[dtd]

LMAO Ok, first off. O gauge is easy, been there, done that. I ran it in my 2013 for that system. Second, yeah its not light. I can't say what it weighs, but it's heavy, and I built it as lite as I could. The convertor is just that, takes the high speaker outputs and turns them into RCA out puts. I have a four channel in 5 out though, four channels for the doors ( mids n highs ) and the fifth is for subs, or sub in my case. Connector 264 is a plug over on the passenger side just behind the shifter where all the wires for the the door speakers are. What you have is eight wires and a shield ( bare copper ) two for each door, I have plugs from some of the cars we had at work for parts, I take the plugs that match the ones in the car, one set goes to the convertor (signal output ) , goes to the trunk. Under the deck you see is where all the wiring is, and the convertor. the other one goes from the four channel amp for the doors back to the front and into the plug that feeds all the doors. Reason I,m doing this to keep my RCA,s as short as posable. The cables going back n forth are 9 wire with a shield, ninth is a remote, I just cut them off at the ends since I have the remote running on the drivers side with the power cable. You buy a 50 foot roll of it for less than 40 bucks, 18 gauge, which is more than enough to run doors. I got some picks of what's going on under it, Ill have to post here in a bit. The processor will let me tune all the channels independently from one another, SO I,ll have one set for the front door, the rears, the 6x9's in the deck, and the sub. Oh and the three switches are for the amps, each one is a remote, plus a volt meter, and a 12 volt outlet just because. I can turn each amp on n off independently from each other that way if I need to trouble shoot something ( sometimes you dont want bass blasting in your ears when your chasing an issue with a door or a 6x9. I think I covered it all, LOL. Any more questions fire away, I,ll do my best.

I think our Sony systems work pretty well, it seems you are going through an awful lot of work for small gains.

 

[metroplex]

I have to agree, the Fusion Sport's Sony system is fairly good. I have sensitive hearing, but I'm not a certified high-end audiophile. I didn't mind my SHO's stock audio system (non-Sony) same with my base Explorer XLT audio system. But the Fusion's Sony is punchy and clear especially when I replaced the bad driver's front tweeter. The active-noise cancelling and copious sound insulation makes it good even at highway speeds. My Cobalt SS Turbo came with a really good Pioneer system from the factory - but there is almost zero sound insulation in the car, coupled with a very loud LNF turbo with the HPFP barely insulated I can't hear the music clearly unless the engine is off. LOL

 

[Skipe]

I wouldn't call it small gains, but I also don't have Sony sound in my Sport, so anything is an improvement over what it has now.

 

[WhiteGhost]

Yes to much weight for my liking.

 

[Skipe]

Weighs 88 lbs all together

 

[dtd]

I wouldn't call it small gains, but I also don't have Sony sound in my Sport, so anything is an improvement over what it has now.

I have a 2019 and they came one way pretty well equipped. I do like the Sony system.

 

[Skipe]

The Sony system is nice, we,ve had more than a few in at work with them over the years, and I,ve always liked the sound they produce, but mine has the 400 package. So no Sony, and just the standard 4.2 screen. At some point I,m gonna change to sync 3, but have others things to do first.

 

[Engineer]

I wouldn't call it small gains, but I also don't have Sony sound in my Sport, so anything is an improvement over what it has now.

Yours wasn't even the "Premium Audio" system, though, was it? My wife has the "Premium Audio" Fusion sound system in her (non-FFS) Fusion, and it's pretty good. But I still think the Sony is a step up. The "Premium Audio" is a really nice system for stock though, and the Sony even more so, in my opinion. But yeah the plain old base Fusion audio is kind of weak, I used to have that in my old SE I had, and it was passable but not great.

 

[Skipe]

What mine has is nine speakers, a 6 n something and a little itty bitty tweeter in each door, plus one in the center of the dash. No 6x9's. Now the guy at work with the 16 SEL 2.0 I tune has no dash speaker, but it came with 6X9's and the amp to drive them in the trunk. Don't know what it has in the doors though, but my 13 SEL 2.0 was kinda odd I thought. Had the 6 n somethings in all the doors ,and tweeters just in the front doors. That was it, and it has the eight inch touch screen. Now what I put in my Sport yesterday were Kicker KSS670 components front n rear, and they sound awesome even with the stock system driving them. Other cool thing was the tweeters fit nicely in the stock locations after I took my Dremmel to them, just needed a bit taken off the outside so they matched the stock ones size wise. I,ve got a set of Lanzar 6x9's for the rear deck, so those and the 10 inch sub should make more a very nice system once I get it all dialed in and sounding good.

 

[Skipe]

And if your wondering why I would buy such a car, I got a hell of a deal on it. This was one we built where I work back in 2017, car only had 2800 miles on it back then. My old boss took it down to Florida where it sat a lot in a garage, drove it back up last May so I could buy it after he sold the shop. It was a sort of departing present, I only paid 10 grand for it with 17,500 miles on it. Yeah it's a salvage titled car, but I,m not worried about it. We built it and it was done right, can't say that for all the ones I,ve seen over the years. There are some really shady places building totals that have no business do it.

