After the extensive modding from the moment I got my car in 2008, I have since stopped doing so.. partly due to the arrival of my 2 little brats and also work commitment. One fateful day, a stone hit my E60's front windscreen and I had to claim my insurance ie. several days without my E60. Had to borrow Ninja King from my dad as work horse while the car was being fixed - and since I had a spare vehicle to use, why not do something which I have planned to do since a long time ago but never had the opportunity to do so? Moreover, the HM would definitely not suspect anything amiss.. LOL!
So talked to my ICE guy, Peter, about my sound system which was not oompphhh enough - don't get me wrong the stock speakers sounded decent but not to my liking. Moreover, when I did the interface route 4 years ago, they did not have the Aux adapter causing the driver side speaker to lose its sound after a while because it could not be fastened securely to the speaker via the iDrive. And the fact that the stock BMW amp was puny and not powerful enough to power the tweeters and door speakers plus the subwoofers underneath the seat, I could not feel the bass whenever I played house or trance songs.
Brief info - my Kenwood player was connected via Aux cable to the iDrive and then the sound would be channeled to the speakers hence the not-so-good sound quality. I told Peter that I played songs and watched DVD most of the time using the Kenwood and so he proposed to installed a 5-channel amp and Gladen sound system (from Germany) which was perfect fit for the E60. And amp would be connected directly to the Kenwood player rather than the iDrive as I seldom use it unless I wanted to listen to radio (in which I would get to that later), and then the amp would power the speakers directly.. bypassing the iDrive. The sound quality had improved tremendously as it was connected to the player directly and not iDrive. The installer even tuned the player's equalizer to get the best of all genres of song... and miraculously the radio function fr Kenwood player functioned after that. I remembered that I could not use the radio 4 years ago as the reception was so bad that all I could hear was only "sa sa sa" sound. And therefore I saved couple hundreds of dollars from programming my Japanese spec iDrive to get the local radio station frequency (YAY!!)
Pictures will follow in the next post :top:
