I posted this in the Technology Discussion section before I realized most of the audio mods were discussed here.
Added a Kicker HS10 -
Tapped into the factory amp outputs for the front woofers, wrapped the wires in fabric tape, pulled the door sills to run wires, ran power to the battery through the firewall, modified the bass knob to poke through the fuse panel, and then tucked everything away nice and neat.
Overall the sound is greatly improved but I still need to tweak the EQ on the Sub, audio system, and my phone's equalizer (Poweramp) to get the best sound. Pretty happy with the results, even prouder of my cable management.
Thanks to the other users in this forum who helped map out the wiring locations in the H/K amp and recommended to use the front woofers for the full signal spectrum.
I ended up writing this up as detailed as possible so I could share this with whoever else might be interested in doing something similar. Part of my job is writing a bunch of technical documentation, so hopefully this is as clear as possible. I wrote this from memory from doing this Sunday, so feel free to ask if anything isn't clear and I'll try and help.
Parts list:
Powered Sub (came with wire harness, 2x ring terminals, fuse, butt connector)
Wire Harness tape:
Plastic trim tools: (might have gotten something better, these are okay)
Posi-tap connectors for 16-18 gauge wire:
IDEAL level wire connectors: (knock-off wago connectors)
Car speaker wire:
Other tools needed/optional:
Wire stripper/crimper, ratchet with 10 12 and 14mm sockets, waterproof wire butt connectors, heat shrink, electrical tape, zip ties, sticky backed velcro, flashlight, drill, fish tape or something similar to push wires through a narrow space.
Steps that are probably way too detailed:
Based on this thread/post on the linked post, it was recommended to tap into the front woofers to get as much of the full spectrum signal as possible:
Yet Another H/K System Upgrade
I took out the bolts that hold the amp down under the passenger seat (10mm), then pushed the seat as far forward as I could. Then I disconnected the negative terminal from the battery.
The image labeled FO1-B is the red connector on the amp, and the image is if you had unplugged the connector and it was facing towards you. If you're looking from behind the second row, the red connector is closer and plugged into the left side of the amp, so pins 15/28 are closest to the rear of the passenger seat, and 1/16 are closer to the blue connector (further away).
I disconnected the red/blue connectors. The wires that you need to tap into are labeled in the diagram for F01-B, but they're all right next to each other in a clump of 4:
I used the posi-taps to connect each of them, and ran two lengths of wire (probably 10-15 feet each) to give me plenty of space to cut/crimp later. I marked the end of each strand +/- with blue duct tape and pink duct tape (whatever I had lying around) that was a different color to differentiate them. I connected the red wires to the positive connectors with the positaps, and the matching black wires to the negatives, then wrapped about a foot of the connector with the wire harness tape.
At this point I just wanted to make sure the sound worked, so I connected everything temporarily (over seats, over doors, etc) - I ran the power wire and connected it to the positive terminal of the battery with the ring terminal, and just used some wire nuts to connect the fused wire to the rest of the red wire. I used wire nuts (before I bought the wire lever connectors) to connect each of the speaker wires to the matching wires on the amp harness, matching positive to positive and negative to negative for each wire. I pulled up the silver skid plate that covers the bottom of the lift gate and also the 'back' of the storage compartment, which needed a screwdriver or pry tool to pop out the single plastic clip that was holding it down. Underneath the silver plate is a bolt (12mm) on the left side, near where the jack compartment is - I used this for the ground, with another ring terminal.
All the wires were temporarily connected (speaker wires from positaps, power wire to postive battery terminal, ground to bolt underneath liftgate trim, blue remote turn on wire was left unplugged), so I reconnected the red/blue connectors to the amp, flipped the switches on the amp to "DC offset turn on", "Hi Level input level", and connected the negative terminal on the battery. The power LED on the amp turned blue, and once my speakers turned on, I slowly turned up the gain and made sure sound was coming through the amp - so far so good.