 

[Engineer]

And if your wondering why I would buy such a car, I got a hell of a deal on it. This was one we built where I work back in 2017, car only had 2800 miles on it back then. My old boss took it down to Florida where it sat a lot in a garage, drove it back up last May so I could buy it after he sold the shop. It was a sort of departing present, I only paid 10 grand for it with 17,500 miles on it. Yeah it's a salvage titled car, but I,m not worried about it. We built it and it was done right, can't say that for all the ones I,ve seen over the years. There are some really shady places building totals that have no business do it.

Eh I don't know about anyone else but I certainly wasn't judging. I think it's pretty cool that you were able to get a deal like that! Besides I'd say the same thing I tell everyone else about this sort of thing: It's your car, do what you want with it. It's there to contribute to your happiness. If it's doing that, I think everyone should be cheering. But yeah that's a great gift from your old boss for sure!

 

[Skipe]

I haven't had a bone stock car or truck in 20 years, can't stand stock. No mater what the manufacture doe's, there's always room for improvement, somewhere, LOL.
Boy I sure did high jack this guys thread though, LMAO

 

[Fishingbuk]

Use Tidal or Amazon HD to stream and plug it into the usb. Don’t do Bluetooth. Sounds way better 🔊

 

[BOT_ROCKET]

Use Tidal or Amazon HD to stream and plug it into the usb. Don’t do Bluetooth. Sounds way better 🔊

I don't know why I keep forgetting this recommendation, but playing playing music from a high quality source is strongly advised by the guys in the know. I'm not in the know, so I keep forgetting to try it.

 

[Skipe]

By a good quality USB flash drive, and load music on it, then plug it in. That's how i do it, I dont have any music on my phone, it wouldn,t fit, LOL. The SYNC system works great doing it that way, but I,ve used cheaper flash drives and you can hear the difference in sound quality over the better ones

 

[DarkArkAngel]

By a good quality USB flash drive, and load music on it, then plug it in. That's how i do it, I dont have any music on my phone, it wouldn,t fit, LOL. The SYNC system works great doing it that way, but I,ve used cheaper flash drives and you can hear the difference in sound quality over the better ones

Does Android Auto pull in high quality signal?

 

[Engineer]

Does Android Auto pull in high quality signal?

Just to clarify a few things here because I know a little about all of this and can hopefully help:

1. Android Auto is just a user interface really, similar to Apple Carplay. It's really more about the menu design and how the users interface with the dash, phone apps, etc.

2. The USB stick quality shouldn't really matter as far as audio quality, but there are two aspects to that:
a. If you have a bad stick/slow stick/unreliable stick, this can cause all kinds of problems with skipping, slow response, etc.
b. Sound quality absolutely WILL be impacted by how the files on the stick are encoded. So if you compare two sticks you should hear exactly the same thing, but one stick can still be substantially better. However, if they aren't encoded the same, there would be audio differences (which might explain @Skipe noting that there were some differences).

Now, you will get a large difference in audio quality between Bluetooth-connected audio vs USB-connected (from the phone or from a USB stick) audio, assuming high-quality sources in all cases. This is because the maximum data transfer speed (bits per second) of the Bluetooth specification is substantially less than the amount of data which must be transferred per second ("bandwidth") for playing a high-quality lossy-compressed audio source, such as an MP3 file.

What I usually do is just encode my own music onto a USB stick, then plug the USB stick into a USB port in the car. That way I get high quality, and don't have to physically connect my phone.

Along these lines, I'll just also mention here (although it wasn't being discussed, but it's sort of related) that the highest-quality files are generally produced by using a good encoder, and using variable bit-rate encoding. It's pretty common to see people encode 128k, 192k, 256k or even 320k mp3 files, thinking they've achieved higher quality. All this really does is use more space. If anyone wants to discuss the processing involved in all this and why what I say is true, let me know and I'd be happy to explain it more, but I'll leave that out of this thread (at least for now) because it's not directly what was asked.

Anyhow I hope this helps!

 

[BOT_ROCKET]

So where is a good place (or a few) to get music? I imagine itunes, but I don't touch anything made by apple. Amazon music is my current (and only) source of music at the moment.

 

[Engineer]

So where is a good place (or a few) to get music? I imagine itunes, but I don't touch anything made by apple. Amazon music is my current (and only) source of music at the moment.

For my own collection, I only buy CDs and pull the digital data off of them myself and do my own encoding onto the stick. I don't trust purchased downloaded music because the quality is usually terrible, plus I liked having the original CDs stored away as a backup. CD quality is very high.

The other aspect of this is that none of us know what the popular compressed audio formats will be in 10 years, or 20. But I don't care because whatever they are, if a device I want to use only supports those formats at that time, I can still use my CDs to generate high quality files in that format. But if someone buys downloaded music instead, because of the technical limitations (it gets into the psychology of how your mind processes digital audio, combined with the technical limitations of how downloaded files are encoded), they can't do that like I can. So I always buy the CDs and do my own encoding. For lots of reasons.

 

[Skipe]

I,m old school I buy CD's, rip to my desk top and then load them on a stick for the car. Have to keep in mind I have hundreds of albums and thousands of songs. I use the old Media player that Micro soft hates, LOL.I have a high end sound card that gives me a lot of control over the sound, it then goes to a 2700 watt stereo here in the room that my neighbors love I bet.