More Photos of the Project

I had trouble uploading all of the photos to the original post.

 

Wow! Super clean! You've got some skillz!

 

Thanks! I also have more time than I know what to do with. The project took about 5 full days.

 

Simply amazing!!!!!

BTW, we need a Smilie to applaud people for services like this.

 

Great DIY stuff; you got talent!

Have you not thought of opening a cubic hole on the left side of the subwoofer, also covered in carpet, in order to have space for tools, bags, or whatever else?

 

Not sure where you mean. The box itself needs to be that way for volume requirements for the speaker.

 

Beautiful, you should go into business.

 

Nicely done.

 

The sub sounds tremendous, and it sounds as good as the JL Audio box. The bass is very deep and tight. The project was a lot of work, but I am glad that I did it. I dropped by the dealer and showed the installation to the SA. When he looked at it I got was ‘Whoa! Dude!’ After he listened to it I got the same response.

Whoa! Dude! Great work.

You appear to have exceptional skills in this area.

I have been planning on a subwoofer upgrade on my Macan from the day that I placed the order. I currently have a JL Audio 8W3v3 sub and XD300/1 dedicated sub amp that I had previously installed in my Audi A7 (pictures attached). However the dimensions of the sub are 19 x 11 - which is about 1 inch too wide to fit the space. D*%N it.

I'm not in a great hurry because I have the Bose upgrade and it sounds surprisingly good with quality source material - but I realize a solution like yours would be much better.

Let us know when you start selling Macan sub upgrades out of your garage workshop! Where did you say you live again..?

 

That's an excellent project and an great post. The pictures alone are worth a 1000 words. I think there is a 10 picture limit per post, so that's probably why a second post was needed to display them all. DIY projects like this can be immensely satisfying to design and create.
A beautiful, well thought-out, and nicely crafted job. Well done!! Thanks for sharing it with the group.

 

Thanks for all of the compliments guys. I do enjoy doing things like this, more so when it all comes together and works as I wanted it to. Around every corner of a project like this lurks an uh-oh that I didn't think of. Fortunately in the case there weren't any.

 

Great Job

Great work! It looks fantastic. It is an inspiration for me to complete my aftermarket stereo project and take the time to post it. Thanks for sharing.

 

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Great work! It looks fantastic. It is an inspiration for me to complete my aftermarket stereo project and take the time to post it. Thanks for sharing.

While the system sounds fantastic, I would eventually like to change the amp and speakers while maintaining factory controls for tone settings. Perhaps if someone else has done this they could post photos, equipment list, and and description of the work done. When I was working on my project I started to remove a door panel to check out the factory speakers but stopped as I have never removed a Porsche door panel and did not want to risk damaging something. My installation uses speaker level inputs to the sub amp, but it would be nice to have an aftermarket system that uses digital inputs and also keeps the factory sound controls.

 

@flickroll Amazing job. And what an excellent writeup. I smell engineer in your blood.


Time to start a cottage industry and travel around the country. I'll be happy to put you up, feed you, heck, I'll trim your toenails if need be, for you to do that to my Macan.


I love JL Audio products. I have one of their monster subs as part of my home theater. I have to check the sill plates around my foundation after I watch a movie to see if they've loosened.

 

Hi, great work and perfect custom box! I am thinking about doing same on my Macan S. Where are you getting your input for the sub, line in from rear speaker? Or did you hook into factory head unit somehow?

Also, have you run into any issues with electricals with the power the sub is drawing? In my previous car under full power my lights would dim a bit. With a porsche I wasn't sure if drawing too much current would endup triggering some faults? Did you have any concerns with this work voiding warranty, say for electrical system?

Thanks so much!

 

I have the MY17 S with PCM4.0. Is the stock amp in a completely different location? I am having a little trouble locating it. I also tried to fit the JL 10" and 8" powerwedge+ and microsub+ enclosures with the spare tire and no joy. It will have to be a custom enclosure or remove the spare.

 

Custom Dual 8" subwoofer and amp

I decided to go with two 8" subwoofers and a JL Audio JX 500 amp

 

Good job! - very similar thinking and solution on my MY16 and as you asked here is how I dealt with the rest of the system:

I changed the front and rear speakers to Focal units:
FRONT: Focal Expert PS 165F3 - 3 way
REAR: Focal Expert PS 165FX - 2 way
Both were installed with additional sound deadening.

Then installed an Audison Prima 8.9BIT to look after the OEM speaker configuration.

Installed an Audison AP1D amp to drive an Audison DVC 10 inch sub which is a shallow mount speaker with a custom box in the wheel well - virtually identical to yours (see pics)

Both amps were located in the OEM amp location back to back - on my MY16 it is in the LHS panel in the boot (trunk to you guys?).

