# German Goodies in a German Sports Coupe - 16 M4 SQ Build: Gladen - Mosconi



## simplicityinsound (Feb 2, 2007)

I dont recall when it happened, but sometime over the last 5 or 6 years, we have really began to sort of specialize in late model bmws...to date, counting E90s, F30s, F80s, F10s, etc etc, we have worked on almost 50 of them. Due to the rather unique design of these cars' speaker location, almost all of them have featured 100 percent oem driver mounting...which is perfectly fine as we have long since figured out a good formula to extract the most out of those placements. However, it is still kinda nice to go beyond that once in a while.

This particular car is a brand new BMW F82 M4, with the oem harmon kardon package. The decision was made very early on to do the entire build with products from the german company Gladen: You guys prolly know we are big fans of their Mosconi product line, but more rare are their speakers and subwoofers being utilized by us...infact, other than two previous builds, the only other times we used a speaker under the Gladen name has been the OEM bmw underseat woofers. 

This one, will be somewhat different. 

Joey built the sub enclosures, while i did the rest of the project.

lets get started with the goals:

1. achieve a nice sound quality with some slightly better than oem locations upfront

2. obtain a slightly higher amount of bass output than our typical late model builds (usually a single 10" sub on the passenger side)

3. Design a simple and clean trunk build that still maintains some usability...overall stealthiness isnt a big concern and the car is more of a weekend warrior, but still need to be able to toss a few bags in the trunk without fear of damaging anything.

first a quick gander at the car itself, pretty sexy despite being 100 percent stock at the moment:




























instead of our typical front stage residing in the doors, this car received a set of Gladen's top of the line aerospace 3" midrange and 1" tweeter, molded into the A pillars, wrapped in factory matching vinyl:









































































a few quick build pics of the pillars. first the stock pillars were coated wtih resin to give me a firm surface to mold onto:










then the two rings for the mid and tweeter were aimed and attached onto each pillar:










mold cloth was pulled, resin applied, allowed to harden, and then a resin/filler milk shake was poured into the pods to reinfoce them:










then several layers of filler and much sanding ensued, resulting in a smooth blended shape:










they were then wrapped in black vinyl:










and the gladen aerospace speakers wired up and installed:





































The rest of the front stages are the ole trusty Gladen drivers. here are the oem drivers in their enclosures. the floor of the enclosures were grounded down, and sound proofed, while an additional layer of foam went on the back of the enclosure to prevent buzzingt against the metal floor pan:














































the Gladen speakers were then installed into the enclosures:










and the enclosures were bolted back into the car, wired up, and everything put back together:


















































































now comes the series of pictures of the wiring as it runs from the front of the car to the back....as usual with late model bimmers, we run all the speaker wires down the opposite side of the car as the main oem power cable going to the battery, to cut down on the possiblities of any radiated noise), the bundle is organized and ziptied evey few inche, where ever there is a stock conduit,it was opened up, the bundle inserted, and then the conduit snapped back together:


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## simplicityinsound (Feb 2, 2007)

next, we tackled the signal source, which for this car, is at the optical signal going into the stock amp, seen here:










this was removed, a new board was bolted in its place, and on it sits a mobridge DA2 MOST optical preamp:





































this was then wired up and installed back into the car:



















the wires coming out of the da2 follows an oem bundle's path and joins the other signal cables coming from the front of the car:



















On the passenger side of the trunk, a zero gauge power cable was run the way way to the front of the trunk:



















The last thing before the trunk was the sound proofing of the rear deck:




























so, moving ontot he main part of the build, the trunk. Once we decided that the build was going to feature a plethora of high end amps that will not fit stealthily in the storage well, it was obvious the floor would need to be raised. the debate was between an entire new flat floor or just building a raised portion along the center channel of the trunk. in the end, the fact that the M4's trunk is much shorter top to bottom made the decision easy. there is simply no way to raise the entire floor up as it would not allow enough room for the subwoofers to go on the side. so the decision instead, was to made to build out the center portion of the trunk only.

so here it is in the all covered up mode, as you can see, everything is fully protected and the trunk still usable. there are two match subwoofer enclosures running down either side of the trunk, with a raised center portion and a big rectangular grille. Nothing too fancy:




























pop off the covers and here is what you see. in the middle are three Mosconi AS amps powering the entire system. a 100.4 sends 100 watts x 4 to the midrange and tweeter, while two AS200.2s send 200 watts to each midbass and 1000 watts or so to the subs. the subs are the Gladen SQX 10s...quite a nice sub with a good balance of output, sound quality and pricepoint.


