Toyota Blade Full System Upgrade

The Toyota Blade, in simple terms a Corolla body with a 3.5L V6 under the hood

While the Toyota Blade is something a little different, we were excited to develop this upgrade as an option that would suit most Toyota vehicles with just a little tweaking. The brief on this specific car was to achieve the same level of audio quality in the customer’s previous Blade, which had a system installed in Japan and that we hadn’t listened to. No pressure! We were asked to leave out a subwoofer from this installation for now, to just get the speakers and head unit sounding amazing and then go further if necessary down the line.

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The OEM blade speaker on the top, the new SONY ES on the bottom, and for a laugh, a Porsche 3” Midrange on the left. See the difference in magnet size?

The Before:

Not quite spec’ed the same as the Corolla was here, the Blade has a head unit with a screen that has built-in (Japanese) navigation, factory rear camera, and AM/FM radio (only on Japanese frequencies). It’s a little different to the standard double-DIN radio that Toyota used here for years, but only slightly.

Toyota have never been known for their speaker quality, but these were some of the worst we’ve ever seen. The front doors had 6” woofers and separate tweeters, and the rears were a 6” full-range driver. The magnets on the back were so small and weak they wouldn’t pick up a screw sitting on the bench – not a great recipe for audiophile sound.

The Components:

A JDM car deserves JDM gear. We’re very much in love with the Sony ES range of speakers, they’re brilliant for their price point and really well built and designed. Sony ES 6” Components for the front, to take advantage of the OEM tweeter location, and Sony ES coaxials in the back. Our source? That’s right, a Sony XAV-9000ES 7” head unit. Our DSP and amplifier? We went for an ETON 7.1 Stealth. Sony doesn’t have a DSP out currently, and since we only needed 6  channels (4 front, 2 rear) the Eton is perfect. We could have gone for a separate DSP/Amplifier setup but given the cabin size of the Blade, space is at a premium.

The Install:

Not only were the original speakers about as high-quality as airplane headphones, they were riveted into the door panels to make removal as difficult as possible. We drilled out the rivets, enlarged the holes and added rivnuts in their place, allowing us to bolt the new speaker adapters to the door for a strong but serviceable connection. We used pre-fabricated speaker adapters for all the 6” drivers, since they were readily available and let us cut down our install time. The tweeters were less easy, the new ES tweeters being too bulky to fit in the original mounts. We ended up mounting the new tweeters in from the back with an automotive epoxy, allowing us to keep the original tweeter mounts in case the car ever needed to go back to stock.

We had clearance from the customer to mount the ETON DSP under the passenger seat, so we made up a board to sit under the carpet and the ETON mounted to that. The biggest benefit of having the DSP/Amplifier all in one is the cabling is all run to one spot. We plugged everything into the ETON and moved outwards from there, the speaker outputs and power cabling going down the door sill and the RCA inputs going up the centre console (to keep them away from noise-inducing harnesses).

We did need to add a pair of wires into each door for the new tweeters, but for the 6”s we had plug-in adapters to suit the Toyota speaker plugs, no additional wiring needed.

Once the audio was all finished, we started the head unit. Not much detail to go into here, other than we were able to use the original GPS antenna since the connection was the same as the Sony. We programmed in the steering wheel controls, checked the microphone worked and did a brief balance and fader check to make sure everything was plugged in right, then it was time for…

The Tune:

We’ve played around a bit with the ETON Stealth DSP software now since Matt’s running it in his car. The thing that we like the most about it is that it doesn’t try to over-deliver on anything. The filtering and EQ is robust and easy to set, the time correction is intuitive and the wireless connection is reliable and quick. Being able to make on-the-fly adjustments in the app is a fantastic feature, instead of needing to set up the laptop every time the customer wants a bit more bass. We tuned to an acoustically neutral sound, then adjusted the time correction to get the staging perfect. We ended up adding a touch more bass in the EQ to cover for the lack of sub, but this will likely get stripped out in a retune when the speakers are run in.

The Next Step:

Head unit, DSP, Premium speakers, where to from here? Well the sky’s the limit really, but beyond this point some compromises on the vehicle’s originality would need to be made. Adding a midrange and moving the tweeters to up on the dash would further improve the staging, and the lack of sub results in the bass being heard, rather than felt. Sound deadening is always an upgrade as well, although it might end up adding more weight than is in the car already.

Final Thoughts:

The grin on our customer’s face as we demonstrated the system is why we do this, and being able to work around the challenges that these JDM cars present is always rewarding. We’d love to see more of these unique JDM vehicles through our doors for audio upgrades, and the Sony ES will be a go-to for us now we know the results we can get out of them.