The system was tuned using the Audison BIT Tune Software to suit. PCM Sound remains functional for all parameters as you want.

What I found is that the biggest sound quality improvement was with the amps (and the associated tuning) followed by the uncompressed file types (I use AIFF), then the sub and then the other speakers.

Note that the MY16 will only play WAV as an uncompressed file type and despite what Porsche claims in its manual it will not (and cannot as WAV does not contain the ID3 tags) order the music or search. So I use an iPhone 7 with 256Gb, AIFF files up to 192kHz 24 bit in iTunes. I leave the phone permanently in the console, so when I start the car it goes straight to the track where I left it.
The PCM is “tricked” into thinking it is playing WAV files and the album/artist/track info in the ID3 tags is passed across to the PCM…….I do not know how this happens, it took a lot of mucking around to find a simple solution but it works flawlessly.

Hope this helps with your project.

 

Good job! - very similar thinking and solution on my MY16 and as you asked here is how I dealt with the rest of the system:

I changed the front and rear speakers to Focal units:
FRONT: Focal Expert PS 165F3 - 3 way
REAR: Focal Expert PS 165FX - 2 way
Both were installed with additional sound deadening.

Then installed an Audison Prima 8.9BIT to look after the OEM speaker configuration.

Installed an Audison AP1D amp to drive an Audison DVC 10 inch sub which is a shallow mount speaker with a custom box in the wheel well - virtually identical to yours (see pics)

Both amps were located in the OEM amp location back to back - on my MY16 it is in the LHS panel in the boot (trunk to you guys?).

The system was tuned using the Audison BIT Tune Software to suit. PCM Sound remains functional for all parameters as you want.

What I found is that the biggest sound quality improvement was with the amps (and the associated tuning) followed by the uncompressed file types (I use AIFF), then the sub and then the other speakers.

Note that the MY16 will only play WAV as an uncompressed file type and despite what Porsche claims in its manual it will not (and cannot as WAV does not contain the ID3 tags) order the music or search. So I use an iPhone 7 with 256Gb, AIFF files up to 192kHz 24 bit in iTunes. I leave the phone permanently in the console, so when I start the car it goes straight to the track where I left it.
The PCM is “tricked” into thinking it is playing WAV files and the album/artist/track info in the ID3 tags is passed across to the PCM…….I do not know how this happens, it took a lot of mucking around to find a simple solution but it works flawlessly.

Hope this helps with your project.

Where did you get that custom sub enclosure?

 

Does the sub cause the trunk floor to make any noises?

 

I have not heard any trunk noises and I can definitely hear the improved low end bass!

 

Sweet thanks.

 

I'll just jump in here 4 years after Flickroll did this job (and it's already sold lol) and say this is exceptional, stellar! Well thought out. JL is the way to go.
I've won East Coast audio competitions with my Lexus GS400, but the days off me ripping everything apart are probably over. I'm going to just replace the factory sub driver and maybe the amp with it and use the same enclosure, because once I decide to scrap that and make a wood one, I will go nuts and spend a lot of money and time. I expect to be trading this car in more often so not worth the extra effort anymore.

 

I previously posted in the ‘Upgrades to CDR+?’ thread that I greatly improved the base audio in my 2016 Macan S by installing a Memphis Audio 10” powered subwoofer. It is true that the system sounded a whole lot better with the addition of the sub, but after listening to the upgraded sound system for a while I decided it could be better. The bass was not as deep as I would have liked, and it sounded a little boomy, which is typical of a ported subwoofer box such as the Memphis Audio sub.

So I started reading and doing a lot of research and ultimately decided to replace the Memphis sub with a custom sub box and a separate sub amp. I had two main criteria for the subwoofer: I wanted to keep my spare tire and I wanted to place the sub in the area under the rear cargo lid, in the same location as a Bose sub in a Bose equipped Macan. My conclusion was the best installation I had seen so far was in the Macan belonging to @VirtualAndrew so I decided to plagiarize a little and somewhat mimic his installation.

I knew the sub box was going to be a lot of work, so before I started a permanent installation I went back to Crutchfield and came home with a JL Audio CS110LG-TW3 sub box, and a JL Audio JX500/1D mono amp. Because of the power requirement of the amp, I also bought a new sub installation wire kit with a #4 power wire. The wire kit I had bought for the Memphis Audio installation had a #8 power wire, which is too small for this amp. The sub speaker in the sub box is a JL Audio 10TW3-4, which is the same speaker that was used in the @VirtualAndrew installation. This particular speaker gets a lot of positive reviews. If the temporary setup sounded good I would cannibalize the parts from the sub box for my custom installation. After hooking up everything in the Macan it was WOW, this really sounds GOOD. It definitely was what I was looking for, so I proceeded with the custom installation.