I would end up pausing here and there to keep testing that things were working as I moved and pinched wires under different trim pieces, I would recommend doing the same.
Now was the hard part - hiding all the wires. I disconnected the negative terminal and temporary wire nuts I used for the power on the power wire, and disconnected the ground from the bolt I used in the storage compartment.
I marked a spot with painters tape on all four doors, and wrapped a loop of painters tape around the weather stripping on the corner where it lined up with the mark, then I pulled all 4 doors' weather stripping off and set them aside. I pulled up the 4 door sills (plastic trim pieces helped, but you can just grab them with your hands and pull with a bit of force, they'll snap off. The bottom of the B pillar is held down by the bolt that holds on the bottom of the seatbelt, and I removed that so the seatbelt wasn't attached at the bottom, then pulled the B pillar trim off between the front and back doors. I couldn't actually loosen the bolt on the drivers side seatbelt, but it was very easy to do so on the passengers side.
I tucked the wrapped/taped bundle of wires under the passenger seat around where the seatbelt bolt attaches to the B pillar and pushed the rest of the wire bundle (unwrapped) towards the back of the car in the rear-passenger door sill. I left the wires unwrapped inside the sill, zip tied them to the existing bundle, but wrapped about another foot or so of it in the harness tape where it sticks out of the back side of the door sill so it would blend in with the carpet. Then I snapped the B pillar and door sills back into place, and reattached the bottom of the seatbelt bolt.
I pushed the speaker wires along the passenger rear side under my floormats so they weren't exposed til they were under the third row.
For the driver side, I needed to run the power cable and remote bass knob cable (3.5mm, headphone style cable) up to the front of the car. I wrapped the exposed wire in harness tape til where it meets the door sill for the rear drivers side door, and then pushed the red power wire and one end of the connector through the B pillar next to the driver seat along the sill (this would have been a lot easier if I was able to disconnect the bottom of the seatbelt to fully remove the B pillar cover, but the bolt was too stuck for any of tools and I broke my ratchet trying to free it, but I made it work.
At this point I have as much length of wire as possible for the remote bass knob and the power cable. I ran these up to the driver side door sill. I pulled off the handle for the hood release and pulled off that panel as well, so I could run the bass knob cable behind where the fuse box panel is - I temporarily hung the bass knob cable out of the open fuse panel and started working on the power cable. To get the power cable through the firewall grommet behind the gas/brake pedals, I reached through the engine bay with a long/slim screwdriver and poked it through the grommet, being careful not to shove it through the bundle of wires that was already there. Once the screwdriver was poked through, I attached the power wire to the screwdriver from inside the footwell of the driver seat using a good amount of duct tape to hold it, but not too much where it wasn't slim, and then I used dish soap to grease up the screwdriver, duct tape, and remaining water so I could pull it through back on the engine bay side.
The power connection here is pretty simple. I used some zip ties to pin up the cables so they wouldn't hang loose, then I connected the fused lead from the positive terminal to the power cable I had just pulled through, and used a butt connector to crimp them together. I wrapped the connection with electrical tape and made sure it was secure, and then I pulled the rest of the slack back through the firewall grommet inside the car, leaving just a bit of slack so it wasn't strained on anything.
I pinned the power wire and bass control wire up inside the footwell on the drivers side using zip ties and I left about 6 inches of the bass knob wire hanging out of the front of the fuse panel. The rest of the wires were then zip tied to the wire bundle inside the door sills, and I pulled whatever slack wire back to the rear of the car, and snapped back on the B pillar cover on the drivers side, the panel that sits under the hood release and handle, and both door sills. If you were able to remove the seatbelt bolt on the drivers side, reattach that too.
To recap briefly:
Now it's just cleaning up and making things look hidden. I reconnected the wire harness to the sub one more time to make sure everything was still working (reconnected power to the negative terminal each time I was testing, obviously), then starting buttoning things up.
