Upgrading the Maverick B&O Sound System - DIY Howto

[JG307]

The front tweeters are wired directly to the head unit which has crossovers built into it, so I left out the crossovers that came with the Infinity component speakers. Adding wiring from the door to the dash is more work than I am willing to do and it is questionable whether it would benefit the system. Both the tweeters in the factory system and the Infinity's image very well any difference would be personal preference. They work well with the factory crossover.

The Infinity door speakers definitely have more bass response than the factory ones. I measured the frequency response flat down to 40 hz and the factory amp can push the speaker to the point where the entire door is vibrating without distortion. It all sounds very good.

I'm doing everything I can to justify not digging into the dash at all. Really dislike the sound from the dash, but I suspect that might be the center channel if you say the tweeters are fine.

I was considering installing coaxial speakers in the doors but it sounds like you're saying they don't get a full range signal. Do you know what frequencies the doors cross at?

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[Delbert]

I really don't know. I've misplaced my calibrated mike and test setup or I'd check. I do know the door speakers get full bass. So much so that the reference speakers vibrate the inner plastic door frames beyond what I think they can handle at loud volumes. I just keep the volume down. Coax speakers are not going to do it for you. The placement of the tweeters at your knees is just too far off axis.
I think you are right about the center speaker. I only have the standard audio and it does not have a center speaker. But my experience with center speakers is that the driver needs to be a very high quality full range speaker for it to be even reasonable. I really can't fathom why B&O would do that to a system.
Maybe just unhook the center speaker and see how it sounds. A good center speaker might be hard to mount. I doubt there is much room.
The next step up for me would be a DSP amp with a loopback harness. It would give you complete control of the sound without having to rewire the truck.

 

[Darnon]

Maybe just unhook the center speaker and see how it sounds. A good center speaker might be hard to mount. I doubt there is much room.
The next step up for me would be a DSP amp with a loopback harness. It would give you complete control of the sound without having to rewire the truck.

In my experience from what I could hear the center speaker's signal isn't simply just combining the L+R but rather the audio processing is attenuating that overlap from those sides and redirecting it. The result is unplugging the center speaker makes center stage sound muffled, especially vocals. You can particularly hear this "center scoop" effect on radio advertisements I've noticed; they sound very clearly defined as coming mostly from the center speaker.

There is a good amount of space beneath. So much so it accommodates the stock connector attached on a bracket beneath the magnet. Only some absurdly overbuilt competition speaker might be too large. Although space horizontally for the basket frame can be a little tight. The MB Quart I initially threw in didn't fully drop in. The Infinity Reference better seats nearly flush before tightening. Something with a particularly oversized cone might be a trickier fit.

Due to how the system is setup with some speakers driven directly off the ACIM in front and others the amp in back there would have to be a bit of rewiring either way to do a DSP+multichannel. Simplest maybe being an A2B DSP (possibly combo amp like mObridge) in the rear and remove the center channel. Then you only need to tie into the rear speaker wiring.

 

[Darnon]

Oh, another thing I noticed today is the front speakers appear to get a (nearly) full signal especially on the low end. The Kicker Key only does high pass up to 120 hz so I'm adding bass blockers to tune out some resonance I get with the door woofers at <220hz.

 

[JG307]

Oh, another thing I noticed today is the front speakers appear to get a (nearly) full signal especially on the low end. The Kicker Key only does high pass up to 120 hz so I'm adding bass blockers to tune out some resonance I get with the door woofers at <220hz.

Do you have a high pass filter on the reference center speaker? Did the OEM have one?

 

[colinl]

Oh, another thing I noticed today is the front speakers appear to get a (nearly) full signal especially on the low end. The Kicker Key only does high pass up to 120 hz so I'm adding bass blockers to tune out some resonance I get with the door woofers at <220hz.

That's... An interesting approach. You are missing all the midbass region which is going to make your front stage very weak.

Generally you would high pass a 6.5 at 60 to 80 hz with a 24db slope. Shouldn't have to be anywhere near 120hz unless it's only 6db/oct, or if some other speaker in the system is playing midbass up front.

I have a key playing 6.5 components in another vehicle and when playing a 20-20k test sweep it wasn't noticable to me, with only ears and not a real time analyzer, much difference between 60 and 80hz high pass. I set it initially to 80hz to be sure I wasn't going to overextend the mid which is rated to 35hz, but certainly I don't expect it playing that low with high volume. Anyway, after a few hours in multiple sessions I felt his midbass was much weaker than my Maverick. I set the crossover to 60hz and intentionally played some tracks at moderate volume with very low bass. No overexcursion and percussion and bass guitar very much improved. 60 is good, but honestly with some 6.5 probably still too high. I would only use 120hz if the midrange is very small like 4" or 4x6. 80 for some 5.25 mid, but I think many can play 60.

