THE CAR

In March 05, Ray took delivery of his new Audi A4 Avant 3litre Turbo diesel S-Line. This thing was already fully loaded with all the toys but that was half the challenge.

THE PROBLEM

Modern cars need for nothing, so what do you do when your business depends on upgrading the standard vehicle equipment? Who in their right mind is going to rip the Audi "Bose" audio system out? What could be better than the factory fit radio with its steering wheel controls and dash board integration?

The truth is that although Audi have designed the sound system around the car, they have also built the components down to a price and in my opinion, unfairly tried to prevent further upgrade or modification by overcomplicating the vehicle wiring and integrating the controls into the steering wheel etc. The low power paper coned speakers and the tiny audio amplifier in the rear side panel driving what they laughably call a subwoofer is just a joke however the challenge was to produce something so different without damaging the fabric of the car. So here is how we did it:

THE SOLUTION

To be fair to Audi the sound system in this car was not bad. As an Audi option at £465 for the Symphony II radio system it should be good, however after only a few days with the car my journey to and from work in Edinburgh from my home in Dunbar (about 80miles a day) was frustrated by the FM signal fading to a hiss every time I passed the town of Haddington, and my favourite program (Real radio) would fade out usually at a crucial bit or even worse during one of my adverts on the radio.

So my first task was to rip the junk out of the dash and fit something decent, this was to be harder that we thought. The unit chosen was the Alpine IVA-D310R Mobile Media Station. This was to be married to the NVE-N099P DVD GPS Car Navigation System. The retail cost of this setup would be in excess of £3.5K but the Audio Navi option is £2.5K and isn’t as good. The Alpine system has a seven inch touch screen which is tactile; this means it buzzes under your finger when you touch the screen. The picture quality is superb and the ability to play DVD movies as well as navigate you is awesome.

TWO DVD TUNERS - HAVE YOU GONE MAD?

The rationale to fit two CD Tuners in this car was simple or at least I managed to convince myself it was. The original Audi system was double DIN, this means it takes the space of two radios on top of each other in the dash so when you remove it there is a gaping hole which was simple to fix with the use of the “Autoleads” facia adaptor however this leaves you with two apertures of which one would normally be a glove pocket. I wanted a DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast) Tuner and Alpine don’t make one however JVC make a little peach of a set which not only has DAB but also a small 3 inch monitor screen built in its standard one DIN size. So the decision to fit this below the Alpine and also connect a rear view camera to its tiny screen was a no brainer. My fitters did look at me strangely when I first suggested this and the technicalities of making all this work were not simple however we pride ourselves in being specialists and it was not long before we were all relishing the challenge.

So how do you fit two radios into one car? Luckily head units of this quality have pre-out and pre-in ports so connecting the two units “audio signals” together was a piece of cake but what about the RF signals or aerials to the uninitiated. The only way was to have multiple aerials and I did not want the car looking like a porcupine so the solution was a Hirschman tri band bee sting antenna fitted on the rear roof. This clever aerial looks good and does three jobs in one. It has an amplified FM feed, a GSM Cellular feed for the phone and a DAB signal feed for the digital radio tuner. The TMC box on the Alpine navigation unit also needs an aerial but it comes with a transparent window film type that was stuck to one of the rear side win