[AndyS84]

Hey guys.

Here’s a step by step guide on how to upgrade the base audio system that a lot of us have over in Europe. If you’re after a plug and play how to, you won’t need to do everything described here as I’ll be making looms etc and bypassing some of the factory looms. I won’t however to cut any of the factory wiring so that it can be returned to base again if needed. I’ll try to describe what you need to do different if you’re doing plug and play but I’m still assuming you’ll make all your harnesses. If you buy them instead, fair play but they aren’t as easy to get for sensible money in the uk.

To make this work, PLEASE DON’T POST A REPLY unless you are correcting an error. I’ll start a parallel thread for comments and opinions.

Please post comments/questions/opinions here; https://f30.bimmerpost.com/forums/sh...6#post27336116

I’ll do this by posting a reply myself for every step over the coming days (and probably couple of weeks).

Let’s see if this will work.

[AndyS84]

Step 1

Planning.

Don’t go to the car and just start pulling it apart. Gather all the parts you need and do any preparation you can before pulling the car apart.

I mentioned that I’m not doing a plug and play previously. This is because I am taking the high level signals from the head unit to my amplifier in the boot (trunk for you Americans) and instead of sending the amplified signals back to the original harness I am creating a new 12 awg harness for the speakers with oem (style) connectors.

Parts required/used:

Alpine PDP-E8000DSP 8 channel class D amplifier and digital signal processor.
Accessories/connectors that come with your choice of amp.
Alpine WAD-PDP1 wireless adaptor.
Connects 2 PC2-102-S Iso extension 5m. NOTE: buy two of these if you want to use the Audison break out harness as it’s intended I.e plug and play.
Connects 2 CT10FD03 Ford break out harness.
Audison Prima APBMW T-H BMW01 break out harness.
AUline 06.330(50) 18 AWG Speaker Cable 50m x 2.
25m x 19mm Cloth Harness Tape.
OEM BMW 51337323509/51337323510 Harman Kardon mirror triangles.
2 X OEM BMW 61132359996 connector (only required if you leave OEM woofers in).
Gladen One 201 3 Way Component Speaker Upgrade kit (for front).
Rainbow IL-C4.2 BMW F-Series 2 Way Component Speaker Upgrade kit (for rear).

Depending on whether or not you buy a 3 way aftermarket components kit you might need the mating connector. In my case I’m buying the above kits and it is included in the 3 way kit.

I’ll update this parts list as I go. For now this is all that’s needed.

[AndyS84]

Step 2

Make you’re extension harnesses.

For this step I am going to be leaving plugs/sockets connected until everything works. Only then will I remove some (not all) and solder the connections. This will help troubleshoot and also allow me to quickly put back in to a useable condition when I need to use the car.

Signal Harness.

Take the 5m Iso extension and push the 8 blades out of the male connector using pliers to hold the blades while pushing. Wait, take a photo so you know where they go back.

Separate the cables in to +/- pairs by colour.

Get someone to hold each pair at the end that still has a connector.

Use a drill chuck to grip a pair. Apply some tension (make sure the cable hardly sags) use the drill to twist each pair so that each twist is around 15mm apart.

Remove from the drill and allow the pair to untwist on its own, your pair will rest at around the 30mm apart. Temporarily tape that pair at the end.

Repeat for all pairs, checking the length against the first as you go. If the length doesn’t match, twist more to shorten or untwist to lengthen.

Push the blades back in to the connector housing making sure +/- go back where they were and the colours go back where they were.

A good way to check is to connect both ends together.

Once your happy with that, tape up the harness with cloth tape.

Questions/Answers

Q. Why are we twisting the wires. A. To reduce noise/interference as this would be amplified by the amplifier and since this is on the input side and is a significant length it needs all the help it can get.

Q. Why cloth tape. A. There’s a reason manufacturers use this. It protects the wiring from rubbing and creates a soft surface that dampens noise if in contact with bodywork and trim.

Make two of these harnesses if you want to use the Audison break out harness as a plug and play and don’t want to replace any speaker wiring. One is for the high level signal input. The other would be returning the amplified signals back to the break out.

I’ll be back tomorrow, modifying the Break out harness and amp input connections.