The first order of business was to permanently install the amp. I have an aversion to drilling holes in cars, so I decided to use Clickbond 10-24 studs for the attachment of the amp to the car. Clickbond has a clever installation system, their products are used in the aerospace industry, I had personally used them before, so I felt certain this would work well. A temporary plastic fixture holds the studs in place while the adhesive sets up. The studs need to attach to bare metal, so I marked the mounting locations, masked off the areas with tape, and sanded the paint off the attachment areas. I left some paint at the perimeter of the attachment so that the stud mount and adhesive cover the bare metal and a small area of paint at the perimeter on the stud base. This way there will not be a rust problem later on as the bare areas are totally covered. I then made up some mounting brackets with 0.100” aluminum and I installed the amp and new power cable.http://www.macanforum.com/forum/att...lectronics/130426d1462541703-custom-subwoofer-box-amp-installation-img_0246.jpg
http://www.macanforum.com/forum/att...lectronics/130434d1462541729-custom-subwoofer-box-amp-installation-img_0251.jpg
http://www.macanforum.com/forum/att...lectronics/130442d1462541737-custom-subwoofer-box-amp-installation-img_0249.jpg
http://www.macanforum.com/forum/att...lectronics/130450d1462541744-custom-subwoofer-box-amp-installation-img_0252.jpg
http://www.macanforum.com/forum/att...lectronics/130458d1462541782-custom-subwoofer-box-amp-installation-img_0255.jpg
http://www.macanforum.com/forum/att...lectronics/130466d1462541797-custom-subwoofer-box-amp-installation-img_0257.jpg

The next order of business was to make the sub box and then cover it in trunk carpet material. The box itself was a bit of a challenge. JL Audio specifies 0.5 cubic feet of sub box volume for the 10TW3-4 speaker. In order to do that, the sub would have to be close to the deck lid, and because of that I would not be able to use the speaker grill. That is not a major problem because the deck lid will keep debris off the speaker cone. I had to offset to speaker to the right a little so that the deck lid handle would not hit the speaker when the lid is closed. As it turned out the speaker is about ½” below the deck lid.

I used 1/2” MDF that I picked up at Home Depot. This is the same thickness material that was used in the JL Audio sub box. Over time a sub can destroy a sub box from pressure waves, so the box needed to be internally braced.

The floor of the sub box was cut with a 33.5* angle, so that it nestles in the angle in the car. Making the curve to match the spare tire was a bit of a challenge. To do that I made approximately 90 saw kerfs in a piece of MDF. I had marked the tire outline on the floor of the sub box with a sharpie. Using epoxy resin and a lot of clamps I carefully aligned the board with the sharpie line. After the resin set up I filled the saw kerfs with a slurry of epoxy resin and flox (flocked cotton), and squeeged it in the grooves. The flox makes the epoxy thick so that it won’t run out of the grooves, and once cured it is as hard as a rock. After that I covered the radius of the curve inside the box with two layers of bias cut medium weight glass cloth.http://www.macanforum.com/forum/att...lectronics/130498d1462541958-custom-subwoofer-box-amp-installation-img_0265.jpg
http://www.macanforum.com/forum/att...lectronics/130482d1462541920-custom-subwoofer-box-amp-installation-img_0269.jpg
http://www.macanforum.com/forum/att...lectronics/130490d1462541938-custom-subwoofer-box-amp-installation-img_0270.jpg

The next order of business was to install internal braces, and mark the location of the cutout for the speaker. The actual hole cut was done using a zip saw with a circle cutting jig. The hole came out fine, but it took a number of trial and error cuts with scrap material to adjust the jig to get the specified 9.625” hole diameter. After that I attached the lid with epoxy mixed with Cab-O-Sil. Cab-O-Sil is a thickening agent for epoxy resins.

After the lid was on I used a flush trim router bit to trim the edges, and after that I used a round-over bit to give the edges a nice radius. I then cut the hole for the speaker wire connector receptacle, and covered the box with trunk carpet material. Last but not least was filling the box with acoustic wadding and mounting the sub in the box

During construction of the box I used Titebond III wood glue until the first use of epoxy. After I made the piece to fit around the tire, epoxy adhesives were used for the rest of the build since wood glue will not adhere to epoxy. I also used an 18 gauge brad nailer to assemble the box.

The sub sounds tremendous, and it sounds as good as the JL Audio box. The bass is very deep and tight. The project was a lot of work, but I am glad that I did it. I dropped by the dealer and showed the installation to the SA. When he looked at it all I got was ‘Whoa! Dude!’ After he listened to it I got the same response.

