Apicella Auto Sound Demo Vehicle - 2019 Volvo S60 R Design

[JayinMI]

It checked off probably the most boxes in my requirements/wants list, which wasn't very long. List in no particular order..

. Nice car that my target market can relate to and feel comfortable in? ✔
. All black interior? ✔
. Center channel from factory? ✔
. Quality OEM radio or something that can take an aftermarket radio? ✔ (has a nice oem radio)
. Pillars/dash that give me enough room to allow me to really show off what I can do? ✔
. Trunk space that would allow me to have some fun while still allowing the trunk to be usable? Ehh, kinda. Its enough to make it work, but not as roomy as one of the other options on my list of cars
. Enough room for kick panels? ✔

Sounds like my requirements before I bought my Mazda...but I don't have Volvo money.

Looks awesome!

[JayinMI]

WSo you aren't orienting your mid/tweet vertically like it seemsd you prefer to do?

[SkizeR]

Making some progress this weekend. Yesterday after some work in the office, i managed to get the doors off, oem speakers removed and converted to CAD files for baffles, made the baffles, deadened the doors which required kevin to help remove the windows, speakers wired and installed, pillar baffles fully designed and made, grills designed, baffles installed into pillars/mold, fiberglassing on pillars started, removed the OEM sub and made a cad file to cut out an acrylic piece to fit in its place, and got said acrylic piece installed. When i read that back i almost start to feel like a real installer lol. Thats a very productive day for me considering i started at like 1pm. Today i am removing the passenger seat to sort out the OEM amplifier, which i just finished. I have one problem with what i found... The oem midrange and tweeter are on the same channel and there is what seems to be no way to run wire into the door without drilling new holes and adding my own boot. Fuck. i really didn't want to do that. I also found out the 3-speaker center channel is also only one channel. That one isn't as big of an issue, but still annoying. Up next is getting signal and speaker wire back to the Helix V12, install said V12, and run power and ground for it. Hopefully today is just as productive as yesterday, because i wont be able to work on this for a bit. very busy week ahead of me.

[SkizeR]

Keeping this here for my future reference and anyone else to use it..

2019 Volvo S60R with Harmon Kardon. Amp under passenger seat.

Not sure of polarity or response or crossovers yet

Plug with smaller wires..

Front left mid/tweeter: brown/gray+brown next to bundle of other wires

Front right mid/tweeter: brown/gray+brown isolated on other side of plug

Rear deck left: purple+orange/gray/orange

Rear deck right: brown+purple/green+purple



Plug with larger wires..

Left midbass: brown/green+yellow

Right midbass: purple+brown/yellow

Center: white+purple/green+orange

Rear left door mid and tweeter: green+purple/light purple+dark purple

Rear right door: green/light purple

Sub(?.. not sure since sub was uninstalled before this, but this wire didn't have any continuity and is thick. Sub is the only option left): purple/yellow+light purple

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[SkizeR]

57 wires so far, and not even done yet. Ugh

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[SkizeR]

Many wires have been run. What a pain in the ass..

Also, made my order today for the other system.

3 Mosconi Pro 4|10
3 Mosconi Pro 1|10
2 pairs of Focal TBM tweeters
2 pairs of Focal 3.5WM
1 pair of Focal 8WM
3 Illusion C12 slim subs

2 Focal 3.5WM and one TBM will go in the center channel. One TBM will be extra.

This system is going to be fucking nuts.

Finishing up a batch of stuff on the laser and heading home to do pictures.

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[SkizeR]

This build is starting to look like getting the "OEM Style" system installed first is the most important thing, which makes sense. Itll be much quicker, much easier, and still provide a demo vehicle to anyone who might stop by. First part to this was getting the front door speakers installed. This consists of the Audiofrog GB10, GB25, and GB60. The 2019 S60 has oem speaker locations that are pretty damn good, and partially what initially caught my eye about the car. The midbass location is standard, located in the lower corner of the doors. The midrange and tweeter are located in the top part of the door and are unobstructed. Pretty damn good speaker in most cars location regardless if OEM or not. We can go into the whats and whys once everything is installed and tuning begins. That way, i can actually show why.



Side note: It also seems like this entire build is mostly being done after hours at the shop. I was at the shop until nearly 5am I think 3 nights out of the past 5. Hell, its 4am right now. No wonder my hair is already turning gray.



That said, heres the speakers all wired up, baffles installed, deadening applied, etc.. Midrange baffles were made out of 1/4" acrylic. I took the OEM speakers and drew them up in a cad software and added the GB25 cutout and bolt pattern.Stainless steel M4 machine screws secure the GB25s to the baffle. Before the GB25 was secured, i used some ResoNix CCF Decoupler 7 to seal the driver to the baffle. ResoNix CCF Decoupler 7 was also used to seal the baffle to the door panel. The GB10 got the same treatment. OEM tweeter bracket was replicated out of acrylic. The gb10 got a light coat of black paint so you dont see the chrome ring behind the grill. Midbass drivers, same deal. OEM speakers coppied into the software and converted into baffles for the GB60's. ResoNix CCF Decoupler 7 used to seal the baffle to the door, and the GB60 to the baffle. XT30's were used on the GB10's and 25's, XT60's were used on the GB60s, which were all pulled out of my previous car. GB25 and GB10 installed into the oem locations on the door panels using all of the oem hardware. 2 layers of ResoNix CCF Decoupler 7 was used to seal the GB25 to the grill to prevent unwanted interference from all other areas in the door panel.

