Simplicity In Sound

10/11/2026

Behold: 1400 Watts of RMS power, 12 channels of DSP, and a pretty powerful 800 watt subwoofer. All installed into an Audi S5 Sportback!!
👀👀🤔🤔😆😆

10/10/2026

Every month I get asked, online and in person, especially by victims of subpar installs: what is the top advice I have for them to avoid falling into the "hack shop" trap.

I've thought about this quite a bit...here is my advice: keep quiet during the consult and see what the salesmen pitches you...

This doesn't guarantee you a stellar result; but it will sure as heck filter out a terrible one.

10/07/2026

Was talking to someone the other day about a civic project and I was reminded of this build from... Gasp! Has it really been almost eight years?! (OP was from well after the car was done)

Still one of my favorites...time sure flies...

This civic came all the way to us from Kentucky for a full sound quality build that is able to compete from time to time and yet remain fully daily usable.

First, Jesse stripped the entire interior and did a layered sound proofing from the windows down with composite CLD/Foam damper, then topped it off with a layer of Mass Loaded Vinyl.

The car features two signal sources, the oem premium system signal was tapped after the stock amp, while the customer provided us with a Hiby R6 high res player as his primary listening source.

Joey fabricated a very cool mounting for the front part of his center arm rest console that securely houses the Hiby, while still allowing to be removed with zero tools. A mosconi RC mini dsp controller is located behind the player for system control. Finally, two switches are located on the back plate of the mounting to activate the front and rear lighting displays within the vehicle.

The front stages consists of a full compliment of the new Focal Utopia M 3 way set, with a 6.5 inch midbass, 3.5" midrange, and the TBM tweeter.

The midbasses are installed in the stock lower door location, Joey molded the TBM tweeter into the factor sail panels, while Joey and I teamed up to make a pair of A pillar pods for the midrange, which due to the sheer size of the drivers, flows onto the dash a little bit for a cleaner look.

One of the design stipulations by the customer from the start was to locate a subwoofer upfront in the passenger foot well, and Jesse did a great job integrating the Focal Utopia M 10" sub in that space in a .5 cubic foot sealed enclosure. The enclosure features lighting to show off the sub, and has two grilles, a fully hidden carpeted grille for daily driving, and a vinyl framed see through grille for display at comps and shows.

The customer also desired some ambient interior lighting, so i built two sandwich lighting platforms under each seat that casts red light in all directions for that purpose.

For rear fill, we chose a pair of Focal PC130 5.25" coaxials, installed on the rear deck.

The brain of the entire system is a Mosconi 8to12 Aerospace DSP, taking both the 6 channel analog input from the stock source and the digital coaxial input straight from the Hiby, from there, the processed signal goes to a trio of Mosconi Pro amps, and Pico2 mini amp, with a bridged 2x320 watts RMS on the midbass, and 4x120 on the midrange and tweeter, with nearly 1000 watts going to the sub, while the rear fill is powered with 80 watts a piece.

Joey fabricated a full enclosed amp rack behind the seat, accessed by flipping the seats down. it is trimmed in alcatara and vinyl, and is lit up with red and white LEDs...the three amps are floating, and with a really cool wiring rack that bolts inside the enclosure and lines up to each and every single amp terminal, i was able to wire the entire thing so that all the wiring follow the same curvature.

in the trunk, I built a simple rack that houses the DSP, the pico2 amp, and the main power and ground distribution blocks, also lit up in a two stage red and white lighting, and in the floor, i built and wired up a rack that holes a 100 amp power supply, and all the various wires, cables and barrier strips, for easy access and service when needed.

I think this is one of the top 5 best sounding cars we have every done, the stage is very wide with great depth and height, with a solid center. the overall tonality can best be described as detailed, yet linear and smooth, with very little harshness. the impact from the upfront sub is absolutely fantastic, and when paired with a superb set of midbasses such as these, they really give the chest a bit of thumping listening to drum solos. the car also sounds "big", with a lot of airy ambiance..really enjoyable to listen to.

sad to see her go back to Kentucky, but i am sure the new owner will enjoy it very much :)

10/07/2026

Building a sub enclosure in a complex and multi angled OEM steel body cavity, BEHIND oem trunk carpet, when there is no carpeted cavity to tape and fiberglass off of, it's a bit like building ur own 3D jigsaw puzzle. 😂

This took a minute but it fits the sub (pretty powerful one) and uses almost every ounce of available room get a decent amount of airspace out of it.