[AndyS84]

ISO to Alpine input adaptor.

Since I’m not returning the amplified signal to the break out harness, the harness side speaker connector can be removed and used to make the adaptor.

If you intend to use the Audison harness as a true plug and play then don’t do this. Instead buy an iso male to iso female adaptor and cut it in half. Use half for the input adaptor and half for the output adaptor.

Take the break out harness and remove the plug. Like before simply push the 8 blades to remove from the fakra connector until you’re left with a loose connector. This can then be connected to the alpine input connector to make an adaptor.

In my case I’ve wired front left (white) to ch1, front right (grey) to ch2, rear left (green) to ch3, rear right (purple) to ch4. Solid colours are positive and striped colours are negative.

Cut the rca connectors off of the input connector. I wouldn’t normally cut wires so close to a connector but this is where the + and - join to a coaxial rca cable. The wires from the iso connector can now be soldered to the input connector. Remember to place heat shrink over each wire before soldering.

The remote in and channels 5 and 6 inputs can be removed.

Slide the heat shrink over the soldered joints and heat up.

Wrap with cloth tape and you’re all done.

The breakout harness can be taped up also.

[AndyS84]

Power Harness.

Remove the deep tray at the left of the boot and position your amplifier in there. This is where the HiFi and HK amps are located. Simply slide the deep tray towards the rear of the car and pry the front up to remove.

Temporarily position your amplifier between the 4 upstands. Remove the toolkit and carpet covering the battery compartment at the right. Simply twist the quick release above to remove the carpet.

Connect the amplifier power plug to the amp and lay out the wiring to the battery (or terminal box if you prefer although as mentioned in other posts you’ll need additional parts). I’m going straight to the battery with the positive and to the ground connector on the body with the negative.

Where the alpine cable meets the wiring kit, cut the wiring. You can now join these outside of the car. I soldered mine together but if you don’t have a high wattage soldering iron a connector suitable for 8 AWG cable might be more suitable.

Ive chosen to run both + and - around the perimeter of the boot together. I’ve run the power cables once already with a reused amp wiring kit but wasn’t happy with the result. It was too short, too many joins and generally looked crap. It was also pointed out by a fellow bimmerposter that there was a potential for a dead short and not to rely on the amp fuses even for testing so this is my second go at this.

I’ve left the image of the previous attempt (the one with transparent insulation). I think the new harness look much more oem and has a proper fuse (60A).

The fuse is an inline type that uses a grub (or set) screw to clamp the cable. When using tri-flex (flexible with many fine copper cores) tin (solder) the ends first to prevent the screw just pushing its way through the cable and allowing it to become loose.

[AndyS84]

I’m not going to call this step 3 because it can be done at any time but I decided to set the jumpers in the amplifier for high level input. I did this at this point simply because I was reading the manual and thought I wonder what happens if you don’t. Frankly, I don’t fancy the amp going up in smoke so I did it there and then.

Follow the manual instructions for accessing the amp but unless you’re going to be using 2 ohm speakers ignore the bit about flipping the smaller circuit board.

Once in there move the jumpers from the right hand pins (near the capacitors) to left hand (near the input connector) as shown below. Do this for the channels you need. I did it for all because I assumed that if I added a future input I’d rather be safe.

Make sure you only move the high/low level input jumpers only. The others (not shown in 1st photos) are for ground looping. You won’t know if you need these until you test. Well cross that bit then. Hopefully our previous wire twisting and the location of the input harness means we won’t need to so no ground looping for now.

Edit: Ground looping was required in my case. There was a buzzing noise present all the time even with ignition off. I therefore added the yellow jumpers for 1K grounding resistor. It may have worked on the left 2 pins (100 ohm) but I didn’t want to remove again any time soon.

Tip; don’t try gripping and removing one jumper at a time, it’s near impossible. Grip them in pairs.

[AndyS84]

Alpine to ISO 16 way Output Harness

For this I bought a Ford break out harness kit from Halfords to remove the ISO connectors as it was cheaper than buying them separately. I needed 2 male and 2 female plus spare blades with correct wire colours. The kit gave all of that.

Cut the harness so that the black 2 x 8 pin plug can be used. The speaker side plug has the correct colour for wires however the power side has red, yellow and black etc. Remove these by pushing the blades out as done previously when making the input harness.

