Random thoughts and rants from an ongoing install...

Nillaz

I understand engine/tranny work from a technical perspective, but have never had much hands on experience. This doesn't surprise me in the least.

There are several pain points here. There's nothing convenient about doing this whatsoever and I'm not sure how to explain it so that it makes sense, and Slik's isntall video doesn't do it much justice. You have to disconnect the door harness where it joins up with the body of the car behind the edge of the door. This requires opening the door to various degrees while reaching your hand in the space between the door and the body of the car in order to flip the latch securing the harness. You have to work at an awkward angle and space is relatively tight if you have larger hands. I'm left handed so it wasn't terrible doing this on the passsenger side but the drivers side was a royal pain.

After that you have to pull the car side of the harness into the vehicle from behind the kick panel so you can drill out a hole for your speaker wire. It's only held in place by a single clip that pops right out, but once again if you have larger hands it's awkward and there isn't a lot of slack in the wire to play with.

Those are the easy parts. Actually feeding the wire through the grommet inside the door skin sucks hard. You have to use one hand to feed the speaker wire through the grommet from inside the door skin while basically massaging the tubing from outside the door to make sure the wire doesn't get caught on the ridges of the rubber. You're basically feeling the wire through the sheath while it's feeding through. When the wire finally gets to the end of the tubing it has to make a 90 degree turn to exit the harness and the opening is far too small to get into with fingers or needle nose pliers. I had to use tweezers and a tiny screwdriver to guide it out.

Once you've manages to get the speaker wire fed from inside the door to inside the car you have to put it back together again. This is easier than taking it apart but is still awkward. You can't let the latch on the harness open all the way or it gets locked open and you have to take it back out and reset the locking tabs.

Everything here is doable but it's a miserable experience. Much swearing was heard throughout my neighborhood yesterday afternoon.

I'm using the new XDi v2 1100.5 and am extremely impressed. It sounds fabulous for such a small amp, and doesn't have the flat sound I usually associate with class D. I wouldn't call it a warm sound but it's perfectly respectable. Even at insane volume levels it barely gets warm to the touch so that's a bonus as well. Best of all, it seems to be completely free of RF interference, which I've had issues with in the past.

If I had to find something to nitpick it would be the placement of the adjustments behind the shroud. The shroud is held in place by some of the smallest hex screws I've ever seen used on an amp. I had to get out my precision screwdriver set to take it off. All in all, not a big deal, but I wish they had used a more common hex size.