10/04/2026

My first ever vehicle was a 1989 Toyota pickup, regular cab with the 22re 4 cylinder. It’s the vehicle that I regret selling to this day, as it carried so many fond memories and likely will still be running strong today.

Over the past 25 years since her departure, I have worked on countless vehicles of many configurations. Yet not a single Toyota pickup/Tacoma regular cab.

So you can imagine my glee when I finally had the chance to do a proper install in one.

Luckily for us, this current generation of Tacoma regular cabs have a huge amount of space behind the seats, in par if not more so than full size regular cabs and basically is similar to the extended cabs of the generation I had. So now, a properly sized build can go in without needing to constantly worry about depths!

The goals for the project were: to achieve a very nice level of sound quality while still maintaining as much stealthiness and daily usability as possible. The focus was especially on the back wall area, where the customer would ideally like to retain the tool storage and the little bin on the driver side.

Jesse did more of the work on this truck, while I took care of the front stage, the signal integration, and the wiring throughout the vehicle. He also installed a wolfbox mirror with rear bed light camera, as well as finished a customer installed front camera module.

Being that this was a base model audio truck, the signal is a standard (for us) two source affair. Like the base audio 4runner we did last year, this truck also featured a full range, variable signal between the headunit, and the little booster/anc amp under the driver seat. Tapping this signal not only nets us a cleaner source being that it is technically not meant to power speakers directly, but also eliminates the ANC, even though that could be coded out with carista.

Oddly though, this signal is not quite the same as the one I found on the 4runner. It is a lot hotter, I would estimate it to be 8 to 10 volts, and not as flat.

This signal, along with a direct streaming module in the form of a Mosconi MOS-BTS LD4C plug in chip, goes to a Mosconi Atomo 4to8 dsp. Which handles the processing of the entire system. Its compact size makes it preferable to the bigger offerings from Mosconi due to a lack of space, as you will see later.

For the front stage, we went with a tried and true combination of Gladen Zeta 165 midbass, 70 midrange and an Audiofrog GB10OE tweeter, as the fit great in the Toyota stock locations and performs very well. Since this car was a base audio car, we sourced a pair of Tacoma JBL pillars to give him a 100 percent OEM appearance while adding 3 way sound quality to the vehicle.

One of the late additions to the truck, after hearing my own Subaru outback daily driver, was an Audiofrog GS8ND2 upfront acting as an impact augmentation woofer.

I directed Jesse to take away as little leg room as possible and he really took it to heart. Instead of our usual carving a pocket in the foam tray that props up the floor, he eliminated it completely and molded a new enclosure for the AF 8, that resulted in a new floor within an inch of the original floor height. But in doing so, because the enclosure now sat INFRONT of the factory trim panel and carpet curvature, he had to extend the outer shell to butt up against those two surfaces, it sounds easy , but lining up two curved surfaces at the same time was quite a bit more effort than the usual flat front panel of our impact enclosures.

The GS8ND2 sits in a trimmed surface with a mdf/mesh grille in front that hides and protects it. With the stock carpet mat in place, there is hardly any evidence there is anything going on with the floor board.



For the back, after taking it all apart, Jesse built a combo sub enclosure/amp rack that housed two Arc Audio A12 subs and three X2 amplifiers, along with the aforementioned Mosconi Atomo 4to8 DSP.

The sealed enclosure of 2 cubic is on the passenger side, putting the subs as far away from the listener as possible, and extends to below the amp. Two X2 600.4 4 channels power the front stage with 150 watts RMS per driver and bridged 300 watts on the Audiofrog GS8ND2 impact driver, while a X2 1100.1 sends 1100 watts RMS to the two A12s.

The entire structure is bolted to the factory plastic structure, then the structure as bolted back through the enclosure to the back wall via stock mounting points. With plenty of sound proofing in between to eliminate rattles.

The equipment is trimmed in the same graphite black vinyl with some concave lines for added visual appeal. And a full length mdf/mesh grille, with a raised Tacoma logo, hides and protects the entire structure. all the plastic on plastic/metal contact surfaces in the back was lined with felt, to eliminate contact buzzing and rattles.

From the first time I powered the system on with just basic gain and crossovers, I knew this truck was gonna be great sounding. And after tuning with Mike, I would say this is one of the best, if not the best sounding Tacoma/Toyota pickups we have ever done. From a midbass impact standpoint, this could very well be the best.