I can't pinpoint the frequency with my ears but I am confident the Maverick has an electronic high pass filter on the door speakers, and it seems pretty low to preserve midbass. There's no filter on the B&O 6.5 (I just went and looked at mine) so I'm sure either the ACIM or the B&O amp is giving it a filtered signal. It could be lower than 60hz but I'm fairly sure it's there because I and many others would've blown 6.5 by now if there was not a high pass filter.

Regarding your 220hz issue, I would fight the resonance with sound deadening and if any remains after what you did what you can, accept it. We can't eliminate wind and tire noise, so a truck is never perfect anyway.

 

[Darnon]

Regarding your 220hz issue, I would fight the resonance with sound deadening and if any remains after what you did what you can, accept it. We can't eliminate wind and tire noise, so a truck is never perfect anyway.

I do have deadening on most of the door panel itself and a few spots on the door's interior side plastic panel. I didn't get into pulling that off to deaden the door interior, although I plan to at some point since I have the extra material.

If the bass blocker idea doesn't sound great it's not a big loss. They're cheap enough to mess around with and the B&O wiring being so accessible makes it easy to do so.

 

[colinl]

I do have deadening on most of the door panel itself and a few spots on the door's interior side plastic panel. I didn't get into pulling that off to deaden the door interior, although I plan to at some point since I have the extra material.

If the bass blocker idea doesn't sound great it's not a big loss. They're cheap enough to mess around with and the B&O wiring being so accessible makes it easy to do so.

Agreed on experimentation and low cost. For my installation, because the amp itself was backordered for months, I had the rest of the system ready so I installed bass blockers temporarily. My wife thought it wasteful, but at $11-15 each, not really a big deal to have them on the shelf for a later project. (BTW getting the Key to auto-tune successfully can be a pain in the ass. Not looking forward to repeating it when/if any components change.)

You mention the wiring is accessible. Are you planning to tap into the harness coming out of the amp? That's very accessible indeed, but I haven't seen any pics or discussion of you or anyone else doing that. I'm not 100% sure how you're using the Key 200.4. I really doubt you're going to like the doors crossed at 200-250hz.

If it's driving the door speakers, try 60hz high pass on the Key and if it's boomy, I would tune the system to fix it. Unplug the B&O 6x9 if you still have it connected, adjust sub crossover & bass gain, sync3 tone controls, etc. I think the B&O 6x9 is very active in the 50-100hz range, but the output volume is pretty terrible with an infinite baffle and presumably not a lot of watts.

I unplugged mine long ago and finally physically removed it a month or so ago, just slapped a piece of sound deadener over the area to cover the hole.

 

[Darnon]

This is the somewhat ugly setup I've got behind the seats presently. The original Pioneer amp I had died; a-sploded a Mosfet.

The Kicker Key is partially hidden at the bottom driving the front doors/tweeters (JBL GTO609C) in bi-amp mode. Compressor on, Kicker EQ off, set for 120 hz high pass but I get gnarly door reverberation at that ~200hz range on tracks with loud, more sustained tones there.

The MB Quart is split off the B&O sub output and to a JBL WS1000 I have in a downfiring box in the driver's rear footwell. There's a rectifier bridge to the left on its power as a bit of a hack to tame the Hybrid's charging voltage via its forward voltage drop as the MB Quart and another amp I tried didn't like it that high*. The stock 'subwoofer' has been replaced with a Rockville and requires the 2.5" 3D printed collar to even attempt fitting its huge magnet in the stock housing. It was something of an unnecessary experiment.

*It took a while to figure out. The first amp I tried to replace the Pioneer sometimes would work, sometimes wouldn't although there were some reviews it would shutdown in low temps so I concluded maybe it was bad. But then the MB Quart exhibited similar behavior and I narrowed it down to closing the doors was making it shut off. After much hair pulling testing grounds, inputting with LOC, remote/signal turn-on I realized the key: the hybrid DC-DC converter is commanded to slightly lower charge voltage (<15v) as soon as a door is opened.

 

[colinl]

Aha, yep. I do see how with that setup you would have too much midbass if the doors are also playing it. While strong midbass is better than none, I would rather have it forward than aft. I would definitely try unplugging it and setting the key to 60hz, then redoing the dsp auto-config.

