speaker wire, (I used a high quality 14 gauge wire – probably overkill, I think 16 gauge would be fine. I would avoid 18 gauge and up if you will be using 75+ watt RMS, I don’t want to start a discussion on “minimum gauge requirements”. I’m sure you could use very very small wire and be ok in some applications.) is waiting to be run through the door harness. Starting on the front driver’s side, move your driver’s seat as far up as you can. If you haven’t already, just grab a hold of the plastic piece that runs from floor to ceiling in that pillar area (B-pillar?). Pull hard starting at either the top or bottom and you’ll be able to remove it without any problems. There is nothing to disconnect.
2. Even with pictures this next step would not be clear so I’ll describe what I did as best as possible. There is a plastic wire harness in the door post, surround by a rubber rectangular shaped seal. Use a small flat screwdriver and gently pry the seal away. The rubber, once removed will reveal a black rectangular plastic piece that is the frame of the wire harness. With the seal removed, you can pry off the rectangular piece by applying pressure with your screwdriver to the tab on top. Pull away from the car, starting with the top and then the bottom. The gray plastic harness will be what is left. It is very difficult to get to reseat properly so I’ll digress in step 3 on what to do to make sure it seats properly when you put it back together.
3. At this point, I went ahead and pre-reattached the rubber seal to the black plastic piece. Stretch the rubber all the way over the edges of the black plastic so that the edges of the black plastic are completely inside the rubber. It is very tight to work with your hands so be patient. If you don’t pull it all the way over, it won’t seal properly and there will be gaps. Once it’s fully pulled over, just let it hang on the wires.
4. Look at the top of the wire harness where you pushed down on the tab. There will be a small hole above the harness where that tab just came out of. This will be the area you push your speaker wire through. If you need help feeding it through, take a metal hanger, use electrical tape to attach your speaker wire and gently feed through. Be patient, take your time. Don’t rip the wire through, it could tear on the sharp edges of the frame. Once through, feed out just enough speaker wire to be long enough to feed through the rubber piece below into the door.
5. The rubber harness that houses all the wires transferring from the door to the B pillar is very tight. You can’t just feed your wire through. You’ll need to pull it through. I put my hand inside the speaker opening and pulled the rubber out of the seal on the door. Just enough to allow it some more flexibility. I cut a piece of wire hanger about 12 inches long. Starting inside the door I worked the wire up the rubber tube until it poked out the other side. With a few inches of wire sticking out both ends, I attached the end of the hangar to my speaker wire with electrical tape, trying to make it as thin as possible. Just pull back gently and work the speaker wire through the rubber. If it gets caught up, don’t jerk, massage the rubber where it is getting caught up and the wire will make its way through. Because the rubber is ribbed, there are lots of areas for it to catch. Again, patience so you don’t tear anything you don’t want to. As soon as the speaker wire reveals itself, pull it out about a foot or so. You can go ahead and attach your speaker connectors and let sit for now.
6. Gently manipulate the speaker wire you just ran so it is completely untwisted and as flat as possible. The goal will be for the section of wire to be flat and right where it goes above the gray plastic harness. Pull back any excess wire. First, put the rubber seal back into position into the door itself. You just have to work the rubber around the edges until its flat all the way around. Now, the rubber seal and black plastic ring should be back in one piece. All you have to do is work it back to the B pillar, slip the bottom tab in first, then slowly fit the top tab back into the B pillar hole. It will be a VERY tight fit with the speaker wire. I tried to slide the edge of the speaker wire under the plastic tab as opposed to let it sit against the sharp edge of the car just to avoid cutting the sheathing. I don’t think there will be any movement once you get this back in so I wouldn’t be worried about the sharp edge wearing into the wire. Shove the tab in as hard as possible (without cutting the wire) and you should be able to work it into place so it latches. If you see large gaps between the seal and the B pillar, you didn’t attach the seal right. It’s almost impossible to fix when it is in place, so remove the seal and frame and put together fully before trying to reattach. If you can’t get the seal flat….you are doing something wrong. It took me a while to figure it out and I was thinking there must be a special tool, but once I understood, you can get it to seal properly if you put together the right way. Now that you know the length of your speaker wire, you can pull it back and cut off any excess before where your amp will be.
TIP: If you think you can get away with smaller gauge…do it. It will make the process of running these through the doors.
Repeat for the passenger side door. I will upload a few pics later.