The truck imaged and staged very well, with a solid center behind the factory screen, width is pillar to pillar and height at about 8 inches off the dash. Depth on a truck is never super great, but this is at the edge of the windshield.

Tonally, the gladen/af combo always provides very nice midrange and highs with great detail, airiness but never fatiguing. Impact out of the zetas and the Audiofrog is out of this world, with drum tracks feeling like the sticks and hammers are pounding you in the chest. I couldn’t help but chuckle at some of the songs I played on it.

With the super short cabin and the well-sealed enclosures of this truck, the ultra bottom end was never going to be superb with the windows closed. But the two A12s does an admirable job going down to 30hz or so, with no sense of pulling to the back since they are low passed at 65 hz thanks to the front impact woofer. This is pretty difficult to achieve in a regular cab truck with the subs directly behind you, but this Tacoma pulled it off in spades. With the windows rolled down, the ultra bottom end bass is tremendous, an easy 5 to 6 dB gain vs the truck closed up.

With their reputation for lasting forever, I can only imagine the smiles this system will bring to the client over the next years…or decades 😊

Thanks for reading, and as usual, please check on the pictures for more detailed info on the build process.

Cheers,

Bing

09/24/2026

Another day, another wiring job on 10lb of stuff in a 2lb bag. 😆

09/21/2026

When I demo my E63 system to a potential customer, I frequently will pull off the magnetic top cover so they can see the wiring organization and install integrity under the surface. To me, what goes on unseen in a build is just as important as the superficial appearance.

If u r looking for potential shops to work on your car, especially on a custom project; I highly suggest u ask to see the "guts" of their demo vehicle or a project they are currently working on.

How a shop wires and secures things under the top layer speaks volumes on their overall attention to detail.

09/19/2026

In my 6 plus years of building projects for Dolby Labs, I have definitely done some stuff well outside the traditional car audio sandbox. As these Atmos in car systems evolve, so do the equipment.

This new Corolla is a R&D mule, versus a full time demo vehicle. So the goal here was simply to install all the products provided mostly by Dolby, in a clean manner that allows ease of testing and modifications down the line. Besides the two Wavtech amps, LOC and a single Arc 8, everything else was 110 Volt! I feel like a home electrician working on this thing. 😆

Don't ask me what things do because I don't really know well enough to give an educated answer.

Despite not being traditional car audio projects, these projects r thoroughly enjoyable because they scratch my itch for fitting a lot of gear in a limited amount of room while maximizing access, serviceability, and wiring cleanliness.

One day I hope to have the time to listen to some of these creations at Dolby HQ! 😍

09/11/2026

Just realized the other day that this cool project never got an updated build log, so here it is!

Before anything, I am sure people would say, why does a Ferrari, with its gorgeous engine note, need an audio system?! Well, firstly, the client thought this turbocharged lump wasn’t nearly as nice to listen to as his other naturally aspirated models. Secondly, and I say this with virtually any great sounding engines, is that despite how good they sound being revved or attacking a mountain switch back at full song, no engine really sounds that great going a steady 70mph on the freeway or puttering in traffic around town. During those times, having a great audio system can truly make your journey more enjoyable. Even if it’s a track car, you still need to drive hours to the track in most cases 😊

This gorgeous Ferrari 488 GTB belongs to one of our long time clients. It arrived at our shop shortly after he took delivery and at the time, the biggest challenge facing us was that being a new model, there was almost no information on the car’s existing audio and electrical layouts. So literally everything we had to figure out on our own as we went.

This turned out to be one of the more technologically challenging builds we did back in 2017, partly due to the fact that as we disassembled the car, we realized why the stock system sounded so bad, and what we needed to do to address that. More on this later.

Joey performed the vast majority of the build, while I supported where I could with audio integration and tuning related tasks.

The goals:

1. achieve a nice level of sound quality

2. maintain an oem appearance in front of the seats, while adding a bit of flair for the sub enclosure behind the seat

3. maintain a usable frunk

After locating the stock amp and putting every channel to the test on our RTA, we figured out the ones we needed to sum to form a full range signal going to the DSP, as with all of our post stock amp builds, this 488 featured an alternate pure signal source in the form of a Mosconi AMAS2 direct streaming module.

Both signals go into a Mosconi 8 to 12 aerospace DSP, providing processing for the entire system.