All the wires that had extra slack were pulled to the back storage compartment. Anything that was exposed on the runs between the rear door sill and under the third row is wrapped in black harness tape and tucked under floor mats where possible. I wrapped each of the wire connections for the speakers, power, and control cables in more harness tape and positioned the amp where I planned to put the sub (left side of the compartment is really the only space the power cable would reach when tucked under everything), which was fine because I could bundle up the spare wires and tuck them in the compartment where the jack sits on the left side.
Note that it's difficult to reach/adjust any of the knobs while the sub connectors are pointing to the left side while things are plugged in, so you may want to give yourself a bit of slack on that side if you can spare it. Otherwise you're going to be trying to adjust most things while the wires are disconnected.
I pushed back down the plastic "back" of the storage compartment, which pinned the bundle of wires below it, so I tried to make the bundle as flat as possible to not pinch/harm any of the connections. This snapped back on, and I put back the plastic clip that holds it down. I pushed back the down the liftgate skid plate/cover and snapped it back into place, and make sure everything was working one more time - wire harness plugged back in, power coming on, sound output, remote bass knob working, etc.
I attached some double-sided velcro to the underside of the amp to keep it from sliding around, and pressed it into place inside the compartment.
Lastly, to make things look complete, I took the plastic bass knob apart by pulling the plastic cap off, and unscrewed the nut holding the plastic over onto the potentiometer and controller board. I marked and drilled a slim pilot hole in the fuse panel cover, and gradually stepped up to the size where I could push the metal part of the knob/potentiometer through, and re-attach the nut, sandwiching the bass knob (from back to front - controller board, washer, fuse panel, nut, black cap). You can just plug the end of the bass control cable back into the small controller board and snap the fuse panel cover back into place.
Added a Kicker HS10 -
Tapped into the factory amp outputs for the front woofers, wrapped the wires in fabric tape, pulled the door sills to run wires, ran power to the battery through the firewall, modified the bass knob to poke through the fuse panel, and then tucked everything away nice and neat.
Overall the sound is greatly improved but I still need to tweak the EQ on the Sub, audio system, and my phone's equalizer (Poweramp) to get the best sound. Pretty happy with the results, even prouder of my cable management.
Thanks to the other users in this forum who helped map out the wiring locations in the H/K amp and recommended to use the front woofers for the full signal spectrum.
I ended up writing this up as detailed as possible so I could share this with whoever else might be interested in doing something similar. Part of my job is writing a bunch of technical documentation, so hopefully this is as clear as possible. I wrote this from memory from doing this Sunday, so feel free to ask if anything isn't clear and I'll try and help.
Parts list:
Powered Sub (came with wire harness, 2x ring terminals, fuse, butt connector)
Wire Harness tape:
Plastic trim tools: (might have gotten something better, these are okay)
Posi-tap connectors for 16-18 gauge wire:
IDEAL level wire connectors: (knock-off wago connectors)
Car speaker wire:
Other tools needed/optional:
Wire stripper/crimper, ratchet with 10 12 and 14mm sockets, waterproof wire butt connectors, heat shrink, electrical tape, zip ties, sticky backed velcro, flashlight, drill, fish tape or something similar to push wires through a narrow space.
Steps that are probably way too detailed:
Based on this thread/post on the linked post, it was recommended to tap into the front woofers to get as much of the full spectrum signal as possible:
Yet Another H/K System Upgrade
I took out the bolts that hold the amp down under the passenger seat (10mm), then pushed the seat as far forward as I could. Then I disconnected the negative terminal from the battery.
The image labeled FO1-B is the red connector on the amp, and the image is if you had unplugged the connector and it was facing towards you. If you're looking from behind the second row, the red connector is closer and plugged into the left side of the amp, so pins 15/28 are closest to the rear of the passenger seat, and 1/16 are closer to the blue connector (further away).
