Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Morgan Photo Gallery IMPROVING THE CX SOUND SYSTEM

One of the slightly disappointing aspects of my recently acquired 2020 Plus Four has been the factory installed OE in car entertainment bluetooth playback system. The bluetooth works fine, although the volume control is inconveniently hidden under the passenger dash, and the sound via 2 x door mounted, and 2x rear bulkhead mounted 5 inch speakers is underwhelming. How so? Well it is muddy, lacking detail, bass light, and, as has been noted elsewhere lacks a fader to balance sound front and rear, a balance which as supplied produces sound seemingly only from the rears.
Given that a Morgan is not an environment that lends itself to the recreation of a concert hall acoustic, I resolved to try and significantly improve the sound system without throwing a fortune at it - with all the diminishing returns implicit. A bit of desk research here soon reveals that the factory set up is a Kenwood 4 channel Power amp (mounted in a void behind the rear bulkhead, and 4 x Kenwood KFC-S1366 5 inch 2 way speakers. This is a very modest set up - the speakers retail around £25 a pair, and the amp is around £70 (I think). And of course the way it is configured by Morgan, fed by a bluetooth unit, is conceived to work with your phone as the playback source.
For my needs the basic configuration is fine, And I decided the simplest and optimum value way to proceed was to upgrade the speakers - and see if that produces worthwhile improvements.The first constraint to consider was clearance for the door speakers, given I could see from the spec drawings that the Kenwoods are very shallow implying not much clearance in the door mounts. So the choice for the fronts was limited to similarly shallow options. This led me online via Car Audio Centre to select Focal ISU 30 - a 2 way component Speaker System at £150 - reduced from £200. This comprises a relatively shallow 5 inch woofer with a separate tweeter with a crossover filter for the tweeter integrated into the feed wire.
I also bought for the rear Focal Access 130AS- a 2 way component speaker system at £100 reduced from £225.
At this stage I have just fitted the fronts - and will report back later once i've fitted the rears. However, I can report that the front fitment has already transformed the sound.


The photo shows the OE Kenwood beside the replacement Focal - the Focal is around 5mm deeper but does fit without fouling the door skin.


For the benefit of anyone who might be tempted to do something similar, let me talk you through the steps.
First you must remove the door card. You will find it comes in 2 sections. The lower section is held in place by 4 x small posidrive screws with chrome cups under the door edge. These are easy enough to remove except the innermost which is shielded by the running board and requires a very short stubby, or the horizontal ratchet that I used. Next you need to remove the leather strap door pull by removing the 2 allen bolts. Be careful with washers which stick to the leather. Now for the Austin Allegro/Morris Marina etc door catch - that comes away once you remove the allen headed screw and detach the inner rod from the spring loaded nylon bridge clip. And last bu by no means least, there is a pig of a plastic plug up towards the hinge.The plug in the lower trim card overlaps and also passes through the upper trim card and into a metal retaining clip. The plug catches on this bendy clip and is a real fiddle to remove, and yields eventually to considerable force.
Now you can start on the upper card. This is retained by two self tapping screws near the door catch, and then by 4 or 5 of the plastic plugs which are friction fit into the wooden door frame. I promise you, they do come out - eventually yielding to far more force than you imagine is desirable - basically I pulled and tugged and applied leverage with a variety of improvised tools until they suddenly release their limpet like grip.


The photo shows the inner of the upper door card with the plastic retaining plugs visible along the top edge.

With the 2 part door card free it soon becomes apparent how poor the factory speaker installation is. No wonder there is so little sound from the front speakers. The speakers mount to a metal bracket attached to the wooden door frame, and only partially behind the perforated section of the leather trim covering the upper door card. The sound from the speaker must pass through the sandwich formed by the door card itself - rigid composite material around 5mm thick and punched with quite widely spaced holes probably reducing the card mass by only about 50% where it sits next to the speaker. What sound escapes these holes then has to travel through another 5mm of foam padding, and finally through the perforated leather with much more leather than its needle fine holes. No wonder you can't hear them! That is the basic problem, but equally there has been no attempt to improve the acoustic properties of the door cavity. No sound deadening. No wadding. No speaker isolation. Having gone to all this effort, it seemed sensible to make a few acoustic improvements - so I bought some Canopus sound deadening material and cut it to shape and stuck it to the door skin, and generally filed the voids with some speaker wadding I had from a previous installation. I also purchased a "Roadkill" speaker insulation kit for later fit.



