For over 34 years Ray Smith has been at the forefront of the in-car electronics industry. Our website "mobiletoys.co.uk" was formed about eight years ago and this is our first Blog, we hope you like it.
Quality of service and attention to detail are what makes Ray Smith Car Hi-Fi stand out from the pack.
We started work on our latest demo car in June 05 and so far we have managed to shoe horn over £10,000 (Yes Ten Thousand Pounds) worth of extra toys into it.
Over the years we have built many demo cars, some quite extravagant. In fact our VW Sharan with £7k’s worth of Pioneer Audio/Visual kit is stunning, and our Pioneer Mini is a head turner but when it came to Ray’s own car it needed to be something completely different.
THE CAR
In March 05, Ray took delivery of his new Audi A4 Avant 3litre Turbo diesel S-Line. This thing was already fully loaded with all the toys but that was half the challenge.
THE PROBLEM
Modern cars need for nothing, so what do you do when your business depends on upgrading the standard vehicle equipment? Who in their right mind is going to rip the Audi "Bose" audio system out? What could be better than the factory fit radio with its steering wheel controls and dash board integration?
The truth is that although Audi have designed the sound system around the car, they have also built the components down to a price and in my opinion, unfairly tried to prevent further upgrade or modification by overcomplicating the vehicle wiring and integrating the controls into the steering wheel etc. The low power paper coned speakers and the tiny audio amplifier in the rear side panel driving what they laughably call a subwoofer is just a joke however the challenge was to produce something so different without damaging the fabric of the car. So here is how we did it:
THE SOLUTION
To be fair to Audi the sound system in this car was not bad. As an Audi option at £465 for the Symphony II radio system it should be good, however after only a few days with the car my journey to and from work in Edinburgh from my home in Dunbar (about 80miles a day) was frustrated by the FM signal fading to a hiss every time I passed the town of Haddington, and my favourite program (Real radio) would fade out usually at a crucial bit or even worse during one of my adverts on the radio.
So my first task was to rip the junk out of the dash and fit something decent, this was to be harder that we thought. The unit chosen was the Alpine IVA-D310R Mobile Media Station. This was to be married to the NVE-N099P DVD GPS Car Navigation System. The retail cost of this setup would be in excess of £3.5K but the Audio Navi option is £2.5K and isn’t as good. The Alpine system has a seven inch touch screen which is tactile; this means it buzzes under your finger when you touch the screen. The picture quality is superb and the ability to play DVD movies as well as navigate you is awesome.
TWO DVD TUNERS - HAVE YOU GONE MAD?
The rationale to fit two CD Tuners in this car was simple or at least I managed to convince myself it was. The original Audi system was double DIN, this means it takes the space of two radios on top of each other in the dash so when you remove it there is a gaping hole which was simple to fix with the use of the “Autoleads” facia adaptor however this leaves you with two apertures of which one would normally be a glove pocket. I wanted a DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast) Tuner and Alpine don’t make one however JVC make a little peach of a set which not only has DAB but also a small 3 inch monitor screen built in its standard one DIN size. So the decision to fit this below the Alpine and also connect a rear view camera to its tiny screen was a no brainer. My fitters did look at me strangely when I first suggested this and the technicalities of making all this work were not simple however we pride ourselves in being specialists and it was not long before we were all relishing the challenge.
So how do you fit two radios into one car? Luckily head units of this quality have pre-out and pre-in ports so connecting the two units “audio signals” together was a piece of cake but what about the RF signals or aerials to the uninitiated. The only way was to have multiple aerials and I did not want the car looking like a porcupine so the solution was a Hirschman tri band bee sting antenna fitted on the rear roof. This clever aerial looks good and does three jobs in one. It has an amplified FM feed, a GSM Cellular feed for the phone and a DAB signal feed for the digital radio tuner. The TMC box on the Alpine navigation unit also needs an aerial but it comes with a transparent window film type that was stuck to one of the rear side windows. TMC is one of the features that set proper navigation aside from the crappy portable so called navigation units but more of that later. The TMC is basically a radio receiver that listens exclusively to the BBC traffic news and will then automatically re-route you round any road traffic problems, clever eh!
9 AERIALS – MAD MAD MAD
When you look at this car from the outside you can only see one aerial but in fact this vehicle sports no fewer that NINE receiving antennae.