I disconnected the red/blue connectors. The wires that you need to tap into are labeled in the diagram for F01-B, but they're all right next to each other in a clump of 4:
- Pin 4 - Driver door speaker positive - Brown wire
- Pin 19 - Driver door speaker negative - White wire
- Pin 3 - Passenger door speaker positive - Red Wire
- Pin 18 - Passenger door speaker negative - Blue wire
I used the posi-taps to connect each of them, and ran two lengths of wire (probably 10-15 feet each) to give me plenty of space to cut/crimp later. I marked the end of each strand +/- with blue duct tape and pink duct tape (whatever I had lying around) that was a different color to differentiate them. I connected the red wires to the positive connectors with the positaps, and the matching black wires to the negatives, then wrapped about a foot of the connector with the wire harness tape.
At this point I just wanted to make sure the sound worked, so I connected everything temporarily (over seats, over doors, etc) - I ran the power wire and connected it to the positive terminal of the battery with the ring terminal, and just used some wire nuts to connect the fused wire to the rest of the red wire. I used wire nuts (before I bought the wire lever connectors) to connect each of the speaker wires to the matching wires on the amp harness, matching positive to positive and negative to negative for each wire. I pulled up the silver skid plate that covers the bottom of the lift gate and also the 'back' of the storage compartment, which needed a screwdriver or pry tool to pop out the single plastic clip that was holding it down. Underneath the silver plate is a bolt (12mm) on the left side, near where the jack compartment is - I used this for the ground, with another ring terminal.
All the wires were temporarily connected (speaker wires from positaps, power wire to postive battery terminal, ground to bolt underneath liftgate trim, blue remote turn on wire was left unplugged), so I reconnected the red/blue connectors to the amp, flipped the switches on the amp to "DC offset turn on", "Hi Level input level", and connected the negative terminal on the battery. The power LED on the amp turned blue, and once my speakers turned on, I slowly turned up the gain and made sure sound was coming through the amp - so far so good.
I would end up pausing here and there to keep testing that things were working as I moved and pinched wires under different trim pieces, I would recommend doing the same.
Now was the hard part - hiding all the wires. I disconnected the negative terminal and temporary wire nuts I used for the power on the power wire, and disconnected the ground from the bolt I used in the storage compartment.
I marked a spot with painters tape on all four doors, and wrapped a loop of painters tape around the weather stripping on the corner where it lined up with the mark, then I pulled all 4 doors' weather stripping off and set them aside. I pulled up the 4 door sills (plastic trim pieces helped, but you can just grab them with your hands and pull with a bit of force, they'll snap off. The bottom of the B pillar is held down by the bolt that holds on the bottom of the seatbelt, and I removed that so the seatbelt wasn't attached at the bottom, then pulled the B pillar trim off between the front and back doors. I couldn't actually loosen the bolt on the drivers side seatbelt, but it was very easy to do so on the passengers side.
I tucked the wrapped/taped bundle of wires under the passenger seat around where the seatbelt bolt attaches to the B pillar and pushed the rest of the wire bundle (unwrapped) towards the back of the car in the rear-passenger door sill. I left the wires unwrapped inside the sill, zip tied them to the existing bundle, but wrapped about another foot or so of it in the harness tape where it sticks out of the back side of the door sill so it would blend in with the carpet. Then I snapped the B pillar and door sills back into place, and reattached the bottom of the seatbelt bolt.
I pushed the speaker wires along the passenger rear side under my floormats so they weren't exposed til they were under the third row.
For the driver side, I needed to run the power cable and remote bass knob cable (3.5mm, headphone style cable) up to the front of the car. I wrapped the exposed wire in harness tape til where it meets the door sill for the rear drivers side door, and then pushed the red power wire and one end of the connector through the B pillar next to the driver seat along the sill (this would have been a lot easier if I was able to disconnect the bottom of the seatbelt to fully remove the B pillar cover, but the bolt was too stuck for any of tools and I broke my ratchet trying to free it, but I made it work.
