CunningLinguist

I picked up my new Octavia VRS TSI 5 months ago. As I'm something of an audiophile, I opted for the Canton upgrade but I've always found it slightly disappointing. It is not a bad system so to speak, I would even go as far as to say that it sounds "quite good". But the sound was certainly not as weighty as I'd hoped, even with the subwoofer maxed out. And with the volume up high, the amplitude of the bass frequencies seemed to be reduced (perhaps to protect the speakers and reduce the number of warranty claims?) So I decided to invest in an after market upgrade with the aim of a louder, clearer, weightier sound. On my previous car, a 2007 Honda Civic, a friend helped me to carry out a custom upgrade and whilst it did improve the sound, it took us several months to complete (working the odd Saturday here and there) and the end result, whilst louder did not seem very refined or well balanced. To avoid a repeat of these problems, this time I approached John Kleis, a car audio specialist in Reading and they have now completed the upgrade. They have done a fantastic job as the sound quality now surpasses anything I could have imagined! The plan was to take the outputs from the amplifier under the passenger seat and feed them through to the boot into a digital processing unit (Audison bit Ten) before passing it in to a 1000W amp (JL Audio XD1000/5 v2). There were complications here because the output signals from the amp all covered a restricted range of frequencies to be sent to specific speakers. So to overcome this, the outputs were combined via another box (an AudioControl LC8) to get a signal across the complete frequency range before passing it into the digital processing unit! The front component door speakers were replaced with Hertz ESK165Ls and an 8” Hertz ES200 Subwoofer in a ported box was added into the boot (with banana clips for easy removal). The various boxed components have all been secured neatly underneath the boot floor and are therefore hidden away. The balance and fader controls in the head unit still work as do the subwoofer settings. To reduce road noise, a considerable amount of sound insulation was added into the front doors and around the boot cavity. I also had the sound generator disabled by the dealer. The total price for the upgrade including labour was just under £2000 but the resulting sound quality is mindblowing. The system seems to particularly shine for vocals and jangly guitar solos. The guitar solo work within Nils Lofgren's "Keith Don't Go" from the album "Acoustic Live" is particularly stunning. There is plentiful bass even with the subwoofer well below the maximum setting, but it never overwhelms the rest of the frequency spectrum. Apparently the upgrade would have been considerably easier without the Canton upgrade. The technicians at John Kleis were very knowledgable and took a lot of care to calibrate the digital processing unit using microphones and audio signal analysis. If anyone is considering a similar upgrade and would like to sample the end result, do let me know and I can demo the system for you. I live in Basingstoke.

This morning on my commute to work the Columbus unit turned itself off inexplicably. It had operated flawlessly prior to that, so I'm hoping it was a one off glitch. Anyone else had this type of issue?