Active System w/complete soundproofing (JBL tear out).

As far as I can tell there are at least five different failure modes.

1) Radio has been on & functioning properly for a while. The screen goes black, buttons stay blue. It never reboots. Stays dead until I restart the car.
2) Radio has been on & functioning properly for a while. The screen & buttons go black and the radio reboots.
3) This only happened one time. Radio was on for a while & functioning when screen goes black & the buttons stay blue and the head unit was driving a constant tone through my speakers till it rebooted. WTF? This made me very nervous...
4) Right after the car starts the radio incurs an unusually long delay before booting. Every time it takes a different amount of time to boot. WHY?
5) The radio fails in the middle of the boot process. Screen goes black, buttons go black & it reboots.

 

Great work and write up! I have 5 boxes of Second Skin products awaiting my attention in the garage. Very inspirational posts, thanks.

 

Thanks! I wish I had more patience to do a better job documenting the process, but then it would take even longer to get the project done.

I liked working with the second-skin products more than dynamat or soundskins. They're more expensive tho.

 

I’m leaning towards bad radio. Time will tell once new radio is in. I say this because 1 ground wire and 2 power wires needed to power a radio. You lose 12v or dip below will cause the radio to power off. Which means 0 lights will stay on. I have seen where a bad ground will cause your symptoms actually. The radio was grounding thru the antenna. That was 1 time in 25 years of professional experience though lol

 

You don't have to pull the yellow/red wires all the way to 0v in order for the radio to fail. Basically all the radio cares about is the delta in voltage between ground wire & 12v..

I'm going to replace the radio before I mess with any of the wires. When the damn thing locked up and started driving the speakers I wanted to get it the hell out of my dash.

 

I didn’t say all the way to 0

 

I'm trying to say you can't assume the radio will turn off just because 12v had a little dip or b/c ground had a little spike. Depending on the magnitude & duration of the dip you can get all kinds of odd behavior..

 

I called Pioneer today just to see what they would say. I described the issue, the radio model and then they just wanted me to mail them the radio. Considering that most issues with these nav units are probably installer/install related I'm surprised that they would ask me like zero questions about the issue, install or debugging steps I took. It kind of makes me think they know there's a problem with the radios they shipped & they decided to do RMA instead of recall...

At this point this is the second Pioneer unit I've had issues with. I had an led in a 7-segment on a single DIN die on me once & pioneer repaired the face plate. I probably won't ever buy another Pioneer radio after this one based on inadequate quality & service..

 

Don’t know what makes you think you were going to get anywhere with the people at pioneer after explaining your “debugging” steps you took haha. It would be the same as if you called a cable provider. Just a lot of waiting explaining and “ I haven’t seen or heard of that”. I’m sure you went way over their head when you probably named dropped what you do for a living like you did to my comments that are no longer here lol. Again as stated, I’m sure it is the radio but you haven’t taken a multimeter to it as you said you didn’t want to drive around with one. The 8200 IS several years old just been changing the box.

 

At least cable the company asks you to check the power & unplug for 30 seconds or whatever. Maybe the customer service was actually just so good that it ended up making me suspicious... I'm used to getting at least a little bit of friction.

 

I finally got everything installed except the shelf. I'm going to need to do a couple cuts on the shelf to prevent it from rubbing the back of the seat, but otherwise it's complete!

I'm going to come back in a week or so and clean up the cluster of wires. I didn't have enough energy to organize them when I got everything bolted, but the system sounds great. Getting the subwoofer off the VXI allowed me to get more volume out of my system as a whole while keeping balance between highs, mid, low.

When I was running the factory JBL sub off the VXI I had to turn down the gain on all of the door speakers and the gain up on the JBL sub in order to get a balance. Now I was able to run the VXI pre-amp out into the JL XDv2 & the VXI remote out into the XDv2. In the VXI software I routed the sub input channels to the pre-amp output channels & gave the pre-amp out a low-pass filter. I'm so happy the VXI allows you to route/EQ/crossover/time-align the pre-amp outputs.

 

I'm thinking of changing the LED colors in the hazard-switch/dash-clock module to make the airbag indicators RED instead of orange. I spent some time on reverse-engineering the schematic from my spare module.