[SkizeR]

Fuck volvo for how they designed the inner skin and how it has to be removed. What you dont see in this photo is the fact that the window has to be removed in order to get the plastic inner door skin out to access the outer skin. I was looking into this and taking peeks at it over the course of the entire day. It was clear that the window needed to be removed, but removing it was not obvious. Not a single one of the access holes in the top of the door allow you to access the clips that hold the window in. It wasnt until kevin came in and we both looked at it hard until he figured out how to do it. Once he figured it out, it wasnt bad. But figuring it out sucked. I should probably do it again and take detailed pictures for anyone else with this car who might want to do this. Once we got the window and inner skin out, the OEM deadener was removed, and ResoNix Squares were applied. I think i used 4.5 per door (which is 4.5 square feet). Butyl rope was added to the gap between the outer skin and crash bar to help even further. 25 Blackhole tiles were added to each door before the inner skin was reinstalled (not pictured). Once that was done, the inner skin (which didnt receive any deadening since it is strong enough on its own and shaped in a way that would make it very difficult to apply effectively) was reinstalled and the GB60 baffles were installed. 2 layers of ResoNix FD2 were added around the GB60 to seal it to the door card to "couple" it to the cabin and funnel all acoustic energy through the grill and outside of the door panel instead of allowing a lot of it to get "lost" and cause problems behind the door panel.























The OEM Hardon Kardon amp is located under the passanger seat. This amp and the processing inside of it may be essential into some of the tuning i do for the 2 seat tune/setup. Regardless of what you think, Harmon has more advanced processing and upmixing going on in here than anything that is offered in the aftermarket. Might as well utilize it, while also giving me access to all speaker wires since the molex plugs on these door specifically make it seemingly impossible to run new wire. These make Mazda door molex plugs look like a walk in the park. I will most likely have to drill a hole and make another boot to get a wire to the tweeter since the oem midrange and tweeter are on the same channel with a basic passive crossover at the tweeter. At the end of the day, i have to grab 10 speaker signals from this amp. Front left and right midbass, front left and right highs (midrange and tweeter), front center channel (2 mids and a tweeter on a passive crossover), rear left and right doors (passive 2 way set up in the door), left and right rear deck speakers, and sub. The reason im deciding to grab ALL of these signals isnt because its necessary. Its because i want to, again, utilize the Harman processing to its full potential and have the option to use or not use whatever signal may or may not work. I have a reason to believe that the rear door signal and the rear deck signal are not the same. I will be evaluating the signal soon enough and post my findings. Unfortunately the Helix DSP Ultra only has 8 channels of analog inputs, so i will probably put the rear deck signal into the V Twelve so long as it is a clearly different signal than the rear door speakers. I will not only have to test for response, timing, phase, and input mixing on that channel, but also signals unrelated to music, such as back up beeps, etc.



OEM amp removed. The harness doesnt look like much.. but it will when 23 pairs of speaker wire are run to/from here, as well as 5 extra pairs of accessory power/ground wire and a single turn on wire just in case. 57 wires total. im not even sure how i fit it all, especially considering i ran out of Stinger speaker wire and had to borrow some home audio style wire from another installer i know locally (Thanks Chris). This stuff was stiff as hell, had an extra external jacket, and was a pain to work with since it was so stiff.



So, the green plugs with the harnesses shown above are the outputs of the amp that feed into the processors/amps. The amplifier outputs were then wired to the oem speaker wire harness. The 5 pairs of extra power/ground are under the carpet on the left in this picture, and the 3 extra pairs on the right are to run extra wire for the side tweeters, and the center midrange. Its not as pretty as i'd usually do it and would like it to be, but I cannot stress enough how hard that wire was to work with, let alone when there are over 20 runs of it in one bundle underneath a molded foam backed carpet.

























Spare tire lasted like 5 days lol. Fiberglassing started for the enclosure to house the 3 Illusion C12's. There were a lot of random studs protruding from the trunk floor, that's why some of the pieces of Biaxial fiberglass has holes punched in them. 2 layers of biaxial were set to cure. You can see the red lines i drew with a grease pen to mark where i am cutting the top section off. Yeah, i glassed a much larger area than i needed. Once this mold is trimmed, the sharp bits will be grinded down and many more layers of biaxial will be added. Im honestly looking at a sealed enclosure that is a bit too small for the subs, but i am still confident that they will still play down to 20hz. I have done these subs in very small enclosures before and had good luck. Great luck actually. Hopefully my own car is no different. Next up is getting the Helix V Twelve bracket installed and the amp wired up and actually have some music again.

[LBaudio]

Looking forward to final product,.... nice work as usuall!

[mauian]

Hahaha, I’m exhausted just reading about and looking at all this good work!


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