The LazyAssGeek’s

This is an overdue public thanks to my good friend Andy who decided to take my disaster of a garage on his shoulders. He & Biggi have been staying at my house a lot over the summer while he’s been trying to do 2 jobs at once in 2 different states.  It has been great having them here and the summer has been a blast.

They both are smokers and as I’m not, smoking is a no-no in my house, so when Mother Nature is dumping rain on us they are forced into my garage for their fix. I am somewhat more…. relaxed than they are regarding clutter.  I can’t stand dirty, but clutter?  No problem for me, but for them….. So standing in my garage this summer has been slow torture. I also know that doing something as a thank you for all the time they’ve spent at my house factors in there somewhere, regardless of the fact that to my mind it’s not necessary.  However if I were in their shoes even knowing that they would feel the same way, I’d feel like I needed to do something as well so there’s only so much I can argue it. Now that I’ve finished typing myself into that corner, onto the details…

Pictures being worth more words than even I can manage… the before.

The Disaster that Was

Andy spent the better part of 2 days working in there.  Tons of crap thrown away, a couple of trips to the hardware store and Wal-Mart for organizing supplies, a lot of sweat and more than a few beers later…

Overhauled!

(Click here to continue reading…)

Here comes the B700 Vauxhall Astra. Just have to decide on a final color.. the silver pictured here is OK, but I’m thinking the “Steel Gray” sort of color Jimbo offered as a possibility looks a bit better.

Silver

Gray

New Pics

I FINALLY got around to finishing up the install in my 2007 Avalanche over the weekend and I wanted to vent and share my experience to maybe help other unfortunate souls….

The equipment list:

Alpine IVA-W205 Head
Alpine PXA-H701 Processor
Alpine PDX-4.150 Amp
Alpine SIR-ALP1 Sirius Tuner
Focal KF165 Component Speakers
Elemental Designs 11K.v2 D4 Sub
Subthump under-seat box with amp rack

I had installed the head unit a long while back but most of my car stereo energies have been invested in the Vette so the rest has been waiting. The install itself was pretty easy. The Avy’s door panels are simple to take off, easy wire runs down the rockers and under the carpet to the back seat. I was able to fit the processor and a Stinger power & ground block (nice piece, very convenient for simple installs) on the bottom side of the Subthump box and the PDX amp and Focal crossovers in the “amp rack” area on the top side of the box.

Now the fun begins with Ai-NET. Somewhere along the way I read something that told me that the Processor must be the first thing plugged into the head unit. So with that in mind I had picked up an extra Ai-NET cable in order to run from the back seat area up to where I had my Sirius tuner installed behind the glove box(factory XM location). The idea was one cable from the head to the proc and then one from the proc to the Sirius. Seems straight forward, right? Yeah, well… I get everything hooked up and after playing a bit (and finally realizing the damn EQ/NORM switch on the head unit was on the bottom) I got the 7 gazillion crossover and speaker settings configured to where I was actually getting sound. YAY! OK, so when I switched to Sirius I wasn’t getting sound, but I was getting channel data and could control it. I figured that tucked up beside the garage the way I was I probably just wasn’t getting enough from the sat to get audio, so I buttoned everything up.

The Sirius wasn’t just a signal issue of course. Some Googling and searching of diymobileaudio.com later, turns out that I made a bad assumption regarding the Ai-NET chain. The H701 needs to be the first device yes, but that’s because it doesn’t have a loop connection so it’s only first when you think of the head unit as being the last in the chain. So off comes the trim and out comes the head again, I just love re-doing stuff! A short Ai-NET cable run from the Sirius to the head unit, and then the loop-out from the Sirius to the H701. Yes, the EQ/NORM on the head must still be set to EQ even though it’s actually plugged directly into the Sirius and not the H701.

So if you have any Ai-NET devices in your chain that rely on the analog audio of the Ai-NET connection and you’re using an H701 then make sure the connection STARTS at the head and ends at the H701.

/TheKomoman steps down off the soapbox.