Joey custom fabricated a cool center console mount for the Mosconi RC-Mini DSP controller, wrapped in real Alcántara, it provides master volume and subwoofer volume, along with preset changing capabilities, at the fingers touch.

The stock system sounded horrendous, and after taking apart all the speaker locations, we discovered why. It isn’t just funky tuning in the stock amp or crappy speakers; instead, we discovered a NON PERMIABLE cloth membrane across some of the speaker grilles in the car! This essentially puts a solid barrier in front of all the speakers. At the time, it was the first instance of this we have discovered, and it boggled our minds. On some of the locations, removing this membrane was not a big issue. But on the door midbass location, it presented a big challenge. The cloth served as a cosmetic cover for the door location as the midbass is mounted to the door card itself. Once removed, it presents a pretty ugly see through grille that must be somehow remedied.

So what Joey ended up doing was to carefully grind off the glued on cloth, then wrapped the area behind it in a piece Alcántara, after trimming the stock mounting location to accept a Gladen Aerospace 6.5” midbass.

An acrylic adapter mount was made for the top of the dash oem midrange location, housing a Gladen Aerospace 3” driver. To access the area, the entire dash had to be disassembled, no easy task considering it was such a new car with no viable info or tutorials.

Joey also fabricated a custom ABS mount for a Morel MT350 tweeter and bolted it to the stock door tweeter grille using oem hardware.

All in all, this is perhaps the most time consuming stock location front stage project we have ever done, before or since.



After all the relevant wiring was run into the frunk, itself an extremely time consuming job. Joey went to work on the frunk amp rack.

The idea here is for a pretty simply layout that retains some storage capacity while using high end amps. Two Mosconi Zero 4s run the entire system. With the front midrange and tweeter receiving 100 watts RMS, the 3ohm midbass getting about 150 watts, and the subs on around 700 watts RMS running at 2.66ohms.

A two tiered rack locates one of the zero4s and the DSP on the first level, with the second zero4 stacked up above and behind them. This may sound simple, but with the limited amount of room available and large amps, it took some engineering to get right. The top Zero4 can be displayed with the removal of the top floor grille. And the frunk remains fully usable with the top floor in place.

The final piece of the build is the subbox. Here, we had some liberty to get a bit creative. After some discussions, We went with a trio of Audiomobile EVO8s, in an enclosure that spans the space behind the seats. A combination of two tone vinyl, carbon fiber, and acrylic matches the stock interior theme, while a curved acrylic structure comes out of the middle and provides some protection for the exposed middle sub and adds some visual pizazz. Definitely one of the creative and showy enclosures to come out of our shop.

to be honest, this car sounded better than I expected. Most exotic cars tend to be less than idea sounding due to their interior, but this one had an overall tonality is very smooth and VERY airy, it really does a good job of conveying a sense of space to a pretty small cabin.



the stock headunit sounded decent, but the amas2 was for sure superior...especially noticeable on the lower frequencies and subbass, but overall it was wider and more precise.

the midbass impact out of the gladens, as usual, are superb, a lot of extension and impact with no hint of distortion, the midrange, and highs, after some tuning, were smooth but detailed. Perhaps the best door card mounted midbass we have ever heard.

Subbass was quite supple with the top of 8s. this car was never going to be an ultra-low frequency monster to begin with due to its extremely short interior, but the subs went down to 30hz with ease and were quite easy to integrate with the midbass.

the car had a decent center and very good height, but with the odd locations of the tweeters (pretty far back in the door) and the midrange (very far inboard, centered above the instrument cluster on the driver side and a matching distance about a foot away from the passenger side pillar), width and depth can vary a little depending on songs. Its note at the speaker grilles, but it’s not quite pillar to pillar. With depth on top of the dash vs at the windshield or beyond.

Overall, quite challenging but also extremely rewarding, turning such a beautiful beast into an enjoyable listening environment.

Thanks for reading, and as usual, please refer to the individual pics for more detailed information.

Cheers,

Bing

09/07/2026

We have been building projects, both demo and in house R&D oriented, for Dolby Labs for almost 6 years now. (this one is the latter)

It's quite a bit outside of our normal stuff but I do get to do some pretty weird and interesting stuff from time to time. Plus all the super complex wiring really makes me happy! 🤣

I cannot give yall an answer for what these will do because I simply don't know. But it was cool coming up with solutions for mounting them with Joey.