More Photos of the Project

I had trouble uploading all of the photos to the original post.
[/QUOTEF]
Flickroll, I like your approach. Too often even upgraded factory audio leaves me wanting a bit more. I recently picked up a 2016 Macan S with the Bose system. Overall I'd say the Bose system is not bad, but room for improvement for sure. To that end, I've put in DynAudio tweeters up front (thanks Musicar Northwest), and yes I know I could have gotten them for less if I'd fabricate my own mounts, but I love the work Musicar does (they did a BMW 335 for me years ago, and it was a great system that is still my benchmark in car audio.) Those tweeters were worth the money to my ears. Overall a warmer more natural sound.

Now I'm on to the Sub. I wanted to do something a bit special - and I have a lot of spare wood materials laying around from other woodworking projects (I build more furniture than I do audio systems.) So here is my box, with a walnut veneer. For the curve around the spare tire, I laminated five sheets of Luan plywood. In hindsight I should have built a jig or maybe fiberglassed the whole thing. Halfway through the box build I almost gave up, the angles were so complex and my lack of a table saw was limiting my precision cuts. Eventually I pulled the box together, filling minor gaps the seams with Bondo glass reinforced filler. I also did a fair amount of dowel joinery on all the edges to add more strength. (You can see some dowels in the attached pictures.) I went with the Focal P25FS because of it's low mounting depth requirements (and it's the same speaker I put in my Audi S6 to build out the B&O system in that, and I'm happy with the clarity and punch). If my volume calculations are correct the size should be right at the sweet spot for that speaker. You can also see I did a bi-level deck on the top. That allowed a bit more volume internally and also recessed the speaker down enough that I'm hoping I don't need to cut a grill vent into the rear cargo cover. TBD on that...

I'll post an update once I've installed the amp. My goal is to keep the option to return the car to 100% stock. So the amp mount I'm toying with building will suspend off of the existing Bose sub-woofer screw holes. More on that later (any feedback from the form on the JL marine monoblock 500W? I'm only looking at it because it's about a perfect fit for the void left once I yank the Bose sub-woofer.

BTW, I talked to my local stereo shop about trying to use the Bose enclosure with another sub and or amp. They basically said it was a bad idea because the Bose speaker is so closely tuned to that enclosure. Even with more power I suspect it wouldn't bring the sound I want.

Lastly, a question: does anyone know what the outputs on the existing wiring for the Bose sub are? From my on-line searching I think it's as follows: 2 = speaker positive (yellow/red), 3 speaker negative (yellow), 4 line turn-on (white/orange wire), 5 ground (brown wire), 6 power (orange wire). DON'T QUOTE ME ON THAT. Also, is the signal speaker or line level?

 

Does anyone know how wide the spare wheel is? Phrased differently, how deep is the hole that it fills?

 

Sorry everyone, I searched and searched and cannot find anything on this. I have a 2015 Macan S with the BOSE system and I’m trying to add an aftermarket subwoofer and amplifier in place of the factory setup. The difference in my case is I’m trying to do it without any DSP or anything else other than an Audio Control LC2i. Anyone have any experience with this? It seems to me I can just tap into the signal wires BEFORE the amp and it should work but I have no clue about the optical cable in that harness. I also thought I could tap into the wires after the amp going straight to the sub but I do not want the Bose amp altering the sound. Also I would basically be amplifying any distortion and noise created by the factory amp. Thanks in advance.

 

I would recommend tapping the rear door speakers for your LOC instead of the Bose sub wires. Bose adds additional "bass boost" to the sub line. The LC2i looks good, but I've come across another product which I plan on installing instead: Wavtech bass freq. It provides more control of the "tune" over the LC2i. I'll let you know if I enjoy it once I get around to installing it.

I have a focal e25kx 10inch sub I plan on using w/ a JL HD750 amp. The other alternative is a JL 8w7 that I might be able to stealth install with fiberglass into the existing sub location, it's a tight fit though.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Do you tap into it in the B pillar?

 

OP - I found a thread that does discuss aftermarket subwoofer installation. It
seems to be pretty detailed.

I am merging this thread with that one.

 

for me (11 speakers) ther eis no amp in the trunk in the left side. any ideea where they put it ? 2016 macan s base stereo.. pcm4 (with nav)

 

There is no separate amp in the base/SPP system, it's built into the head unit/PCM. From the 2017 brochure (emphasis mine):

Sound Package Plus, with 10 loudspeakers and a total output of 150 watts, delivers excellent sound. The amplifier integrated into PCM optimally adapts the acoustic pattern in the vehicle interior to the driver and front passenger.