Here's the thread I started for changing the LED color. I just need to measure some voltages before I pick the replacement LED's.
https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/hazard-switch-passenger-airbag-belt-indicator-led-color.586236/

 

I wanted to do an update about how I ran my power wire & grounded my amplifiers for another member so I'll do it here.

My power wire is a 1/0. It has red loom covering it and then gorilla sleeve covering the red loom for extra protection. Fuse for 250A.


I ran the wire down by a factory wire that passes over the frame between the passenger tire (behind mud gaurds) and the exhaust.


This is inside the engine bay on the passenger side of the firewall. The wire runs down by the engine, but the heat shrink over the loom/sleeve marks the beginning of a heat shield.
The heat shield is fiberglass covered in aluminum foil, you can find this stuff at most auto stores & jeggs in the performance engine area.


You can see my big wire (covered in heat protection) running just next to a factory wire (also covered in heat protection). This is behind the front passenger wheel in the wheel well.


I only used the heat sleeve for a little longer than the factory wire uses the heat shield, a little before/after. The wire goes back to loom & sleeve all the way to the rear storage bin. You can also see the loom I ran for my 12v reverse camera popping up above the 1/0 wire about half way. This is just under the passenger seat on the frame.


Here's where I pass the wire through a waterproof grommet into the storage bin. This picture was taken just in front of the rear wheels on the passenger side, outside of the frame. You can see the parking brake cable running through the image for reference.


Here's my distribution block. The 1/0 wire comes from under the truck & the two 4 AWG wires go to my amps. I have an 80 amp fuse on the VXi and a 50 amp fuse on the XD.


I grounded both amps to the back left pillar. You want to make sure to ground to something that is structurally critical to the truck & I'm pretty sure all of the pillars fall under that category. I'm going to clean up all the wires near the amps in the next week or so.

 

Here's where I'm at today. As part of a warranty service for my defective 8200-NEX the installer I bought my equipment from helped me out by upgrading me to the 8400-NEX instead of leaving me without a radio for weeks while Pioneer tries to repair the hardware.

I bought my gear here. They gave me a good price & they've been willing to work with me even though I did my own install. I think they have good customer service.
The Car Stereo Company (Mountain View CA)

Here's the 8400-NEX installed. It's faster than the 8200-NEX in most ways (boot time, response time, reverse-camera). The image looks higher quality as well plus I love the wireless CarPlay & Android Auto.


I still need to test the Mirroring & my girlfriends Pixel 3, but everything else appears to work good! Had a little trouble getting my phone to connect to the wireless CarPlay. I had to set up the bluetooth twice in order for the CarPlay to set up, but it works good now.


I had the shop help me do some tuning. Hai at The Car Stereo Company left me with a much higher quality tuning & a much less harsh/sharp output. Here's the routing table.


Here's the EQ's, crossovers, delay/polarity, & level trim. EQ 1,2 are the front left,right mid, EQ3,4 are the front left,right tweeters, EQ 5,6 are the left,right rear doors, and EQ L/R go to the Subwoofer amp.

Front mid woofers left/right.


Front left/right tweeters.


Rear doors. left/right.


Sub pre-amp out, front right tweeter.

 

Hey Everyone!

I spent some time trying to use my multimeter & a DC current clamp attachment to get a figure of the maximum DC current this audio build consumes.

It looks like I top out at ~27 amps DC current at 3/4 volume. When the car is running I get about 13.8 volts by 27 amps is ~373 Watts. Probably don't need to do a big-3 upgrade at all then.. I will do a similar video when I do the same thing using a current clamp and my oscilloscope to try and get the absolute peak current.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENCYc4JykJM&feature=youtu.be

 

BADASS!! Very nice work. Was pretty dope getting to see some of it and hear it in person

 

Thanks man! The build is coming together very nice! I still have some more work to do on the system to clean it all up so I'll have updates soon!

 

Looking forward to it

 

It's 100 degrees today & I'll tell you that the thermal insulation of the sound proofing materials make a HUGE difference! I have goose bumps in my truck while it's sitting in the sun.

 

Good Job!!