Prius Hidden Subwoofer
When I bought my Prius, I knew I needed to have space available for traveling
with the family and such. But of course, shortly after I got it, I had to figure
out how to get some better sound out of it. I decided to see what I could fit
into the storage space between the hatch area and the spare tire. A slim sub
and amp fit in here pretty nice and I'm happy with the results. It's not as
good as a large box but it satisfies most of my needs.
And of course, when I put the cover down over it, it's hard to tell that anything
is going on. To try to allow the sound out and keep the amp from overheating, I
used a heavy wire shelf in the middle of the cover. Then put a layer of Modders
Mesh over it to cover the large holes so that nothing can poke through. I used
some silicon culk along all of the edges to make sure there's no rattle.
The box has 0.7 cu ft for the Pioneer TS-SW3001S4 12" slim subwoofer. The Q
for the box is 1.05 which is higher than I prefer. It's a little lacking on
the really low base. The amp mounts on the board on the right with room for
the wires behind it.
One of the other options I wanted was to have the ability to remove the whole
setup in case I need every last bit of space in the car. I installed a pair
of male/female 8-wire connectors, one for the high-level in to the amp from
the stock head unit and the other going to the speakers. I used a trailer
light connector for the power and ground wires. When I remove the system,
I can plug the male/female speaker connectors together and feed the front/rear
speakers directly from the head unit.
The whole thing put together with a cover around the Alpine MRX-V70 5-channel
amp to hide most of the wires. I've been meaning to pair or carpet the whole
thing. But, it's hidden from view so there's little incentive to do so.
Here you can see the speaker in/out and power connectors. Plus I have handels
on the sides to make it easier to handle when installing or removing.
And the wires all plugged in.
There are adapters for the front and rear speakers although I don't remember
seeing much at the time I started this. So I made my own. I used 1/4" plywood
for the base and then 1/2" MDF as a spacer. I'm showing some Infinity Kappa 62.9i
here but those are now in the rear doors. The front has Infinity Kappa 60.9cs
components with the woofers in the door and the tweeters in the dash.
I did a similar thing for the rear doors.
And made a mount for the tweeters in the dash. The larger tweeters fit well
in the opening. Unfortunately the terminals on these suck and strip very easily.
So I had to try to solder the wires directly to it which was also not easy.
The last mod I made was with the wiring for the head unit. I needed to route the
speaker output to the amps. But instead of just splicing directly in, I used 8-pin
computer power extension cables for the 8 wires I needed for the 4 channels. Cut
it in half and spliced one half to the head unit speaker outputs and the other half
to the actual speaker wires. Connecting these would put the system back to stock
with the head unit driving the front/rear speakers directly. I then spliced another
matching connector to the new wires I ran to the amps which is what I'm plugged into
now.
Discuss on reddit!
When I bought my Prius, I knew I needed to have space available for traveling
with the family and such. But of course, shortly after I got it, I had to figure
out how to get some better sound out of it. I decided to see what I could fit
into the storage space between the hatch area and the spare tire. A slim sub
and amp fit in here pretty nice and I'm happy with the results. It's not as
good as a large box but it satisfies most of my needs.
