Freelander 1 Becker Radio/Sat Nav HSE 2004

Hi, I've got other threads going on the woes of getting speakers working elsewhere....

On this, I'm trying to get a feeling for who has had problems with their system and found that the problem has actually been the head unit or the remote amp?

I'm getting the feeling that peeps that have changed out one or the other in the hope of a cure, have not had much luck....

Does that strike a chord?

All four main speakers on mine went within about a month of each other. Amp and changer have never had issues. HU was always reliable but recently it very occasionally glitches out. I'll replace it at some point, when I am 100% confident I can connect a new one up and keep the amp powered and working without faffing around too much. I'll prob go for double din android unit.

My head unit's CD reader has decided to get a gastric band fitted so it refuses to process anything you put in there, two of my speakers have seized but that's more due to moisture damage and if I move my driver's seat forwards/backwards it has a varying effect on the subwoofer ranging from no bass to amazing - but only when playing CD, if I use my phone/parrot it always works great.

I'm getting there slowly........... It turns out that at least 2 out of 4 of mine have gone.... One is working fine. The 4th is quiet, but I dont know why because I can't get the door card off!

The screws securing the door handle are just spinning.... another problem I need a solution for!

So far, bar the unproven 4th channel, the head unit/amp/changer are fine. The head unit works but I do have a problem with the hinge/removal mechanism... the front isn't secure and disconnects itself. I have considered just screwing it directly to the main body but can't find enough meat without electronics behind it to screw through....

I'll probably replace with a single DIN unit and a parrot hands free eventually ............ need one with pre outs to feed the power amp...........

I've replaced the speakers with these JVC units, a tenner each off Amazon..... Less than half the weight of the original HK units due to much smaller magnets, but hey, what did I expect for a tenner?

Bottom line, is they work fine.

The sub needs replacing too.... sounded very scratchy...... on inspection, the foam roll surround has split so a £20 replacement is in the post...

£60 all in to refresh the entire speaker compliment is pretty decent value... it's not Hi-Fidelity but sounds way better than you'd expect.....

The replacement sub is here..................

As you can see, it's a drop in replacement........

The new one is much heavier and beefier than the HK supplied unit, with a substantial 30oz magnet.

That, and a kevlar cone, delivered for £20.... dunno how they do it.......

Initial thoughts, with absolutely no critical listening at all, are that it works fine.

I run a reasonably high end audio system in the house, but I've never quite "got it" in terms of throwing shed loads of money at car audio.

Anyway, if you want to refresh your audio system, then £10 a corner and £20 for the sub is about as cheap as it gets!

One final question... anybody seen a factory setup with twin sub units? As you can see, there are two pairs of speaker cables in the enclosure. (And shown on the loom diagram)

pm1961 said:

One final question... anybody seen a factory setup with twin sub units? As you can see, there are two pairs of speaker cables in the enclosure. (And shown on the loom diagram

Click to expand...

That's not the correct sub driver for the FL1 setup. There's too much wrong for it to work optimally. There's nothing actually wrong with those cheap kevlar drivers, but they're not suited to this application.
It's only a single coil, so runs on just one of the 2 available channels. It's also an 8 ohm coil, which will halve the power you can feed to it from that one channel.
The Kevlar sub also needs a larger rear volume, for it to respond correctly at lower frequencies.

You actully need a duel coil 4 ohm driver, which effectively doubles the power to the sub.
If you're only driving the sub at 1/4 power, in an incorrect size enclosure it'll be disappointing.

There's a link to the correct replacement on a old thread, in the archive somewhere.

Ooh intruiging....... So the enclosure is correct and the driver I've replaced, is itself, a replacement?

pm1961 said:

Ooh intruiging....... So the enclosure is correct and the driver I've replaced, is itself, a replacement?

Click to expand...

That's definitely not an HK sub driver. It's an incorrect replacement.

You want than this one.
https://www.thompsonsltd.co.uk/plpw6d-pyle-plpw6d-6.5-600-watt-dual-voice-coil-4-ohm-subwoofer.html

I've tried it myself, and it seems to work well enough in the HK enclosure.

Great knowledge! Thanks for that...... And that price!

pm1961 said:

Great knowledge! Thanks for that...... And that price!

Click to expand...

They used to be under £10, but even at the current price, it's still a bargain!

I second that. It works a treat; worth way more than the cost to get your real bass back.

I might well get one of those now too!

So, meandering back to the thread title about the unit itself, if we may .................

Cos, I is well confused...............

I've decided to swap out the head unit due to problems with facia retention..... (there's a joke in there somewhere...) But, I still don't properly understand what they've done....

So, we have the Head Unit in the dash............. Feeding an Amp under the pax seat..... which in turn feeds the Door Speakers............

But the feed from the HU to the Amp takes the amplified loudspeaker output rather than the line level output..... which baffles me hugely......

Have I misunderstood something? Is there something unusual about this HU/Amp combination?

This has implications for the new unit because I was expecting to have to find a harness to go from the Line Out phonos to the existing loom in the car ion order to feed the Amp.

It would be a lot simpler if I don't need one, but on the other hand, I don't want to ruin the Amp by feeding it an inapproropriate high level signal.

So here are those ISO connections, which those nice logical Germans follow to the letter......



But................ here, in the case of a power amp in use, I would expect the connections to be from the C block..... but they're not..... the are most definitely on the B block.............. Which is how it is on every Head Unit I've seen where the amps are inside the unit, not external....

The only connections on the top C block are to do with the CD Changer unit, and not all the Line Outs I was expecting.....

