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.
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.
