My installer stayed two and a half hours late to finish with the install (damn doors), but he didn't have time to tune it, and I suggested he leave to me, because I would probably go and change it after he spent an hour tuning it.

System is: Factory head and rears. ADS 335is fronts, JL Audio 10W3, powered by an MTX amp (5 ch). Bridged mode for front speakers, and class D amp for the sub.

Here's what I did so far...I removed the sub, and set the fronts as low as I could without causing rattling in the door panels or "break-up" from the front speakers at the loudest levels *I* am likely to listen at. I then set the sub eq to 0, and raised the sub xo to fill in the low end. After that I raised the sub eq slightly (maybe 2dB) to compensate for road noise. It seems okay, but there are stark differences in bass response depending on what I'm listening to. On some music, there is a lot of resonating on the low end (no subsonic filter here), on other's it seems fine, and occassionally it even seems a little thin.

I'm thinking I should ask them to install the remote sub control, but that only allows me to raised the EQ boost (centered around 40Hz), which I am barely using right now. If the music has a little too much boom for me, I'm left with no options!

I tried lowering the xo point on the sub, but then I'm left with an audible hole in the music, and the boom is still there! Peter Gabriel-Shaking the Tree is a good example of one of the discs where I can hear these bass irregularities.

After I tinker and listen for a few weeks, I'm going to bring it back to the installer so we can work on this, but if any of you have any ideas, please pass them along. I've tuned my home-theater/music system myself with relative success, but I really don't have enough knowledge about car acoustics to begin addressing this.

I've briefly played with the rear seats (folding them down), but that didn't seem to make a difference.

Argh!

For sure get the remote sub control installed. I had that in my last car, and it came in handy everyday. That could help a lot of your problems...

If I do have a remote sub control installed, is there a way to make it look natural on the dash? I'd like to see if I can use a factory switch, like the seat heater controls. Any info from anyone who's does this would be great.

TIA,
Shaun

like under the arm rest where the phone jack would reside. That way it's out of the way, and yet easy to adjust when necessary. I think a rotary bass knob would kind of look tacky on that great looking audi dash.

Or better yet, if you get the right head unit, a lot of head units have separate controls for the sub output built in... my old eclipse head unit had phase and output volume controls for the sub built right in... my new Kenwood takes it a step further and allows you to control the bass quality (center frequency EQ), frequency cutoff point (low-pass crossover setting), as well as relative volume to the rest of the system... all thru the head unit, from the drivers seat, with no extra rotary knobs to run cable and install.

Too bad I don't have the remote QBass capability in my PPI PC450
or else I'd have to bombard you with questions on the custom cable. :-)

-AlexD