andyb40

Hi, just bought an Audi mk3 2017, petrol 2.0 TFSI. What a great car, reasonably well specced but from what I can see the standard sound system (no rear speakers), no B&O.

In an attempt to improve the sound, is it worth:
a) Buying standard rear speakers which includes the enclosure and fitting them (cheap off ebay). I've read the car then needs coding to "see" the rear speakers?
b) At the same time replace the front and back door speakers with better quality ones? plug and play?

I'm not after some incredible quality sound system, but the standard one seems pretty poor! Hoping to improve things a bit without having to resort to subs/amps.

If you asked what I don't like about it...I put on some music, turned up the volume and everything sounded dull, no clarity. Bass and treble settings were at mid point.

Cheers :-)

GIJoe111

try tweaking on the treble and bass levels WHILE adjusting the sound field. for example, if you have the setting on surround level maxed, there is more mid range coming from back speakers. try turning that down or adjusting the sound field slightly forward.
If you replace the speakers, reply with what you put in and if it made a difference...

andyb40

No rear speakers so can't adjust sound field. Original question was weather putting in original rear speakers will improve sound or not, or whether to go aftermarket.

GIJoe111

for those that think the sound system in the TT is lacking bass, crank this tune up with bass setting at 2 o'clock and treble around 2:30 in settings....

andyb40

Well I'm an idiot LOL, I climbed into the back of the car and there is sound! And the missus whose car it is says she happy with the sound quality. I did as you suggested and played with bass/treble while adjusting fader and it's as good as it can get without upgrading compontents :-)

hwalkerTTS

Don’t mess around buy a plug and play speaker kit from SCR: https://www.skiptoncarradio.com Based in the UK but will ship world wide. I have a huge thread with pics on here with my experience installing their front and rear kits! 2 years later and I love them!

hwalkerTTS

https://www.audiworld.com/forums/tt-...grade-3000498/

hwalkerTTS

You will have to pull the front door panel to confirm which front speakers you have. You either have a closed enclosure like mine or a raised spacer. The raised spacer can take a larger speaker, 8”. The enclosure like mine can take a 6.5” speaker. You need to know this so you order the correct kit. The rear speakers 6.5” are all the same and use that triangle piece they provide on my set. Hardest part was carefully popping out the dashboard tweeters, get yourself a trim removal kit and go slowly... The door panels are easy The rear seat bottom has to come out to make the rear side panels easier to take out... If you have any questions just ask.

Dinglydell

I was in a similar situation with my 2016 Mk3 Audi TT Sport. Poor sound quality from the factory system. From the factory, my car had door 6 speakers: 2 mid-bass 165mm drivers in the door, 2 tweeters in the dashboard firing toward the windscreen and 2 rear 130mm mid-range speakers in the rear panels. From the factory they all driven directly by the MMI2 head units built in amplifier and there was no separate amplifier. The front door speaker wires are connected in parallel with the dash tweeter wires somewhere behind the dashboard and the factory tweeters have cheap and simple high pass filter capacitors installed in them.

I started off my upgrade journey with good quality Focal component speakers to replace the door units and dash tweeters. Install is tricky because of limited space to fit crossovers and run the speaker wires but the Audi door cards are very easy to dismantle and go back together without problem. I added the usual sound deadening and made up proper MDF speaker adapter rings to accommodate the Focal door driver units. After doing this the sound was probably worse than with the factory speakers, far too harsh. No amount of fiddling with the MMI treble and bass settings could improve this to an acceptable level.

Next I added a Kicker Key 200.4 amplifier, disconnected the rear panel speakers and bi-amped the front speakers. The Key amp has a DSP to correct the factory equalisation and comes with a microphone and runs a clever auto setup. After much experimentation, the result was basically still a little too harsh sound and lacking in bass but it was now much louder and able to play at high levels without distortion.

To add some bass I fitted an budget ultra-compact active subwoofer in the spare wheel compartment. The unit is 70mm deep and at least 20mm too deep to fit under the driver or passenger seat - I don't know of any sub that can be used under the seats in a Mk3 Audi TT. The bass is now acceptable considering the limited volume of free air between the sub and the rear boot floor card/carpet.

Overall, I've spent a fair bit of money and all I have really achieved is slightly better bass and a much louder system. It's impressive for playing loud electronic or dance music but fairly poor for listening to well produced high quality music, particularly natural vocals and mid-high tones. I believe the problem is that the MMI MIB2 head unit is applying lots of undesirable equalisation to compensate for the cheap factory speakers. In the absence of RCA line level outputs I'm forced to use the head unit speaker outputs to drive my amp and then the DSP has done its best to compensate for all the factory equalisation. Furthermore, II am beginning to think that the Audi MMI head unit applies a different equalisation at different volume levels (like a kind of variable loudness control).

Overall, if I were to do this all again I'd just get the active subwoofer and leave everything else as factory standard and save myself a lot of time and money.

Not wishing to hijack this thread but does anyone know if anything can be done about the factory head unit equalisation to recode it (re-parameterize?) to output a flat frequency response? I've read conflicting reports that this can (or can not) be done with VCDS or other diagnostic software tools that I don't have. I've also read that there may be solutions that can break into the fibre optic M.O.S.T bus to decode the audio (Zen-V) - too expensive for me unfortunately.

hwalkerTTS

Only way to flatten the frequency is with a DSP amp between your head unit and your speakers. Audison has a few that will plug directly into the Audi MIB Hex plug. Easiest way without re-wiring everything. It will be expensive... SCR may also have a DSP amp from Feelart that should also be plug and play...