 

[dkurtz42]

Front Doors and Tweeters

The rear doors were not overly difficult to wire, but I will admit that going through the plastic harness is harder than just feeding through rubber tubes like a lot of cars have. I have seen pictures of many people on this forum drilling holes in the pillars, drilling out holes in the plastic harness, etc. These options would be easier, but you have a hole to contend with. The other option is to just tie into the factory speaker wire (accessible on the opposite side of where you tied in your RCA inputs). That would mean having to deal with a very slight amount of sound loss with the small gauge speaker wire.
That was the rear. Now the front was even more of a challenge. I almost gave up and tried something different.
1. My speaker wire was ready to run. I thought it would be very similar to the back, but it is not. It is more difficult. First, if you are running crossovers, you are going to have one more set of wires to contend with. First, remove the rubber seal on the door harness like before. When I tried the hangar trick, I quickly realized that there is a space in between the inside of the car and the outside of the car. This obviously must be part of the frame, but there is no way to get into this space. Once I figured that out, it literally took me several minutes just to figure out how to get the coat hanger into the hole. Starting on the driver’s side, you can take all the panels off, and half the dash and it’s still very difficult. You have to feed in the hangar and kind of guess about where the top of the plastic harness is. Be patient, you will get it eventually. Attach your wire to the hanger and try to pull through. The first problem is that the foam on the inside of the car is thick and will barely allow you to get the hangar with wire attached through. I had to cut out a tiny bit of foam with a razor blade just to start it through. Once the end of the hangar and wire is in the dead space, you are blind to what is happening, but you can quickly see that the opening above the plastic harness is slightly smaller than it was in the back. I don’t know why and I'm not exaggerating. I lost the wire 3 times pulling on it before I was finally able to finagle it through. Like I said, I almost gave up.
2. After a brief celebration, I became sad to remember that I still needed to get a positive and negative crossover wire through the hole. Instead of diving in with brute force, I thought about it for a while. Again, pissed and about to give up, I realized that I could use the old speaker wire. It is about the same gauge as the crossover wires. I clipped the end of the factory speaker wire off right at the speaker location and spliced in just the very end of the crossover so I could reuse the speaker connection. The plan was to then find the speaker wire inside the car and splice the other end in. The problem was there are 9,000,000 wires and they are all wrapped in loom. I took my time, found the wire bundle coming out of the door harness, gently cut open the look, searched for the blue and blue/brown wire, got it as separated as I could and spliced it in. I don’t know if that sounds simple enough, but I will tell you, if you are not willing to be patient and take your time to do it this wire, figure out another way to do it, or hire a pro. Maybe it is just my skill level, but this took almost an hour just to feed the wire through and splice in the crossover.
3. Feed the speaker wire through into the door now and reattached everything the same as the rear. Repeat on the other side. One caveat for me was I could not get the door harness seal to reseat properly on the passenger side due to the wire being shoved in the hole with it. I had already had enough so I took a short cut. I cut off the tab that stick into the hole above the plastic harness, got some hot glue and hot glued the seal to the door. I am ashamed of myself for doing this, but two things. #1. It still looks stock. #2. I almost lost it, so I’m glad I got something done that didn’t compromise anything worse.
4. Now to the tweeters. If you recall, I had taken apart the tweeter pillar and saved all the hardware. After looking at my tweeter, I realized it would be took big for the hardware so I audibled. Based on the actions of someone else, I took just the outside mounting frame and the tweeter itself, with wires pre-attached and hot glued it directly to the tweeter mount. The hot glue bounds within seconds and holds itself. There will be not back to the tweeter, but since it is encased into the pillar, it will be protected. You can even angle these tweeters to point towards the listeners. Once back inside the car, just drop the wires down in the corner of the car and there is actually a pretty big slot where you can just let the wire hang and then hook it in at the bottom to your crossover.