On the fakra connector push the 8 speaker blades out and cut the wires from the harness. Use these to replace those pushed out on the 2 x 8 connector. Copy the speaker side making sure the colours and stripes match the speaker side. You now have a 16 way (8 channel) ISO connector. You can now strip the wires and tin ready for soldering.

Cut the Alpine harness down by approx half its length and strip and tin the ends. Add heat shrink to each wire and move as far away from the joint as possible whilst soldering.

Solder the wires as follows;

Speaker side connector.

Amp CH1 + (black) to ISO white
Amp CH1 - (white) to ISO white striped
Amp CH2 + (black) to ISO grey
Amp CH2 - (white) to ISO grey striped
Amp CH3 + (black) to ISO green
Amp CH3 - (white) to ISO green striped
Amp CH4 + (black) to ISO purple
Amp CH4 - (white) to ISO purple striped

Power Side connector

Amp CH5 + (black) to ISO white
Amp CH5 - (white) to ISO white striped
Amp CH6 + (black) to ISO grey
Amp CH6 - (white) to ISO grey striped
Amp CH7 + (black) to ISO green
Amp CH7 - (white) to ISO green striped
Amp CH8 + (black) to ISO purple
Amp CH8 - (white) to ISO purple striped

If needed, you can map the outputs via the DSP (Alpine Studio) in the amp but the above will make sure the inputs match the outputs I.e CH1 in is front left and CH1 out is front left and so on.

CH5 out is underseat sub left
CH6 out is underseat sub right
CH7 is boot sub left
CH8 is boot sub right

CH7 and CH8 can be biamped (connected parallel) to give a bridged 2 ohm channel but the jumpers for these channels will need changing in the amp.

As before, heat the heat shrink and tape up. I’ve only taped 2 thirds so I can see wire colours and channel numbers.

Edit: I also revisited this and added a remote in cable as the auto-on doesn’t seem to work. In addition, I heat shrinked the RCA out to eliminate the possibility of it touching the bodywork.

If you didn’t modify the Audison break out harness and you simply want to plug and play you can just connect the speaker side back to the break out harness with a 2nd 5m ISO extension. You’ll still need to do the next part to separate your subs from the front looms and supply a connection between the amp output and subs. Either way that is covered next.

[AndyS84]

Here’s everything laid out that I have so far.

[AndyS84]

Step 3

So you’ve now done all the prep you can without doing things twice. Time to get in the car.

Step 3 is to replace the existing door speakers, add the tweeters, add the crossovers and add any new speakers. The reason for this is that you can still use your car whenever needed as the battery hasn’t been disconnected and you don’t have all the trim removed.

There are plenty of descriptions on how to remove the door cards etc so I’m not going to tell you how to that but here’s a YouTube link that I watched before doing this.

Before starting, wind down your windows so that the window glass is behind the speaker. I did this mainly as my Gladen 201 BMW mid speakers were so much bigger than both the rainbow and hifi oem ones and massive compared to oem base speakers so I was convinced they wouldn’t clear the glass. As it turned out, THEY DO FIT and an added bonus is it makes fitting the Harman Kardon window sails (tweeter cover) easier.

After removing the door card and window sails, unplug and remove the mid speaker by unscrewing the 3 torx screws and disconnecting the connector.

Before fitting the mid speaker, run some self adhesive foam strip around both the front and rear of the mounting flange.

Peel back the soft foam that is glued to the door where the mirror wires go through. Feed your speaker cable through here and connect the connectors to the speaker. Before fitting, bend the connectors so that the wires are towards the front of the car (so they don’t snag on the glass). Fit the new speaker by reusing the torx screws.

Fit the tweeters in to the Harman Kardon window sails simply by pushing them in to the opening until the clips click. Replace the foam and run the tweeter wires in the channel on the rear of the foam.

Connect the tweeters to the crossovers by pushing the plugs and sockets together. In my case these were behind the foam so I just pushed the connectors in to the foam once connected.

