Focal Speaker and Amp Disaster

[James321]

I was going to make a post in another section about this 'upgrade' but I'll write a little piece here.

The fault was caused when the fitter was making a spacer ring to go between the speaker and door, he managed to drill through the canbus and short it out, this brought the ECU crashing down.

The speaker install, well the sound clarity and staging is fantastic BUT I have lost bass, quite a lot of bass. Where the old system used to rumble away but produce some deep notes, the Focal speakers have lost this, even with the bass on max it just starts to sound ok.

When I get time, I'm going to play with the amp and filters to see if I can set this up better and produce a slightly deeper sound, if not then it's going to be the Focal active sub either under the seat or mounted on the side wall of the boot.

I paid £723 for the install but the shop manager is still arguing for more money, I'd rather have the whole install removed than pay him any more money for this, it's been a real ball ache and I'm not 100% happy with the result.
I'll report back when a sub is fitted or I have it tweeted to sound better but at the moment I'm confused as to how fitting amp powered, larger speakers can lose me bass?

[Ozmosis]

Hmmm you're not having any luck with this at all mate...

I wonder if the lack of bass could be due to something simple like cross-wiring the speakers. I remember a few years ago I bought some nice Infiniti 6x9's and the bass sounded crap. I swapped the +ve and -ve wires round on one of the speakers, and all was well with the world!

But the point is, these guys have screwed the job up, taken forever to get it to this point and it's STILL not right! Outrageous!

[Paralla]

Shame man. Maybe I can help. The suggestion above is worth a try. If one of a pair of speakers has been wrongly connected it will tend to cancel out the bass of the other one. It's not super important that + goes to + and - goes to - but it is very important that both speakers in a pair are wired the same.

Play a song you a familiar with at normal listening volume. Fade all the way to the front so only the front speakers are on. listen for a bit, turn everything off then swap over the + and - of one of the front speakers at the amplifier (so you don't have to remove a door card), listen to the same song again to see if there is more or less bass than before. If there is more then leave it, if there is less, put it back to how it was before.

Do the same thing at the rear with the fader control all the way to the back.

[skydemon]

If speaker wiring is transposed ie crossed then the speaker will pull rather than push resulting in a dead flat sound. HTH


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[James321]

Shame man. Maybe I can help. The suggestion above is worth a try. If one of a pair of speakers has been wrongly connected it will tend to cancel out the bass of the other one. It's not super important that + goes to + and - goes to - but it is very important that both speakers in a pair are wired the same.

Play a song you a familiar with at normal listening volume. Fade all the way to the front so only the front speakers are on. listen for a bit, turn everything off then swap over the + and - of one of the front speakers at the amplifier (so you don't have to remove a door card), listen to the same song again to see if there is more or less bass than before. If there is more then leave it, if there is less, put it back to how it was before.

Do the same thing at the rear with the fader control all the way to the back.

I'd love to but for some reason I now no longer have a fader. I have the option to balance but the fader which usually brings up the picture of the interior of the car has gone completely from the menu. Possibly because the car now detects a fault with all the speakers so no longer produces that page.

Would an owner with Dynaudio please check on their car to see if they get this option still? I believe fitting the amp removes the facility to fade?

[Cuprabob]

I have Dynaudio and have the fader option. I remember a thread a while back with an owner not having the fader or the aux-in and it was down to coding.

[James321]

Thanks Bob, I'll have a search.

[Paralla]

Wow. They really did bugger this up.

I have Dynaudio and I have the fader.

They will have either used speaker level inputs to the new Amp or line level inputs from a 4 channel level converter. Neither if which should give you a speaker error or problems with the fader.

It should be a 4 channel Amplifier.

[James321]

They fitted the Focal FPS 4160 amp http://www.focal.com/en/amplifiers/234- ... 76049.html along with some Focal HiLo line to RCA converters http://www.focal.com/en/converter/246-f ... 76052.html

The system is definitely faulting all the speakers so I'm guessing that's why the fader function has gone missing.

Is there anything I can alter in there to bring this back, I've no idea what to do next, I certainly don't want to give them the car back, for one I haven't paid them the full (which I don't intend on doing as this has cost me too much in taxis, etc already) and two, I don't trust them to fit a stereo!

Beware all VW owners in Dubai, do not use yellow hat !!

[Paralla]

That's a nice amp and speakers, there is defo something wrong if it only sounds ok. It should sound awesome.

There's a few things that could be wrong. If they have connected the level converters to the output of the RNS head unit and disconnected the Dynaudio Amp that would give an error in the RNS and could be why you have lost the fader controls. The coding in the RNS is different depending if you have Dyunaudio fitted or not. It changes the signal level going out of the RNS. The RCA level converters have a very high input impedance and would show up as an open circuit to the RNS if the coding hasn't been changed.

The RCA level converters need to be connected to the speaker connections at the output of the Dyinaudio Amplifier under the front seat. You should have two of those level converters because they are two channels each so you need two of them to give 4 channels in total.