1. Audi’s own AM/FM glass mount (connected to the Alpine Mobile Media Station)
2. Alpine TMC window mount
3. Hirschman Tri Band-1 (AM/FM connected to JVC head unit)
4. Hirschman Tri Band-2 (GSM Cellular connected to Bluetooth phone kit)
5. Hirschman Tri Band-3 (DAB connected to JVC Digital Audio Box)
6. Glass mount cellular (connected to Smartnav Navigation)
7. GPS Puck antenna (connected to Smartnav Navigation)
8. GPS Puck antenna (connected to Alpine Navigation)
9. GPS mobile Bluetooth antenna (conneted to PDA Navigation)
THREE NAVIGATION SYSTEMS – NOW I KNOW YOURE MAD
Okay Okay so three navies might seem a bit excessive but this is a demonstration vehicle and how are you going to know which navigation system is best if you can’t test them back to back. Sometimes for fun I set them all of on the same journey together just to listed to the cacophony of female voices all telling me to go in different directions; just like having the wife and her sister in the car.
The serious point to this is simply to demonstrate that old adage that you only get what you pay for. The £2500 Alpine knocks spots off anything else but for only £500ish the Smartnav is streets ahead of any TomTom type device, so you can guess who came last then!
Anyway let me finish rambling about the head units before I go on to Navigation.
CAN-BUS WOES
Connecting two head units together and giving them the proper aerial feeds was a walk in the park compared to interfacing them to the Audi’s wiring. The original Audi Symphony II radio system is wired into the cars CAN-Bus system. What is CAN-Bus; why is it good and why is it bad?
CAN-Bus is basically computer controlled wiring that can multiplex or utilise one pair of wires to do many tasks. Examples would be the car doors locking themselves when the vehicle speed gets over 10mph or the radio volume increasing and decreasing with the road speed. Lights that turn themselves on at dusk, wipers that comes on in the rain and audio controls on the steering wheel or radio display information in the Speedo cluster. All of this and many more vital vehicle systems are controlled by computer controlled CAN-Bus systems. This is good if you are building a car, you can use common or universal modules across a range of vehicles and of course it keeps the build costs down.
So CAN-Bus is a God send right? Well it might have been if the original theory of the universal connectivity of all CAN-Bus devices was true. “Media Orientated System Transport” or the MOST Cooperation was set up to oversee the creation of a truly universal CAN-Bus system that would be all things to all men. Imagine a car alarm that would simply plug into the wiring node in your new Jag or BMW or Honda or anything, it would not matter, it’s universal. NO CHANCE just like Beta-Max and VHS before them the world’s car manufacturers could not agree a standard so now we have several different CAN-Bus systems.
CAN-Bus is a bad thing if you are trying to integrate any accessory to your new car, and that is where my problems started with the Audi.
Surely you just unplug the Audi unit from its ISO-DIN plug and plug the Alpine in and away you go. WRONG. First you have to reduce the audio output to line level to match the Audis inbuilt amp. Then you must decide whether you want to have the positive supply connected directly to the battery or through ignition because the accessory position vanishes when you disconnect the Audi head unit. This means the radio power is either on all the time or on full ignition, either way not good. Oh by the way you also lose the dash display and the steering wheel controls.
This is where thirty years of being a specialist counts. In all that time, every challenge has been met head on. When we were hand-making radio mounting brackets and drilling aerial holes in Ford Anglia’s and Hillman Hunters as well as tracking down interference from the dynamo, When we were fabricating wood and fibreglass mouldings for bespoke installations, When we were building competition winning audio systems in the British sound challenge sound-offs. We were at the cutting edge; we were the specialists that all the trade garages came to for advice. So we could not be beat by some new fangled computerised wiring system. The solution was found and special CAN-Bus adaptors were sourced and fitted so the Alpine now behaves exactly like the Factory fit radio, steering wheel and all.
04/04/07
The car is now nearly two years old and there have been many changes made to the system since my last post to this blog.
The audio was upgraded to “Rainbow” speaker’s front and back and a couple of 8 inch Subs stealth fitted into the rear side panels all driven by two “Genesis” amplifiers, one- four channel and one mono-block for the subs.