Fit the new window sails and tweeters by following the reverse of removal. Be patient with this. The first door it took me a while to figure it out but the second should have been quicker. As it turned out it wasn’t as I made the mistake of lifting the door card up. DONT DO THIS. Instead of removing just the card, you will remove the glass seal. If you then try to pull them apart to refit, all the metal clips fall out.

Next use a thick double sided foam tape, something like 3M VHB tape to tape the crossovers to the rear of the door card. The only place I could find space was just above the light that shines on the floor when the door is open. Connect the input connector to the oem harness and tape up any excess wire to existing wiring runs and each other to reduce any rattly wires.

Re-fit the door cards etc and then repeat for the other front door.

As a note here, the crossovers have two wire loops acting as jumpers that need cutting (or not) depending on preference. I cut the wires on one door but not the other to compare. Not cutting the wires made the tweeters a little too loud but not uncomfortable (just a bit too much treble). Cutting them meant you could hardly tell they’d been added. So I’ll return to the car and rejoin the wires as the oem head unit is heavily equalized with lots of treble. I can rectify and tune with the dsp amp rather than cutting wires.

I’ll take photos when I revisit this. I was rushing today running out of daylight.

Note: I will be coming back and editing this step with rears speakers but realised I needed a tweeter mount and grille.

[AndyS84]

Step 4

Fit the amp and wiring.

To do this, all the carpets and trims in the boot (trunk) will need to be removed in this order;
1. Lift out the centre carpet.
2. Remove the clip at the front right of the storage compartment below and lift the carpet out.
3. Remove the rear boot lock trim. There are 4 clips that need prying out with trim removal tool. Once removed pull the bottom towards the front of the car and upwards.
4. Remove the toolkit and carpet covering the battery by twisting the release thumb screw.
5. Remove the 4 bolts holding the rear seats in place so that the top of the seats can be pushed away slightly.
6. Remove the right wheel arch carpet. There are 2 clips holding this in place, one just behind the rear seat at the top of the boot and one at the top under the rear glass. The rubber seal around the boot also traps this carpet in place so will need peeling away. The covers around the boot arms will need unclipping and removing. Finally the carpet can be pulled out starting at the rear and working towards the front. When the rear is loose, push the rear seat forward as the carpet tucks around the back side of the seat.
7. Remove the deep tray as done previously.
8. Remove the left arch carpet (this is a mirror of the right (almost) but all clips etc are opposite those on the right.

To hold the amp, make a plate 5mm thick mdf or plastic that picks up the existing bobbins and screw intended for the HK amp. I slotted the plate at the edge with 2 7mm slots that slide around the bobbins but under the flanges. I drilled a 13mm clearance hole for the 3rd bobbin so it would drop over the flange and then drilled a 7mm hole for the securing stud.

I will upload a drawing of this at some point.

Fit the amp to the plate.

Connect the power cable to the amp and run to the battery compartment (don’t connect yet). Use the plastic channels that are already used to cover cables and route as shown in the pictures around each arch and to the front of the fuse box.

Whilst the rear seat back is loose, lift the seat base up and out. There are two clips at the front of the seat. Lift the front with enough pressure to release each side. You can now remove the trim at the bottom of the left rear door opening by simply removing the single clip and then by pulling up. You can now feed your 5m extension harness and speaker cables through here and up behind the seat, over the arch and back to the amp.

Before replacing carpets I used a 3m double sided pad to mount the WiFi module to the amp plate and connected to the amp via usb cable.

Replace all your rear carpets (except the left side unless you’re happy to remove it again) and trims and replace the seat and replace the 4 bolts. Note you will no longer be able to fit the deep tray above the amp so will need the shallow one. I’ll add the part number to the parts list at the beginning.

[AndyS84]

Step 5

Terminate and tidy the speaker wiring.

To return the output signal to the door speakers, take the 4 pin subwoofer connector that came with the 3 way kit and remove the centre pins. Simply pri open the latch on the connector, push the pins down with a screwdriver and pull out.

Cut the cable short (about 1 inch from connector), strip and tin the wires. Strip and tin the speaker cable and solder together. Solder the striped speaker cable to the black cable and the clear speaker cable to the red cable. Remove the pins from the connector again and heatshrink the joins. I doubled up the heatshrink for extra insulation. I also put a third heatshrink over both positive and negative.

