Hello all,

Well, after three days of fumbling around in sub-zero temperatures, my empeg is now installed in a car worthy of such a device - my 1995 Jaguar XJR. It certainly beats the Ford Escort it's been living in for the last year. Many thanks to CMU for helping out, it was a mammoth task; more details can be found below but first, some install pr0n:

http://www.colour9.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=empeg

...mmm, tasty. It's not a particularly complex install by the standards of this BBS, but it took a lot of time largely due to the complexity of the vehicle. Jaguar seem to have a large bin of computer modules at the factory which they staple liberally to every available surface; we counted 14 computers and we weren't even looking. Fortunately we didn't need to displace many of these, but there's still and awful lot of trim to move around.

Essentially, it was a straight install of the empeg (alright, a RioCar Mk 2a) in place of the original head unit, and the addition of an amplifier in the boot. This was complicated by a need to upgrade the front mid/bass speakers (in the doors), remove the old CD-changer and also put in a nice Nokia Bluetooth car kit.

Taking out the old head unit was easy, as was fitting the fascia adaptor from Autoleads - and it even looks fairly tidy. The hard part was splicing into the Jaguar wiring loom ("Oh my god, it's full of cables...") in a sensible place. It turns out that unless you want to re-run cables to each individual speaker (there's 8; 4 mid/bass and 4 tweeters), you have to splice into the Jaguar head unit connector. Which is behind the head unit. Which would be fine if you had an amplifier anywhere near there... but there's not really room for that, and it would require running power cables all the way from the battery in the boot. So the amp stayed at the back, the speaker connections at the front, and we had to join the two together. Which means removing the centre console trim, displacing the centre console, routing wires (audio, speaker and amplifier remote) along the transmission tunnel, digging through the carpet, pulling cables through the underlay, routing the cables through the rear seat junction boxes, removing the rear seat, routing cables up to the parcel shelf, through the handy blanking plate for the Jaguar premium stereo install and down into the boot. Fun!

That just left mounting the amplifier (on a board attached to the mounting points Jaguar kindly left under the parcel shelf, running power cables from the absolutely monstrous battery, round the petrol tank and up to the amp. Oh, and installing the hands-free kit, which works very nicely with the empeg's mute facility.

Reassembly was the reverse of removal :-)

Anyway, that's probably all of interest to nobody except myself, but I just wanted to record for posterity how much effort it took for such a simple-looking result :-)

And, of course, now it's installed, it's absolutely brilliant - sounds great, looks fantastic, and adds a perfect finishing touch to an already rather nice car.

Gavin

Oh my god, it's full of cables...

Tea. Screen. Thanks.

Nice install. Seeing an empeg happily in a new home is always a beautiful thing.

Nice clean, mean machine!

Yeah... VERY nice install... and car!

Seriously. It is. It's just full of 'em. I thought the back of my desk had a lot of cables behind it, but I was wrong...

Ta very much - I'm happy with them!

http://www.colour9.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=empeg

Is it just me, or ? I get a DNS server lookup failure in that domain.

\\Kaare

Nice install. Thanks for sharing.

I am curious, what does the Nokia bluetooth do? (I am familiar with bluetooth, btw)

Worked ok for me.

Worked ok for me.

Work for me aswell now.

Nice install, nice car - there is only one thing wrong. The bloody stearing wheel is in the wrong side of the car.

\\Kaare

Yeah , you would think someone would have noticed that.

The Nokia Bluetooth kit is essentially a hands-free kit for the car (now strongly recommended by current UK legislation), just without all the nasty wiring and cradle taking up space and looking ugly.

Once you set up a pairing with the unit (works with both my 8910i and my wife's 7620), all you need to do is get in the car with the phone in your pocket (or bag, or wherever you normally leave it), turn on the ignition and it sets up a Bluetooth link with the phone. If you get a call, it mutes the empeg and relays audio via a small speaker hidden in the footwell, and a microphone in the headliner. You have one button (the visible bit) to terminate calls/put people on hold/adjust volume etc., and it can also be used for voice dialling, which works very well.

Plus, there's no chance of you leaving your phone docked in the cradle when you leave the car!

Gavin

The Nokia Bluetooth kit is essentially a hands-free kit for the car

How's the sound quality? I've been disappointed with pretty much every piece of bluetooth kit I've tried.

Oh my god, it's full of cables..

This would be the same Jaguar who were going to lead the world in having one wire linking every light and device in the car, digitally activated?

Not bad at all - receiving and transmitting. It's much better than the little Nokia Bluetooth headset thingy, which was frankly awful.

Could well be. It's worth noting that this is a 9-year old car; I'm pretty sure that Jaguar's terror at having to shoehorn that many wires into place could well have motivated them to try something a little more intelligent!

It was the new XJ6 that was going to be the first bearer of this technology and that's a great deal than 9 years ago, I think that they just couldn't make it work, maybe they should have studied DCC model railway technology, that seems to wotk well enough.

It was the new XJ6 that was going to be the first bearer of this technology and that's a great deal than 9 years ago, I think that they just couldn't make it work, maybe they should have studied DCC model railway technology, that seems to wotk well enough.

Mercedes is using CAN-bus and CAN-bus II in their cars, which is two wire network for the mobile enviroment. CAN means Controller Area Networks. In the new E class every piece of electronic has its own controller, like you mention for the Jaguar. I also think i saw somewhere that Dalles One-wire technology was introduced in a car somewhere.

\\Kaare

Maybe Jaguar were a bit like Empeg, the concept was great, but it was a bit too early to be widely accepted.
The difference being Jaguar couldn't make it work, Empeg made it work brilliantly!
I think GM have a working concept car with fuel cells, or one of those tchnologies, which has the equivalent of fly by wire steering, the controls simply slide from the right side, to the wrong side for you Americans and Europeans!