The trusty old Alpine was removed and the new Pioneer AVIC-HD1 double din navigation hard drive head unit was fitted in its place with the JVC DAB unit moved to inside the glove box. This was a work around and would probably not have been offered as an option to a customer but since it was my requirement to not lose my DAB, I opted for the inconvenience of having to fiddle in the glove box to adjust the tuner. The updated navigation software in the Pioneer and its ability to rip any CD inserted into it to the internal hard drive is superb.
The car has never missed a beat and has now covered over 45k miles however the efficiency and professionalism of the Audi dealerships leaves a LOT to be desired. It is clear to me that when faced with anything other than a stock fault the policy of official Audi dealerships is to blame the customer (me) for tampering with their overly complex vehicles and they will try anything to pass the buck.
When I say it has never missed a beat I mean that the excellent German engineering on what has to be the best 3litre diesel engine in production runs like a sweetie. Unfortunately their electrics let them down. Last year, one cold November morning I came out to the car to find the battery dead. I called out Audi assist and the service I got from their roadside engineer was above and beyond. He quickly established that the engine cooling fan has switched itself on the middle of the night and flattened the battery. This was a common fault on RS4’s he tells me, he disconnected the fan switch and we jump started the car and I took it to the Edinburgh dealership where I left the car and was given a hire car for the duration of the repair, so far so good.
The length of time and excuses I got plus the inference that the fault had somehow been caused by the aftermarket audio system that I had installed made me both angry and disappointed with Audi. This was the first time I had been anything but delighted with my car and its makers but it would not be the last.
Eventually I got the car back but the bullshit I had been fed from the dealership and their obvious inability to fix a simple (common fault) quickly, without trying to blame me (because the car did not sport the factory fit radio etc), left a bad taste. The fact that the car had three return trips to the dealership to rectify faults that they had generated while trying to fix the original fault made me vow never to use them again.
Everything was running smoothly and my Audi was being regularly serviced by a small independent specialist German Marque dealership when, last month (April), I had electrical problems again and yet again I tasted the Main Dealerships quality of service or lack of it.
The small independent had diagnosed the electrical fault to the ignition switch barrel and had replaced it. Having to remove the steering wheel they had caused the airbag warning light to come on and damaged the cruise control switch. Whist mildly irritating these things happen and it should have been quickly rectified but guess what? The car has now been four times to the Main Dealer (not the same one as before) and the whiff of bullshit is once again prevalent.
The simple truth is the small dealer’s mechanic made an error and incorrectly re-fitted the steering wheel and broke the cruise control switch in the process.
The Main Dealer has tried to tell me the problems were caused by the aftermarket audio system I fitted (The system that has worked perfectly for two years). And the latest is that the cruise control was never connected to the engine management unit so could never have worked (the same cruise control I have used every day for two years). You might understand my frustration.
I wonder if I am alone with my Audi dealership problems.
23/11/07
Finally - Great Sounds!
The car has now done over 60K and still feels like new (I love Audi’s). The Hi-Fi has been changed quite a bit though. I dumped the JVC DAB since it was too hard to operate from the glove-box, I miss the clarity and stereo separation that a good DAB signal brings but to be honest the signal was never that good for long enough to be enjoyable anyway. Whilst the Pioneer AVIC-HD1 is an excellent feature packed unit, it never really lit my fire in the sonic department. Don’t get me wrong , the internal amplifiers are fine for the average car and even though I had it hooked up to Genesis Amps and Rainbow speakers there was just something missing.
I have just completed the final stages of the last phase of the Audio upgrade which was to RTA (Real Time Analyse) and do the final adjustments and tweaks to the Audio Control products that were fitted last month and “WOW” what a difference!
The Audio Control Matrix was installed and as I say finally adjusted yesterday. I can't explain what a difference this piece of kit makes. It is phenomenal the staging, presence and depth of bass coming out of my front door speakers has to ne heard to be believed.
The idea behind "Audio Control" signal processors is that for many factory head units, the only way to get signal out of them to amplify is to use some sort of adaptor or speaker to line reducer. The Audio Control products not only do all of this but enhance or strengthen the signal and allow full control. Full control can mean you have the ability to make a dreadful sound if you don’t know what you’re doing. Using a Real Time Analyser you can see the effect your tweaking is having on the acoustic output of your system and the results can be staggering.
(more to follow....)