If that experiment ends favorably I bet you could sell that to someone with B&O who doesn't want to bother with a powered sub, though. Pretty neat that you printed a spacer / bracket for it.

 

[Darnon]

It's not so much an issue of too much midbass in an overall sense, I had this issue before the Rockville which is a recent install. Rather the doors in particular just don't jive with a lot of it. Another possible solution I'm thinking might be needing inserting deadening particularly between the dark blue and lighter sections of the door panel. I've mostly just got it on the flatter sections not unlike the XLT audio upgrade writeup.

 

[colinl]

Got it. I've always liked a lot of midbass in the doors. Previous to my Maverick, my best system was in my Evo and I had late 90s era MB Quart 6.5 components seeing 100w rms. There was definitely a balance issue because it didn't have a DSP, and had a sealed 12" in the trunk that played low really great, but did not do much for midbass. I tried to fix it with an audiocontrol 4.1 which was a bandaid.

It just blows me away what the Key 200.4 can do by comparison. It's nothing short of amazing to me how the DSP can fix spikes from cabin gain, holes in the soundstage created by the infotainment or speaker performance, and so on. Just amazing for $270.

 

[Delbert]

What I hear you all saying is that ACIM module and the B&O amp both do some digital signal processing. Neither one has a programming interface, so you are left with whatever decisions the designer made.

The simplist way to tame this beast is to take two full range signals from the ACIM run it to a DSP amp and back out to the drivers. Many DSP amps handle both high and low inputs and you can choose how much wattage you get by choosing the model. A loopback harness attaches the ACIM to the amp and back to the wiring to the drivers. It has an interface where you can program all the inputs and outputs, crossover points and delays. All on a computer screen.

I had hoped that someone would hack the ACIM with forscan and that some of the setpoints would be modifiable. Noone has done that.

 

[colinl]

What I hear you all saying is that ACIM module and the B&O amp both do some digital signal processing. Neither one has a programming interface, so you are left with whatever decisions the designer made.

The simplist way to tame this beast is to take two full range signals from the ACIM run it to a DSP amp and back out to the drivers. Many DSP amps handle both high and low inputs and you can choose how much wattage you get by choosing the model. A loopback harness attaches the ACIM to the amp and back to the wiring to the drivers. It has an interface where you can program all the inputs and outputs, crossover points and delays. All on a computer screen.

I had hoped that someone would hack the ACIM with forscan and that some of the setpoints would be modifiable. Noone has done that.

Yes to all of that. You can intercept everything with the A2B integration that Darnon mentioned which can be done for ~$400 and up, or you can get 4 channels if you insist on fading with the sync3 unit, or my personal favorite just tap the front doors and use a DSP to reconstruct whatever you want. I don't care to touch anything in the factory tone controls if I have a tunable DSP.

Second thing you mentioned - Forscan.

In the Bronco world people have dug into Forscan to remove the bandpass on the rear speakers, which like the Maverick, are only 4". https://www.bronco6g.com/forum/threads/forscan-rear-speaker-eq-findings.54999/

While well-intentioned, I think that is counterproductive unless you are using that factory rear channel for something bigger that legitimately can make use of a broader frequency response. If you skim the linked Bronco thread, you'll see someone observing that the speakers distorted after the change. Of course they did, unless you apply a bass blocker, a 4" is going to have issues trying to play full range. Ford has a bandpass on it for speaker life and a forward soundstage. If rear seat passengers can't hear, I just turn the volume knob up. Stock B&O can get plenty loud for front and rear passengers, nevermind what we do with modifications.

 

[JG307]

It just blows me away what the Key 200.4 can do by comparison. It's nothing short of amazing to me how the DSP can fix spikes from cabin gain, holes in the soundstage created by the infotainment or speaker performance, and so on. Just amazing for $270.

It sounds like you're saying this amp gets you 90% of the way to a full a2b solution for a fraction of the effort. Unless I'm really misunderstanding the B&O system, you'd just unplug the speakers from the factory amp, connect the factory amp to the Key, then the speaker wiring that originally went to the factory amp just goes to the Key (with the appropriate harnesses of course).

I wonder if just putting a Key 200.4 with the stock speakers would be an improvement-- because I'd have to imagine the the cabin was EQ'ed with the stock speakers during the design phase and those curves (the ones that work best with the stock speakers) built into the ACIM. Or am I putting too much faith in Ford's audio engineers?

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