Porsche Macan "Stage 1" Audio Upgrade

We’ve had hundreds of Macans through over the years, and without fail we find that the base audio package is severely lacking, and brings down enjoyment of what is otherwise a brilliant car. On the other hand, we also understand that it can be hard to justify spending thousands just on car audio when all you need is just a bit more punch and clarity. This is why we’ve developed our “Stage 1” upgrade for the current model Macan, which gives a huge upgrade at a fraction of the cost of the BOSE or Burmeister factory options.

The Before:

The Macan is equipped with 7.5” bass drivers and 4” midrange in each door, and a 1” tweeter at each corner of the dashboard. There’s no centre speaker in the base audio package, and the rear doors have the same 7.4” bass driver and tweeter, with no midrange. There’s no factory amplifier in the vehicle, but the bass drivers run on their own separate channels out of the OEM head unit. This means our starting point is a 6 channel, 10 speaker system.

The Components:

We have prioritised bang-for-buck quality and straightforward fitment with our speaker choices, with minimum compromise on audio quality. The front bass drivers have been replaced with 8” Audison Prima woofers, which have a frequency response all the way down to 35Hz. Our mid-range has been swapped out with the Audison 4” Prima drivers, which are one of the cleanest 4” speakers we’ve ever used. The tweeters are the Audison 1” Prima tweeter, which has an excellent off-axis response, which means we’ll get tons of highs both playing off the glass and the sides of the tweeters. Staying brand-consistent means that the components are already designed to work together tonally, which means our final tune is simpler.

Size matters for a setup like this, so we’ve gone for the ETON Micro 250.4. It gives a ton of power relative to it’s size, and gives us as much tunability as we need. The low(er) powered channels 1&2 will be wired to our mids and tweeters, and the high power channels 3&4 are our bass channels.

We’re leaving the rear speakers as they are on this one. While all speakers would benefit from an upgrade, the rear speakers in nearly all audio systems are just for surround fill. This means that the detail and quality from the rears is far less important than the fronts, and in our testing the OEM speakers are fine for this purpose.

The Install:

The first thing we did was fabricate our speaker adaptors for the 8” bass drivers. Thanks to the Porshe speaker already having a larger-than-necessary enclosure, we were able to trace the footprint onto some marine plywood and manufacture some plates. We then primed the plates with a waterproof sealer and painted them black so that nothing aftermarket is visible through the OEM speaker grille. We’ve replaced the original speaker bolts with longer, countersunk ones for a fully flush look, and removed the original speaker plug to give us a serviceable connection to the door wiring.

The midranges (no photos sorry) fit neatly onto the back of the door panel with minimal modification, but we did seal up the corners of the speaker to ensure it wouldn’t vibrate or rattle. The tweeters were a direct fit into the orignal locations, and the original spring clamps held our new tweeter tightly into the dashboard while still keeping enough clearance for the factory grille to clip back on over the top. The crossovers were wrapped tightly in foam to prevent rattles, and securely fastened into the sub-dash.

The amp presented an interesting challenge, as there’s next to no cavities in the Macan dashboard that we could hide the amp while still providing us access to tune it. Our solution was to custom-fabricate a mounting plate that we could hide in behind the OEM screen. Our only permanent modification to the car was the two holes that we drilled through the sub-dash to pass these bolts through, and once the screen goes in it’s impossible to see. The hole behind the screen gives us access to the ETON tuning controls without needing to remove the entire dashboard.

Lastly, we sourced a harness to connect directly to the radio wiring and split off our speaker wires in and out. By doing everything at the radio with a plug-in harness, we were able to build the loom outside the vehicle then just drop it in.

Our real-time analyser displaying the frequency response in the vehicle, with the spike on the left representing our bass-biased tune.

The Tune:

Usually, the aim for us is to produce a flat frequency response graph, where on our test noise all frequencies are equally represented. As this car doesn’t have a subwoofer, we’ve slightly upped the lower frequencies in order to give a punchy (yet still accurate) sounding system. In our testing this did result in slightly boomy bass on certain tracks, but the OEM bass control in the head unit gives enough adjustability that this can be changed per-song if necessary.

The Next Step:

This is a fantastic entry-level upgrade that would keep nearly any driver happy for years to come. That being said, there’s also still plenty of room to move for an audiophile. Adding a digital signal processor (DSP) would give a massive step up in quality, as it would allow de-equalisation of the PCM outputs, as well as time correction and per-channel EQ curves. Adding a subwoofer in the back would move some of the very bottom-end away from the front speakers and give true thumping sub-bass. Replacing and amplifying the rears would give even better surround-sound, and improve the quality for any rear passengers. Adding sound deadening in the door and door panel would help reduce resonance and further improve the quality of the sound.

Final Thoughts:

We’re thrilled with how this system came out, and will be recommending this package as our go-to for anyone looking for “just a bit more” out of their Macan audio system. It’s completely reversible and won’t affect the Porsche factory warranty, which is absolutely crucial to us. The soundstage is excellent for a non-DSP system, but we still have options to further improve on this setup and achieve absolute audio perfection.