HAPPY DAYS!
Well, with Easter giving me a bit of time to do some investigation, I finally got an opportunity today to take another look at things to see if I could work out what was going wrong with my Alpine upgrade.
Like many of you, I was experiencing issues with the volume of the Gong, the PDC beeps and the Bluetooth phone sounded terrible and very tinny.
It turns out that the trick to fix pretty well all of these issues (for me anyhow) came from a little hint from Superdaws :goodone:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Superdaws
Hey guys, i got my 268 kit and have done 80% of the install. One thing i noted with the crossover cables that get mounted int he door panels. One of the cables (single one out) was labelled as "Radio", but that was different to what it instructed me to connect it to in the manual. I went with the manual and connected the tweeter to the single cable end. I had read of it happening beofre and aparently its a labelling problem with the kit?
Mids and tweeters working fine after test, just gotta finish off drivers side cables and then code... Do you remember how you hooked up the diplexers?
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Of course I was convinced that I had wired everything up correctly but this little tid bit was enough to convince me to take another look. I pulled the drivers door card off again and took a look.
Here is the label on the wires for the crossover:
As you can see, it clearly says "Radio/Headunit" which of course is how I had it connected. Interestingly though, the wire colours didn't seem to match particularly well - as in, the tweeter wires were yellow with coloured stripes and so was the crossover wire that was labelled as above, yet the wires that were connected to the mid and the tweeter were both blue with a white stripe (just like the original wires that came from the head unit).
Here's another pic.:
The blue wire comes from the head unit and the yellow one goes to the tweeter.
So, armed with Superdaws comments, I decided to swap the wires around so that the yellow wires from the crossover coupled with the yellow wires going to the tweeter and the blue wires from the crossover connected to the blue wires coming from the head unit like so:
I connected everything up and without even putting the card back in place, fired up the stereo....
The difference in volume and sound quality was like chalk and cheese! All of a sudden, I could hear the mid working and the over emphasised tweeter was banished - job done!
I put everything back together and then quickly corrected the passenger side connections. I've tested all the key items and I'm VERY VERY pleased to say the least.
- The Gong volume is back (now set at 50% in the volume setting menu).
- The PDC volume is mostly back (set at 100% in the volume setting menu) but if I could have it a bit louder then I would. It's certainly a lot better than it was.
- The Bluetooth phone volume and sound quality is back to where it used to be.
And most importantly, the stereo finally sounds the way it should have from the start. The sound quality is a marked improvement over the standard (Professional) stereo but still not as good as the B&O system in our Audi. I suppose it goes to show that a fair amount goes into getting these stereos to sound good.
So many thanks to Superdaws for drawing my attention to the wire labelling issue
The moral to this story is, if you are experiencing the same issues as I was (low gong and PDC volume and terrible Bluetooth phone sound) then I can pretty much guarantee that you have the same connection issues I was experiencing.
Now that it is sorted, I think that I might see what difference changing the CIC module back to "stereo" - just because I can!