To supply the output signal to the underseat woofers, crimp a fork connector to the end of the speaker cables. If you want to be safer like I did then solder them also. Wrap with heatshrink. Again, I wrapped twice individually and then a third time over the pairs.

Tape the front left together with the woofer connectors about 2 inch longer than the door speaker connectors.

Repeat for the right hand side.

Position the woofer connector level with the woofer grill on both sides and route around the edge of the car and rear seat.

Pull any excess speaker cable in to the boot (trunk). And then tape all runs together.

I made the mistake of not labelling each cable up so had to do this at the point of connecting the 2 x 8 way Iso connector by using a multimeter and continuity test to identify each one before cutting off the excess in the boot. It was a pain reaching both ends so if you’re reading this before starting label them as you pull them through.

Once each is identified, you can cut off any excess cable in the boot and then solder to the ISO connectors as I listed previously. I plugged the connectors together and then cut to suit.

I won’t go over soldering, heatshrinking and taping again. One bit of advice however is don’t let you’re soldering iron get too hot as the insulation on the speaker cable melts easy and the flux in the solder burns off too quick making it hard to avoid dry joints. If you don’t have one, I’d recommend buying a soldering iron with temperature control before attempting any of this.

[AndyS84]

Step 6

Remove all the trims and carpet, hide all the wiring and connect everything up.

I’ll come back to this but for now here are a few pics.

[AndyS84]

Step 7

Power up the amp and set up.

Before powering up the amp, disconnect the speaker connector from the amp and turn the volume at the head unit to minimum.

Install the PDP-E802DSP software (not the E800DSP, it doesn’t work). Don’t install the USB driver either. If you do, once installed, it doesn’t work and it stops the WiFi from working for longer than 15 seconds before timing out.

Connect the amp via usb and when it shows as an external drive, access the drive and delete the file named software.

Download the PDP-E802DSP firmware from the alpine site and drag and drop to here.

Temporarily connect the remote in to the battery as the auto on is not yet set up.

Open the Sound Lab app and go to the last tab. Change the wireless security to none. It will make you wait 60 seconds.

Go to your wireless connections in the pc and connect to PDP-E800. Once connected open the Sound Lab software. If you’re lucky you’ll see a blue WiFi symbol at the top right. Click the power icon at the bottom right to connect to the amp. You should see the connection established by the last icon at the top right. If this stays stable you’re good to carry on. If it doesn’t and it kicks you out, you’re on your own. It took me all day to get this to work as described above. Depending on your version of windows, you might need some other combination of firmware, drivers and sound lab version. Sorry can’t help any more here as mine just started working hours after the last change I made so I have no idea why.

Once connected, go to the inputs tab and select input configuration. Set ch1 out to 100 under ch1 in, ch2 out to 100 under ch2 in and so in for ch3 and 4. Set ch5 out to 100 under CH1 in and ch6 out to 100 under ch2 in. Set everything else to 000.

Go to the equaliser tab and select ch 1. Set the high pass to chebychev, 186Hz and -30db. Set the low pass to butterworth, 9806Hz and -6db. Set the output level to -3.5db. Tweak the equaliser to you liking once you’ve connected the speakers.

Copy the above for ch2, ch3 and ch4. Note there is a copy setting function if you right click on the channel.

Go to the equaliser tab for ch 5. Set the low pass to chebychev, 134Hz and -30db. Set the output level to -3.5db.

Copy the above for CH6.

Read the manual for your component kit. This will tell you what crossover frequencies to use. Those above are for the gladen 201 bmw kit so with any other kit you may need to adjust the chopping frequency.

Set ch7 and ch8 to mute. Edit: set the volume for these channels to 0 as well as pressing mute. Muting didn’t seem to work and still showed an output on the output tab which will lead to overheating and going in to protect mode since there is no load.

Edit: Go to the output tab and set the speaker detect to off if you have 3 ohm speakers like I do. You should see the red speaker icon at the top left go off. This is because the speaker detect doesn’t work unless set to 2 or 4 ohms and your speakers match this impedance since it does an impedance test. If you’re unsure of the impedance of your speakers do a resistance test across the + and - (whilst disconnected). In my case they read 2.9-3.1. Check for yourself before turning it off by hovering your cursor above the icon. In my case it said all but 2 speakers (rears, which are 4 ohm) were not connected. Not only does it display this message but it goes in to protect mode and disables those speakers.

Connect your speaker connector and gradually increase the volume to a sensible level. You can now adjust the equalisers to your liking. Note, mute all outputs except the one you’re tuning when you do this and don’t forget the copy settings function.

Once you’re happy, make sure you tell the dsp to save these otherwise you’ll lose all this work when the amp is turned off. To do so, simply right click on the Preset 1 and select send to dsp (or something to that effect). Also, right click again and export a copy to your pc. This is because if you try recalling the settings from the dsp, some things return to default. Instead you can import from the pc, tweak and resend to the dsp. Trust me it’s much easier.

You might have noticed there are a few workarounds here. That’s because the software is crap. I was tempted to swap the amp out for an Audison Prima Bit 8.9 that I have but resisted. It was worth resisting, the power of this amp/dsp is worth the hassle. I cannot say how this car has gone from the worst sounding car I’ve had to the best (even better than the ones I’ve upgraded previously).

[AndyS84]

Step 8

Enjoy you’re hard work, go for a drive and play you’re favourite stuff. Pull up somewhere remote, hook up the laptop and tweak whilst the volume is up and there are no neighbours to piss off. Then go home and reward yourself with a 🍺.

Now open up to comments.

Thanks for not commenting/posting so far. The thread is nice and clean and will hopefully be easy for people to follow in month/years to come.

I’ll probably go back and tidy some bits up and add some more photos. Ill also upload the dsp setting file when I’ve finished tuning.

Let me know if there’s any more detail you’d like or anywhere you’d like me to elaborate.

Cheers

[rm163603]

Amazing work!

I installed this amp on my e82 135i about a year ago. I got mine from Amazon when it was really cheap, sub £400.

My experiences were pretty much exactly the same as you.

You deserve a medal for going through all that (and trust me I know what you've been through!) and spending the time to write it all up.

I had a bit of alternator whistle which I've largely solved by adjusting the gains and with the ground loop.

I can also mirror what you said about the software, it's awful. I need to go back and tweak mine a bit more as I didn't realise that some things got lost if you used the settings from the device to edit your eq settings.

I used the mids and tweeters from the individual audio system from the e90/92 and the sub from a HK system. The impedances worked out ok.

In my car I've fitted it in the same location as the factory HK amp; inside the rear quarter panel.

One final upgrade I'm going to do is to use some wire from a used audio loom I bought on ebay to pin the output from the head unit directly in to the to the amp. The space bethind the dash is tight for the adapter and I can do away with it that way. Also I'm hoping using twisted pair cabling for everything might help with the whistle but from your experience I don't think so.

The build quality isn't amazing. The connectors that go in to the amp come in for special mention, being really flimsy feeling. The power connector especially doesn't sit tight home when you plug it in at least not on mine. It's latched in place and won't come out but feels like it could move around a lot.

Some standard screw terminals would be way better.

I would also be really interested to know what connectors these are as I'd really like to make my own loom and crimp my own terminals to reduce the number of splices needed as much as possible.

One question... Did you run a remote switch wire or did you use the auto power on feature? I'm running the remote wire from the head unit power but if it's not needed I will do away with it in my rework.

Also why does this not have A2DP? If anyone if thinking of streaming their music directly to the amp wirelessly forget it! It does work quite well when hooked up to a usb cable but you then have the issue that the main volume control in the car doesn't actually change the volume anymore. Opening an app each time to change the volume isn't workable.

I did install the alpine remote volume control but it's too hard having two volume controls so I got rid and have another a2dp adapter connected to the most bus now.

One thing I should note is that the BMW volume knob from the E82 head unit fits straight on to the alpine remote volume knob so it can be made to look quite stock.

My car sounds really good I must say but it really isn't a plug and play solution although if the support was better and the software wasn't so flaky it could be.

Well done again and thanks for taking the time.

[armenio1986]

great work!

I did something very similar on my f30 inspired by your post here, mainly related to the split for the independent subwoofer harness.

I also had to add an amplifier with DSP, without that the sound behaved very badly, with distortions.

Thanks for sharing all this work