VP Electricity

Friend of ours asked us to upgrade the audio in his 2012 A3 recently. It has RNS-E, and no Bose and he wanted to retain that for now (probably put CarPlay in later).

He's a drummer on the side, so he likes the bass notes to be immediate and realistic. As any A3 owner knows, the car has almost no room at all to hide anything.

First thing we did was pull the RNS-E and stuff the Bose pin and the front preout pins. This flattened the non-Bose EQ (Bose EQ lives in the Bose amp) and gave us front and rear preouts.





The preamps signals went to a Mosconi D2 100.4DSP. This is a 4-channel amp and a 6-channel DSP processor in one module. The last two channels are RCA outputs for another amp - in this case a matching D2 500.1. These are small enough to fit under the floor next to the spare.








Then Tom Miller built a sub enclosure in the driver's rear corner:




He relocated the sat tuner module:




And build a cover for the subwoofer.




Here's the back end assembled:





As far as the front stage goes, the A3 has great potential, but it's easy to screw up, too. The tweeter locations at the bottom of the A-pillars can sound great, but most passive 2-way component sets will play the tweeter way too loudly. IN this car, we used a set of Morel Hybrid 602 components in a fully-active mode - we ran 100x2 to the tweeters, crossover-filtered in the DSP, and 100x2 to the midbass drivers, also in the DSP. Then we were able to control output levels and equalization on a per-channel basis, without any of those adjustments affecting any of the other speakers. We also could adjust in the time domain when the sound from each speaker reaches the driver's head. This gives us a cohesive sound stage with detail all the way across.




We lost the front speaker pics, so I am inserting for reference some pics of a similar install, with Morel Elate drivers, in a Passat. The concept is the same:










Car sounds great, is completely usable, can be returned to stock, and works seamlessly with the RNS-E.