5. The driver’s side crossover ended up getting Velcro taped to the inside of the fuse panel. No wires to be seen and still easily accessible. The passenger side went inside the glove box. Some thing, no wires, easily accessible.
Pics to come later.

 

[dkurtz42]

Hatch Finishing Touches Part 1

After a few days at work, I was able to finish my hatch setup.

I wanted things to be as stealth as possible. I knew I wanted the sub mounted below the hatch floor and with the extra space surely there was a solution. The sub was popping up about an inch and pushing on the floor. I did not want to lose my spare tire though. Here is what I did.

1. I took a piece of 1" thick plywood (1/2" would have been fine.) I removed the bottom floor piece and traced the outline on my plywood. I cut out the form and then prepared where I wanted the sub and amp to be mounted.



2. I cut out the sub hole and then cut a few holes where I would run wires through. I tested to see if it would look ok. This is what I wanted it to look like.



3. I took the cutout back to the car and made sure my plan would work. I wanted the sub to sit over top the spare tire opening.



4. I wanted to mount the sub as deep as possible in this area. It ended up being able to be dropped about 2 inches. This would ensure clearance from the floor above.



5. Before I used corner brackets to attach the sub, I had some laminate floor left over from another project and pieced it together to look like this.



6. With the laminate in place, the sub mounted below the floor and the amp screwed down, I cut the edges off the factory mat and used them as trim. I also removed all the foam pieces on the back of the mat and attached them to the underside of the custom frame. See next post for how it turned out.

 

[dkurtz42]

Hatch Finishing Touches Part 2



Here is how it looked outside the car.



Here is how it looks in the car. I got all the wires hooked up. It looks awesome. I am purely an amateur when it comes to stuff like this so in my opinion, it turned out as good as I could have possibly hoped for, short of paying a professional. Between the wood and the laminate, it also created a nice 1.3" barrier from all the metal on the bottom of the car. It almost makes a sub enclosure for the air space the sub operates in. Finally, With the main floor put back in and everything closed up, the car looks 100% stock, which was my #1 goal from the beginning. I will be pulling up the floor and showing off my handiwork though just for bragging rights. I haven't seen a whole lot of laminate floor in a hatch before.



I have tuned the amp by ear a bit and its sounding much better than upon initial installation, but I'll probably turn to someone with a little more expertise to help me get it dialed in. Basically, I've got all my high pass and low pass filters off. Having tweeters plus component speakers and a sub, the channels are doing what they are intended. I have the bass turned WAY down on the HU and the crossover at about 90hz for channels, 1, 2, 3 and 4. The gains (input sensors for JL) are at about 30%. The sub's crossover is at 50hz, no filter, gain at about 45%. The way I have it set up, at low volumes, it sounds full, but doesn't pound bass. With the gain high on the sub, every unit up on the volume increase the sub by a greater margin than the mids and highs. This means that sub catches up and becomes more prominent at high volume. I want it this way so I can listen to nice full sound in normal listening conditions like with my family or friends that aren't in the mood to feel their music. When I'm in the mood, I just turn it up and get the full effect of a booming system. I do not plan to use a bass control knob.

 

[AndrewGS]

Very nice!

I love my 12" JL TW3. I'm running an XD500/3 with my JL components up front and TW3 in the back of my Suburban. Thing friggin' rocks.

I'm planning on getting an RS and will probably run an HD600/4 with a set of C5-650 components up front and a 12TW3 in a custom cargo floor.

 

[NRStanley9]

Great work. Both on the car and on the keyboard! I'm curious why you would set the crossovers at 90hz and 50hz. Setting it that way you should be eliminating all 51-89hz sounds. Why not a 90 and 90 setup? Then you can still hear the full range.

 

[mr2quick]

Excellent post, and will be definitely referencing this when it comes spring time!

 

[CDren70]

Great work. Both on the car and on the keyboard! I'm curious why you would set the crossovers at 90hz and 50hz. Setting it that way you should be eliminating all 51-89hz sounds. Why not a 90 and 90 setup? Then you can still hear the full range.

In my car I have my sub set from 63hz and down and my door speakers play from 80hz and up.
Cars have a "cabin gain" and you can get a huge hump in the sound so you can play the speakers with a gap and it will sound smoother and not peaky.