At this point I have as much length of wire as possible for the remote bass knob and the power cable. I ran these up to the driver side door sill. I pulled off the handle for the hood release and pulled off that panel as well, so I could run the bass knob cable behind where the fuse box panel is - I temporarily hung the bass knob cable out of the open fuse panel and started working on the power cable. To get the power cable through the firewall grommet behind the gas/brake pedals, I reached through the engine bay with a long/slim screwdriver and poked it through the grommet, being careful not to shove it through the bundle of wires that was already there. Once the screwdriver was poked through, I attached the power wire to the screwdriver from inside the footwell of the driver seat using a good amount of duct tape to hold it, but not too much where it wasn't slim, and then I used dish soap to grease up the screwdriver, duct tape, and remaining water so I could pull it through back on the engine bay side.
The power connection here is pretty simple. I used some zip ties to pin up the cables so they wouldn't hang loose, then I connected the fused lead from the positive terminal to the power cable I had just pulled through, and used a butt connector to crimp them together. I wrapped the connection with electrical tape and made sure it was secure, and then I pulled the rest of the slack back through the firewall grommet inside the car, leaving just a bit of slack so it wasn't strained on anything.
I pinned the power wire and bass control wire up inside the footwell on the drivers side using zip ties and I left about 6 inches of the bass knob wire hanging out of the front of the fuse panel. The rest of the wires were then zip tied to the wire bundle inside the door sills, and I pulled whatever slack wire back to the rear of the car, and snapped back on the B pillar cover on the drivers side, the panel that sits under the hood release and handle, and both door sills. If you were able to remove the seatbelt bolt on the drivers side, reattach that too.
To recap briefly:
- - Speaker wires tapped into the amp outputs for the front doors, ran to the back through the passenger side door sill and B pillar.
- - Power wire ran from the rear to the front via the drivers side, through the door sills and B pillar, up through the footwell and through the firewall grommet, attached to the positive terminal with a fuse in line.
- - Bass knob wire ran in the same path as the power wire, but sticking out of the fuse panel door from behind.
Now it's just cleaning up and making things look hidden. I reconnected the wire harness to the sub one more time to make sure everything was still working (reconnected power to the negative terminal each time I was testing, obviously), then starting buttoning things up.
All the wires that had extra slack were pulled to the back storage compartment. Anything that was exposed on the runs between the rear door sill and under the third row is wrapped in black harness tape and tucked under floor mats where possible. I wrapped each of the wire connections for the speakers, power, and control cables in more harness tape and positioned the amp where I planned to put the sub (left side of the compartment is really the only space the power cable would reach when tucked under everything), which was fine because I could bundle up the spare wires and tuck them in the compartment where the jack sits on the left side.
Note that it's difficult to reach/adjust any of the knobs while the sub connectors are pointing to the left side while things are plugged in, so you may want to give yourself a bit of slack on that side if you can spare it. Otherwise you're going to be trying to adjust most things while the wires are disconnected.
I pushed back down the plastic "back" of the storage compartment, which pinned the bundle of wires below it, so I tried to make the bundle as flat as possible to not pinch/harm any of the connections. This snapped back on, and I put back the plastic clip that holds it down. I pushed back the down the liftgate skid plate/cover and snapped it back into place, and make sure everything was working one more time - wire harness plugged back in, power coming on, sound output, remote bass knob working, etc.
I attached some double-sided velcro to the underside of the amp to keep it from sliding around, and pressed it into place inside the compartment.
Lastly, to make things look complete, I took the plastic bass knob apart by pulling the plastic cap off, and unscrewed the nut holding the plastic over onto the potentiometer and controller board. I marked and drilled a slim pilot hole in the fuse panel cover, and gradually stepped up to the size where I could push the metal part of the knob/potentiometer through, and re-attach the nut, sandwiching the bass knob (from back to front - controller board, washer, fuse panel, nut, black cap). You can just plug the end of the bass control cable back into the small controller board and snap the fuse panel cover back into place.
