3x8 Audio: Blaupunkt Bremen SQR 46 DAB

Grabbed a flashlight and went into the car in the total dark. First song: "Junior Wells performing Tracy Chapman's "Give Me One Reason." Wow.



Raised the buckets with the headlights off. Adjusted color to match the gauges. R=3, G=3, B=6. What have others settled upon?

Adjusted dimness to match the gauges. Set brightness = 1. Still brighter than the gauges. I need LEDs.

 

The factory speakers are quite small and don't produce great sound. I don't remember the factory size. If you phone Crutchfield, they would probably know.

The problem is not so much a speaker magnet depth problem as it is a speaker grille problem. There is no clearance for bigger speakers and the factory grilles are not sonically transparent. Higher frequencies, actually anything above the higher mid-range, will struggle.

There are lots of speaker options for great sound, although this is not a car you want to get too fanatical about since engine and road noise are too high to have any sort of high fidelity experience. Any stereo equipment outlet, such as Crutchfield, can give you good advice. A common solution has been to cut out the factory speaker grilles, install big speakers and cover the hole with a metal speaker grille. Going one step further, it is common to install matched tweeters in the manual emergency window door crank holes.

If your car is a concours level car, as is mine, you have to be careful not to go too crazy on appearance. The concours judging rules allow for something to the effect of, "tastefully installed stereo systems". Rifledriver says that my leather non-factory speaker grilles should be a deduction, but I have never been deducted for them. I also have tweeters in my window crank holes and a small power amp mounted behind the carpet on the driver's front bulkhead. (Before anyone titch, titches me about this placement of the amp, there is so much room ahead of the pedals, the amp cannot possibly impede their travel, I've anchored the amp such that it cannot come loose and the amp has a thermal cut-off should air circulation behind the carpet somehow get blocked.)

Sitting quietly in the garage, my system sounds pretty darned good. ... today, I take it out for its first drive with the new stereo system. I don't have high expectations.

 

As planned, I took the car out, roof off, windows down, microphone in hand and phoned my wife while at speed. She gave me feedback as to which microphone location gave her the best sound of my voice. Surprisingly, it was not the upper corner of the A-pillar where the old microphone was but rather down beside the ignition key. When I got back to the garage, I mounted it on the other side of steering wheel, at the corner shelf, which gave her equal sound quality.

While out on the road, I also cranked up the volume to listen to music over the din of the engine. It was very good. I don't think I caused any hearing damage.

About the only surprise is that the "day" setting for display brightness is too dim. I've got it set on the maximum brightness (brightness = 16). I am hoping I am missing something in the instructions.

This project is now fully done.

You may find threads like this useful:
1985 308 QV Door Speakers & Tweeters

 

I've fixed the daytime brightness issue. Although the overall brightness can be adjusted with a general "brightness" control, brightness is also impacted by how high each of red, green and blue colors are independently set. The 308 lighting is a bluish color. Instead of starting at r=0, g=0, b=0 and working upward, I cranked all three up to their maximum brightness values of 16 and reduced green and red until the Bremen color matched the instruments. I ended at Red = 10, Green = 13 and Blue = 16. Much brighter.

I must say now that I believed a fallacy that a 308 could not have high audio sound quality. It has to be louder, but my stereo sounds great over the sound of the engine and wind noise. On long stretches of plain highway, I may now play my Bremen.

An operational surprise was that the phone goes through the unit even when the unit is turned off (although ignition must be on). Said another way, while driving the car with the Bremen switched off and my iPhone sitting on the passenger's seat, an incoming phone call will wake the Bremen and route the call through the car's audio system.

 

Humm, (Not sure what it is you want to see) ...

Here is a photo of the installed unit. It looks better in person than in a photo. The dangling wire is the microphone wire, which I hadn't installed yet when I took the picture.

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Here is a photo of my infamous (non-factory) speaker grilles and my tweeters (Infinity speakers). Modern speakers can make huge base without a subwoofer. Also note the microphone placement between my nifty outdoor thermometer (sender in front grille of car) and USB ports/Volt meter.

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This last photo is of the wiring under the dash. It still looks like a mess, but I consider it quite tidy (you should have seen it before). The black plastic split wire loom tubing holds the antenna wire, 12v trigger wires and the line-level interconnects between the Bremen and my power amp (which you see behind the clutch and brake pedals). The other colorful twisted cable running beside it is a 4-wire 16-gauge cable which returns amplified signal from the power amp to the factory wiring running to the speakers in the doors. The phone jack is for the telephone microphone which was not hooked up yet. The dangling USB pigtail is the rear USB port, which I later wire-tied underneath the dash (I now have a USB flash memory drive plugged in with lots of mp3 files). The enormous red wire against the bulkhead is an unswitched 12v power supply coming directly from the battery a stereo installer put in once-upon-a-time. Since it is there, I use it for my power amp power supply. It's on its own in-line fuse.

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Per my prior post …

 

Crutchfield currently has the Breman SQR 46 DAB back in stock and is selling it for $449 with free shipping. That is a good price.

https://www.crutchfield.com/p_423BREMENS/Blaupunkt-Bremen-SQR-46-DAB.html