[neoprufrok]

So finally getting some time to post the pics.

I want to first shout out Ernie at Sound Innovations in the Bay Area, Cali. He is a master and a consummate professional. Doesn't oversell and tells you what you need but will still work with your wishes. He did Joe Rogan's GT3 system with a CF sub and he's done my cars in the past.

Sound review - the car sounds about 100x better. Still not like my home system or my Desktop McIntosh DAC to B&W P9 headphones but for a car it's as good as I've heard in a long while.

The biggest bang for the buck like any home system or any car system is to room correct, or in this case, cabin correct. The B&W stock system is decent, and with the EQ you can do some work. But I was really just guessing based on what my ears could hear. You really should do an RTA of the channels and figure out how to best correct for each channel. The biggest issue I could hear was a midrange to low treble glare that keeps you from cranking up the volume.

So I chose my system basically to work on this. We ended up using MATCH since it offers that level of DSP tuning and 10 channels - which lets us basically due the front mid and tweets separate (x 3 for L/C/R and the two 8" below seat). It also ups the steady state power and is a much higher quality amp than stock.

I don't have his RTA pics, but he provided the work he put in on each channel and what he tuned (see below). I asked him to tune to neutral before I sat down with him. Once installed and I sat in the car, we added some treble. The Helix M1X has it's own sub control knob we hid in that far left cubby hole near the steering wheel.

We also found an issue with the 8" below seat. Unlike other BMWs it seems to be be connected to weird air spaces and resonates stuff on the M5 Comp chassis like crazy - given the speaker is a major upgrade and the power as well. We had to tune those resonances out by doing a higher cutoff to the sub than we wanted at 70... probably will go lower later.

The benefit to all this is that the signal that the BMW iDrive sends to the amp is the same - so i can still use the different BMW DSP modes and EQ.

How does it sound? Glorious... but not 100% there.

It is much more neutral and lets the mids shine without that glare. Things pop out much more and sound staging is rock steady since most of the focus is on the front. Rear deck and doors we tuned way down. Clarity is impressive and the bass kicks perfectly. A very musical bass and not meant for SPL contests. In songs that actually use string bass, you can actually discern it's an wood instrument generating the bass vs. some synthesized bass. But put in some heavy hip hop bass or EDM and it does the job and then some. I'm super happy.

Where it still lacks is that final resolution that I hear in my home system and my headphones. Likely it's the speakers themselves. They're very good - but I may swap them out for Focal's later.

Here are the pics of the DSP work. Keep reading for install pics.