Avants Portland Tech Session w/ Musicar Northwest
BYE BYE BOSE
Written by Jeff Jones
There are very few aspects of the Porsche 718 Spyder that are underwhelming, but chief among them is the audio system. I know…it’s a convertible. I know…it’s a sports car and I should only care about listening to the engine and exhaust. What can I say…music is a big part of my life, and I love cruising with the top down on a sunny day listening to some new indie rock band. Okay, that’s a total lie…it’s more likely to be Billie Eilish or Taylor Swift…maybe some 90s hip-hop. I did add the Bose upgrade to my build, but the old saying of “no highs no lows must be Bose” still holds true. I was going to just live with it, but the stars aligned and I was introduced to Nick at Musicar Northwest. Nick has posted on Rennlist about these staged upgrades they have for Porsche, from mild to wild in three steps. We started talking about options and it quickly became clear that I was going to end up with another modification to this car. All it needed was this one last thing to be “perfect”…really, I swear.
Fast forward a few months, and Nick mentioned that the Portland chapter of Avants was interested in hosting a TechEd event with Musicar. He thought it would be cool to showcase a Stage 2 install and wanted to see if I was game. Hell yes, sign me up!
The plan was to head from Seattle to Portland super early in the morning and then come back the same day. It can be ~ 4 hours each way, so a bit brutal. I talked Shep into coming along and we turned it into a weekend getaway. We drove down mid-day on Saturday, stopped by Musicar to plan the next day with Nick, left the car with him and then checked into The Duniway Hilton in downtown Portland. We had a great time exploring Portland. We had some great sushi, found a super-sized chess board (I lost) and played in the pool until they kicked us out.
Thanks to “spring forward” daylight savings, morning came earlier than we wanted it to. We fueled up with some breakfast and good coffee, and made our way to Musicar for the event. It had rained a lot on our drive down and the car was a mess. I brought some quick detailer and I expected to spend the next hour cleaning the car. To my delight, the awesome crew at Musicar had already done it!! Winning. I spent the time wandering around the shop and reminiscing about my college years spent selling car audio at Circuit City, Myer-Emco and Audiobuys. The last two were high-end shops in Virginia where we did competition level custom car audio systems. We were living in the dark ages compared to what Musicar is working with. Laser engravers, 3D printers, a woodworking shop that would make a master carpenter jealous and sophisticated interface components that seamlessly integrate with OEM entertainment/communication systems. I was in awe of the facilities and clearly in good hands.
Once Sheri (the Director of Avants Portland) and the Avants crew showed up, it was time to setup the event and prepare for folks to arrive. Coffee, check. Avants swag, check. Amazing pastries…yes please. Here are some photos as we got things ready. Nick opened up the shop so we could get a closer view of the larger, custom projects which can take months and hundreds of hours of effort. That Continental is massive and so are the subwoofers going into it!
Okay, enough socializing…time to get started on my project! As the Musicar crew prepped the car for the install, Nick walked us through their process, talked about the components being used, speaker dynamics and took questions from the group.
In addition to the full suite of custom options, Musicar offers 3 stages of upgrades for cars like mine. Stage 1 replaces the tweeters which can make a huge difference by themselves. Stage 2 replaces the tweeters and the underpowered Bose amp. It adds a more powerful amp, a digital signal processor (DSP) and sound deadening to the doors. Stage 3 replaces all of the speakers and uses a different amp appropriate for that setup. Nick and I both felt that for my use case, a convertible where the top is almost always down, Stage 2 would have the best bang for the buck.
The specific components in the Stage 2 kit are:
Morel Elate MT350 tweeters. Beautiful soft dome tweeters that make such a difference.
The AMP/DSP comes from Audiotec-Fischer and powers 10 channels with a total of 580w of output.
The built in DSP allows Musicar to fine tune the system for each car and customer.
A MOST interface enables the clean integration with the Porsche PCM system.
Various sound deadening materials are applied inside the door, on the door and the door panel as well. This makes a huge difference in the bass response and helps stop the door from vibrating as much, acting like an unwanted speaker in the system.
