Meet Dale's partners Scirocco - and its all new surprise birthday present system upgrade.

VW Scirocco Front End

The Brief

A completely stock look interior, just an overall boost in sound quality and bass reproduction with our usual high levels of installation/fabrication.

An absolutely standard example in Viper green with a fully ticked spec list. That includes the Dynaudio system pack. Regardless of people's opinions of the Dynaudio system pack, it is an upgrade of the standard equipment, however...is it really an upgrade when we look at it from a value point of view? When a company like Dynaudio are set to a particularly small budget they can only do the best with what they have. Given that this budget would typically be sub 3 figure territory between both manufacturers then nothing that fantastic is ever going to happen. I'm a fan of Dynaudio raw drivers, as am I their home equipment and lets just say that this "option" system is anything but upto par.

VW Scirocco Garage Shot

Now, we're almost certain that every part of the problem in these cars with speaker upgrade packs are the source units, pre-equalisation plays a huge part to the detriment of the final sound, especially when you start to wind the dial round. You see, for those of you that aren't too familiar with what these systems do is they start to snip away at the frequency band as you get further up the volume. So when you are at a volume you are happy with, the midrange signal starts to fade away, the higher end of the spectrum starts to become insanely bright and bass either just straight disappears or becomes overblown and is just a nuisance.

VW Scirocco Steering Wheel

Cue the Audison Bit 10D mid level processor, the way we used this in this system is to take the factory deck speaker outputs and feed the signal into the processor at the headunit's "cleanest" point. The processor then takes this signal in, de-equalises it for the flattest output and then sends out 4v clean output to our aftermarket amplifier in this case a Hertz HCP5. Now in this car we are running an "active" front end, each tweeter and midbass on the Hertz High Energy 165 component set get their own channel of amplification. This allows the utmost control from the processor with variable slopes, independent time alignment to get over the differences in time/distance between the driver and each speaker and many more controls.

Audison DRC Mounted

The car was sound deadened to limit road noise and maximise the money spent by keeping our newly found "good sound" all within the confines of the car. As usual solid wooden baffles are fitted to house speakers to minimize any energy loss and solid wood mounting panels are built to house the equipment.

About the equipment mounting, one thing that is quite special about this installation is all of the kit fitted by us has been fitted behind the factory rear door cards without the removal of any of parts behind there, with the door cards back on you simply wouldn't know what is in the car apart from the most important part of it, GOOD SOUND.

So inside the boot compartment, we knew that there wasn't really a way we could add subwoofers to this car in such a way they couldn't be seen, not if we are serious about bass. Two custom enclosures were made, completely from composite parts. Its still impressive to ourselves when you consider these enclosures at one point just didn't exist and now there's two full blown enclosures there built to an optimum box size (.4cuft) each to house the two 8" Hertz DE200 Subwoofers. Lovely stuff.

VW Scirocco Boot Space

Some cars lend themselves to good sound through giving us a simpler time in terms of mounting equipment and the positioning of components. I'd be lying if I said the Scirocco isn't a good base for car audio, the doors are great, tweeter position isn't finite but is nicely workable on a stock upgrade, the cabin is quite small so getting pressures up isn't particularly difficult. This car, for instance, stages well from its stock locations with a wide and high stage and bass sits mid dash area whilst being powerful and still extending low from small drivers.

Not bad for a mid range system that costs less than a factory upgrade, do you agree?

Shakey - Studio Incar.