The photo shows the upper door card with the hole I cut adjacent to where the speaker sits in order to improve sound transmission into the cabin.
So attached to this post is a photo showing the door minus the upper and lower door cards, and with Canopus sound deadening lining the door skin. White acoustic wadding fills as many voids as is practicable.

The new 5 inch Focal woofer simply screws into the existing OE speaker retaining frame. I used some piggy back spade connectors to allow the existing speaker wiring toi attach to the Woofer terminals along with the additional wires to feed the separate Tweeter.

The installation is completed by fitting a pair of alloy speaker grilles (obtained for about £15 via amazon, and some speaker cloth. This tidies up the external appearance of the aperture cut in the door card. The Tweeter attaches to the outer face of the door card with screws and the wiring passes through a hole cut in the card.

The finished installation looks quite neat to my eye, and the sound transformation is excellent. I will make a further post showing a wider angle view of the cabin , and will later report back with progress on the next phase to replace the rear speakers.

However bad the CX OE speaker installation is, the Classics are worse. Like you I updated the (4 inch) footwell speakers for modest improvement. Then I discovered rear speaker wiring on my Roadster, a legacy from the 4 seater version offered for a while. I installed speakers in side panels although only enough room for quality 3.5 inch units. Powered from my Sony DAB/FM Bluetooth radio this at least brought the sound closer to my ears and gave me a fader option between the two pairs.



Still chronically lacking in bass though so a cheap sub woofer with 8 inch speaker and its own power amp was added recently. It's fitted unseen attached via brackets to upper side of passenger footwell. Electrical installation was easy as the radio had its own dedicated sub woofer feed and all cables needed were supplied. Fitting was a journey though, thread here.



This has transformed the sound experience, you can feel bass now as well as hear it

Richard.
So I should count my blessings! Well at least the CX has provision for 5 inch speakers front and rear. The transformation thus far having just done the front pair is already dramatic, and I am hoping the next phase being the addition of 2 x 5 inch woofers and 2 x tweeters in the rear will add a further dimension of quality and enhance the bass. However, I suspect like you I will be then tempted to try and add a compact sub-woofer somewhere, although I am not sure how I will get a feed for both signal and power.As for location - perhaps in the void behind the rear bulkhead in which the existing rear speakers are located. Anyway, let me see how I feel after I have completed the new set up in the rear.

There is power back there & some space. I added a thread on fitting a system as mine came without secondhand & I bought from a breaker a plus 6 sound system.

Thread link is here
https://www.talkmorgan.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/814172/1

John
Yes I had seen your posts, and found them very helpful in doing what I have thus far done. Thank you. I gather what you have done is more or less to retro fit the standard factory OE Kenwood set up from a Plus Six into your Plus Four? So I am presuming maybe you are experiencing the issue with the sound mix primarily from the rear? Assuming that is, that you fitted the door speakers into the factory housing, and kept the factory door cards as supplied ,that block out and dull the sound? Of course it is a bit radical to make a large speaker sized hole in the door card and introduce an after market speaker grille. I didn't try it, but I would wager you could get a significant further improvement in sound from the factory Kenwoods in the front, simply by carrying out the mods I have detailed to the door cards and grille and with the introduction of sound deadening and wadding to the door voids.
Best
Peter

Peter,
yes that is what I did I insulated the doors & I removed the foam behind the leather on the door card by the speaker. For me it is OK but I can understand the urge to improve.
I also insulated the back of the rear metal panel the speakers fit to.

iI should probably have added in my original comments that whist the actual speakers are 5 inch units the external aluminium speaker grilles are 4i nch units - meaning that the hole I cut in the upper door trim is slightly smaller in circumference than the actual speaker that sits behind it (although the hole is plenty large enough not to hinder the sound emitted). This is because the actual location of the speaker does not align particularly well with the perforated section of the door card, and the hole you must cut if you centre it on the centre of the speaker takes the hole down to the waistline edge of the trim. This becomes more pronounced and intrusive if you opt for 5 inch grilles which will not fit as neatly and will look visually misplaced despite being perfectly aligned with the actual speaker.