Sometimes being a perfectionist is a real PITA...
Last year, I replaced the main speakers in my Jeep and re-tuned the crossover value of the tweeters. It made significant improvement to the sound quality, but I wanted to improve it further, as well as get a head unit that has integrated Bluetooth as the 2009 factory radio does not--I currently use a Bluetooth->FM transmitter, which is not optimal.
I was gifted a visa gift card for my birthday, and thought that's as good a reason as any to actually pull the trigger on a higher quality and more modern head unit. Nothing extravagant--the Jeep lives without a top, so I don't want something that screams "steal me", and given that it might be washed out by the sun a fair bit, didn't want a touchscreen anyway.
So I started researching. And researching. And researching. And realizing that if I want to do this "right", it's not a just a head unit. It's replacing the original amplifier as well. And then it spirals outward from there.
You see, the "premium" Infinity sound system in Jeeps is made to be "premium" but also as cheap as they can. It's an underpowered 8-channel amp / audio processor driving 2 ohm outputs, to 4 cabin speakers, 2 tweeters, and 2 outputs bridged to the subwoofer. The head unit (like most) is underpowered as well.
One downside of relying on the factory amp is that it relies on electrical signals from the head unit to do fade control, so I lose fade control with an aftermarket head unit running through the factory amp. The second downside of the factory amp is that it has to be driven off the head unit speaker level outputs, so it's amplifying an amplified signal. Which is not the best way to do it. It's much better to drive the amp from line level pre-amp outputs so the amp gets the cleanest possible signal.
The replacement cabin speakers are 4 ohm speakers, so they're being woefully underdriven by the OEM amp. The factory sub is 2 ohm dual voice coil. I'm not sure if it's actually being run bridged parallel across two amp outputs to 0.5 ohm, bridged serially to 1 ohm, or whether each voice coil is being directly driven by 2 ohm. But 45Wx2 driven into an 8" sub is probably not ideal either.
So if I want to actually complete a proper build, it will probably require the below:
- Replace the factory head unit.
- Replace the OEM amp with an aftermarket 5-channel amp (75Wx4 @ 4 ohm mains, 300Wx1 @ 2 ohm sub). This will help since I can drive it from the replacement head unit pre-amp outputs rather than speaker outputs (better quality), and drive the mains to a decent power level at proper impedance.
- Drive the front speakers and the tweeters off the single front channel amp outputs, which then means I'll need passive crossovers between the two. I'm not going to drop the coin on an 8-channel amp just to drive the tweeters.
- If I'm doing a full build, I might as well replace the factory tweeters anyway. They're not horrible, but the last thing I want to have is the weakest link of the entire system the bit that stares me in the face and plays the highs.
- If I'm doing a full build, that factory sub has got to go. I can find a good aftermarket with dual 4 ohm voice coils, which when run in parallel, will be able to use factory wiring and match the appropriate impedance of the new amp.
So I wanted to buy a relatively modest head unit ($139 cost at Crutchfield, a little over $200 with all wiring accessories, tax, etc). A full build, however, is probably a $350 amp, another $100 subwoofer, probably $50-70 on tweeters, a bunch of wiring/crossovers/etc, and a day or two of the car being torn apart to figure out where/how to mount everything.
And the problem is that once I buy the head unit, I'm essentially committing myself to the whole build. Long term I'm going to do the rest, because I can't leave it "not right" forever. Which means if I do it "halfway", I tear apart the entire dash to build it once, and then wait a year and tear it apart (along with the rest of the dash to get to the factory amp and wiring) again because I'll need to run the RCA pre-amp cables to the amp instead of stereo outputs to the rest of the car.
Issue is that if I do it "right" from the start, I'm not going to drop $800 right now. That's a ridiculous expense to talk myself into in order to use a $100 gift card. So it's either do it halfway now and halfway later, or do nothing now.
So I just ordered the head unit. I'm going to do it halfway. I'm sure it'll be an improvement. But my inner perfectionist is angry at myself because I know that to get it "right" is a bigger job, and one that I don't want to put off right now because all my research tells me it's necessary if I want to unlock the full potential of the build.
Am I alone in this? Or are some of you guys obsessive about these things like me such that it's painful to not go 100% when you know 100% is attainable?