holy crap man.. what a write up..
very nice install too sir...

keep it coming!

 

Good job !! See how easy audio can be !!

 

Thank you Gents! I knew I wanted to get better tunez on the bike and, as I said before, I expected to do it in stages. Mostly to keep costs, not low but spread out. Well, that didn't happen! It was like a snowball down a slope. The further it rolled.. Well, you see the result.
I think the biggest initial decision anyone has to make is weather to just go with a pre-packaged audio system or piece it together. Then, will someone else install it or do it yourself. I did my car install a while back (had the whole interior out for that one!) so I was not alien to the process but a motorcycle is a bit different and took some research. Plus, did I really want the bike down for the time it took me to do the install. To each his own and this is what I came up with.

More to come!

 

UN thinks this guy is a professional installer and doesn't want to tell anyone..

 

Lol...! No...

I'm a Major General...

Major nuisance and General F@*#-up ....

I AM "How Things Work" ....

I never stayed in a Holiday Inn Express ...

I don't eat Wheaties and I'm not a Rocket Scientist...

But.... I am blessed with an insatiable desire to know how it works and have a talent for creativity.

A jack of all trades, master of none....

As GLACIERPEARL put it.... I'm a moron....

AND.... I do work for the Govm'nt and I'm here to help you.....

 

LOL

 

Hahahahah. It's not even 5 o'clock yet...!

Now excuse me while I go mold a clear mount for the GPS so you can see the beautiful Iron Cross piece below it.... :-)

Well... Uploads failing... Pics to follow

 

FLTRX Audio Odyssey – Pt VII

SETTING GAINS….

Well it has been some time since my last installment…. And I apologize… Life took over and I’ve barely had time to RIDE let alone type up my install…!! I will say that the audio system has got a workout every time I have ridden and there are no issues to speak of. There’s something about cruising down the highway or cutting corners in the sticks or even pulling up to the pumps with some wailing Blues playing (my music of choice) that completes the experience for me!

Anyway, My son and I set about setting the gains. At first we did it by ear. I read several posts that the HD HK radio cannot be turned up too close to max as it begins to distort. We set the gains one set of speakers at a time messing around with the trim pots and noting their position before turning them down and moving to the next set. Four front speakers were connected to the Soundstream Amp and the rear speakers to the RF Amp. The HD HK headunit was connected through a line level convertor and then with an RCA splitter to the low level inputs of the Soundstream amp and the rear speaker level outs of the HD HK were connected to the RF amp input.
We both thought we had the settings pretty good but our error was in turning the HD HK up too far (as we found out when we put the scope on her!) If I remember correctly we had the headunit up full and then backed off two bars. But when we scoped the HD HK we ended up seeing clipping at 13 bars! I think that’s a couple bars below our “by ear” settings. The clipped signal was kinda off too as the waveform peaked as normal but the other half of each wave (above and below the midline) were sawtoothed off. This seemed pretty odd and more can be read at this link….

https://www.hdforums.com/forum/audio...-inputs-2.html

All that was left after setting the levels was putting the fairing back on and … RIDING…

There will be another installment as I used this company ( http://www.smooth-on.com ) to purchase the mold-making materials to make my own clear GPS/iPhone mount so I could still see the nice Iron Aces mount ( http://www.ironacesspeedshop.com/pro...-gps-mount.cfm ).

I put a Klockwerks midsized windshield (8 or 9 inch) on and it seems to help the audio “in the bubble”. It CERTAINLY helped with the "buffeting my glasses and eyeballs to hell and back" syndrome!!

I added EGlideGoodies locks to my gloveboxes. Remember the iPod is wired through a hole I cut in the glovebox.

And I made an audio test disk to check the frequency response of the system. My plan is to test the frequency response of the J&M Rokker and Kicker speakers with sweep tones and other audio test tones downloaded from this site ( http://www.audiocheck.net/soundtests...ones_index.php ) and use a graphic EQ to see the result. It will not be pure science but will give me an idea of where the peaks and valleys are.

Except for the audio test disk everything else is pretty non-audio related but were the clean-up items to this install. I had hoped to have the audio test results by now but they will have to wait a bit…

 

Eglidegoodies.com locks pix..

I researched many lock companies but ended up using EGlideGoodies locks as their locks can be key matched with your bike. I thought this worth the extra money.....

I did not want to remove the fairing again just to take the gloveboxes off so I measured and measured and measured again to find where I wanted to locks to go. With the odd shape of the boxes it is not so easy finding the "middle".

Their drill bit made easy work of the hole drillin'...

I played with the positioning of the lock catches using tape to hold them in until I found a good tight position for them with the locks locked. The hardest holes to drill were the pilot holes for the latch inside the glovebox since I did not remove the doors. Good thing I have a mini drill that came with another tool I purchased back in the day!

 

mo EGlideGoodies pix...