Any ideas please?

pm1961 said:

But the feed from the HU to the Amp takes the amplified loudspeaker output rather than the line level output..... which baffles me hugely.....

Click to expand...

Why's that? It was a design choice to accommodate various HU, simply be feeding the audio via speaker outputs, known as high level audio inputs.

pm1961 said:

Have I misunderstood something? Is there something unusual about this HU/Amp combination?

Click to expand...

No. It was just design to take speaker inputs, for the reason above.

pm1961 said:

This has implications for the new unit because I was expecting to have to find a harness to go from the Line Out phonos to the existing loom in the car ion order to feed the Amp.

Click to expand...

You just need to connect the speaker outputs of the replacement HU to the amp inputs, not low level (RCA) inputs. Lot's of audio manufacturer's use to use this principle, as it means the HU doesn't need RCA outputs.

pm1961 said:

But................ here, in the case of a power amp in use, I would expect the connections to be from the C block..... but they're not..... the are most definitely on the B block.............. Which is how it is on every Head Unit I've seen where the amps are inside the unit, not external....

Click to expand...

The audio goes in as you describe.

Normally the hardest part is getting the amp to turn on once a different HU is fitted.

Nodge68 said:

Normally the hardest part is getting the amp to turn on once a different HU is fitted.

Click to expand...

This is the bit I'm most interested in here.

Ah, thanks for your insight... that's good to know.....

In a way it's a shame, as in they seem to have sacrificed performance for versatility....

What little I know about car audio, are the principles brought across from domestic hi-fi... The whole purpose of a pre-power combi is to take the source, at signal level, unalduterated by the "cheap, nasty, made to a price" amps that they squeeze into the head units.... and have your "quality" power amp do all the heavy lifting..... otherwise, what's the point?

High level inputs are a usually a "workaround" when something can't provide a line level output............ But this unit can, so why do it.......?

So, either the power amp isn't doing much work in the first place, or it's attenuating the signal it's getting from the head unit and then amplifying it again.............

If they've truly tried to provide a "step up" audio system, and their equipment can be configured as such, why didn't they implement a genuine pre-power route in the first place.....?

I can't find any info on the HK H70858 power amp in terms of how "clever" it is in terms of load sensing, gain etc, or whether it's just a straight amp. It must do some stuff cos it feeds the sub, but it's not clever enough to have active filters for the 4 main speakers since they're just a single cable from the amp and a passive capacitor for a crossover.........

It'll be interesting to see how it works with my new head unit............ I can't claim to have gone the "Nirvana" route myself , having gone with the cheapest possible speaker replacements, but LR/HK don't seem to have gone the extra mile either... They seem to have charged the (original) punter a lot for extra bits of kit, for very little perceptible gain...... Kinda taken the gloss off it!

pm1961 said:

In a way it's a shame, as in they seem to have sacrificed performance for versatility...

Click to expand...

I believe that route was taken to allow the HK upgrade on all audio systems installed in the FL1, not just the Becker nav unit. The Vestion unit fitted to the SE doesn't have low or line level outputs, so to make it work with the HK speakers, the speaker outputs are used across the board. I know what you are saying about true HiFi, but that's not the case in a vehicle, as the sound is degraded in so many ways, through bad speaker placing, vibrations discolouring the sound, and so on, that any potential clarity improvements of line level audio are simply lost. In fact the vehicle wiring itself often adds noise to the audio signal in line level cables, so most decent HU now have 4V line level outputs, simply to allow a less sensitive amplifier to ignore cross cable noise transmission.


As an aside. I've often wondered if the HK amplifier is simply a "pass through" unit for the 4 main door speakers, and simply takes the audio for the sub woofer, processing it, amplifying it before outputting it to the sub.

Of course what it should do is to process all audio signals, before amplification and passing them on to the relevant places.

I'd love to pull the HK amplifier apart, to see exactly what it's doing.

All that makes eminent sense......... I agree, I don't think that amp is doing anymore than tapping the signal and powering the sub........

For all the reasons you suggest, I've never sunk too much money into car audio.... Although, I have to admit to getting a teeny bit excited at the thought of inheriting a "high end" system.... Only to find out, it's a bit of a fudge.... Hey ho, back to where we started!

pm1961 said:

All that makes eminent sense......... I agree, I don't think that amp is doing anymore than tapping the signal and powering the sub........

Click to expand...

If I ever get my hands on a cheap HK amplifier, I will pull it apart to see what it's doing. However at a simple glance of one under the seat, it doesn't seem large enough to contain 6 amplifier channels, or have enough heatsink area either.

For a while back in the early 90s, I did lots of custom ICE (In Car Entertainment) installations, for a separate department of the garage I was working at, at the time.

I got quite in to the whole ICE scene, attending a few "sound offs" and the like.

There is a huge amount that can be done to make ICE amazing. However its always compromised when actually driving along, as the sound is coloured by road noise, engine noise and wind noise, and whatever else makes noise in a vehicle.

Our current family Mazda CX5 has a BOSE system, which is OK sounding, but not nearly as powerful as the subwoofer system I installed in my V6 FL1 a few years ago.

I've always had a keen interest in home HiFi, building my own speakers, subs and amps in the past. Unfortunately these have now been replaced by smaller, less obtrusive off the shelf HiFi midi system and a pair of nice looking book shelf speakers.

kernowsvenski said:

This is the bit I'm most interested in here.

Click to expand...

Fortunately, it has been plug and play so far..... Outputs to all speakers.... Including the sub..... The HK amp under the seat is still doing it's bit and it's responding to the tone settings on the head unit...

Early days, but looking good so far....