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## simplicityinsound (Feb 2, 2007)

so thats it for the finished pics, lets take a look at the build pics of the trunk. first up is joey's portion, the two side enclosures. this may seem like a pretty basic job but the truth is, the two sides of the oem trunk carpet is quite different, so a lot of effort was made to ensure they end up looking the same. also, to balance the raised center portion, it was decided that cosmetically speaking,t he enclosures would run as far forward as possible, following the curved lines of the oem trunk carpet. 

Joey did the passenger side first, and because there is no stock carpet to mold off of once the battery cover piece was removed, the shape was instead formed by hand and tape. once that cured, it was sit in the cavity and test fitted:










to mount the enclosure upfront, joey decided to glass in a custom made metal bracket that will bolt to the oem cargo hook latch upfront:










then the whole trunk was taped off, and the two backs of the enclosures were glasssed:



















when those cured, they were pulled out, trimmed and re test fitted in the car:










Joey then secured the two mounting rings for the subs, pulled cloth, and glassed them. once cured, the excess fibergass around the opening was trimmed off with a palm router
































































then the two enclosures got a ton of filler, sanded smooth, back filled, until they were each at the desired shape:




























and then i jumped in and wrapped them in matching carpet:























































i then dyed the carpet a bit darker to better match the oem finish, here you see one that has been dyed, the other sans dye:










next was to figure out the mounting system for the enclosures. now the front part was going to the same, utilizet he oem cargo hook mounting point...but how to secure the back differed on each side... on the passenger side, a wooden support platform was first bolted to the oem battery tie down bracket:










this was then bolted back intot he car providing a solid platform for the rear of the enclosure to sit on:



















in this shot you can see the fuse block that is reachable through the subwoofer enclsoure opening:










then the speaker wires were run down, two threaded inserts installed onto the platform, and then the passenger side enclosure could be bolted down via two bolts into the inserts:










the driver side by comparison, was far easier, it is basically a bolt, some nuts and fender washers, passing through the oem carpet and the enclosure, with an additional nut on the inside. 










before we move onto the amp rack, lets take a quick look at this relatively new product (to us), the Gladen SQX 10. its not outrageous but looks just like a high quality driver:


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## simplicityinsound (Feb 2, 2007)

so, moving onto the amp rack.

first, the floor was sound proofed and a series of rivet nuts were installed into the floor. six total. hard to see in these pictures but they are there. then relevant wires were lead down into the area, note the stock bolt used for theg rounding point. the reason why it has dual 4 gauge ground cables vs a single 0 is due to heigh clearance under the foundation floor as you will soon see:



















next, i started to build the foundational floor that everything will secure to...including a little rack for the mosconi 6to8v8 dsp that will jut down vertically into the storage well area, it is bolted to the bottom of the foundation board. another concern was to still be able to access the fuse panels and modules under the front portion of the board without a TON of effort. to that end, the foundational board is dvided into two sections. this is the back section, with the dsp board bolted to it:





































and this is the front portion of the board, which secures to the floor with rivetnuts and bolts and into the back portion of the board via bolts and threaded inserts:










so here is the back portion of the board bolted in place, as you can see, it leaves the entire area containing the fuse panel and moduels open:










then the front portion of the board was bolted to the car:










so in order to access the fuses etc, you just need to unbolt the back amp, flip it forward, undo the four bolts and remove the front portion of the floor. takes about a minute to accomplish:

so then the amps are secured and wired up one by one, along with the dsp and power/ground distribution:


















































































then i built the main cosmetic trim panel, and wrapped it graphite vinyl and secured it to the rack for test fitting




























and then built the two piece top cover...this is the bottom panel, note cutout to accomodate the distribution blocks:










and this is the top panel:










the two pieces were then precisely lined up and spaced up using blocks of mdf and router tape:










mold cloth was pulled and stapled to form the shape, kinda doing it old school , resin applied and allowed to cure:





































then quite a bit of filler went on to smooth out the shape, particularly at the corners where the mold cloth invariably curves too much:




























and then it was wrapped in carpet:



















here are the three grille pieces before and after carpet:



















and finally, everything was dyed to match the oem interior carpet:



















so thats it for this one. the pillars and additional sub made a pretty big difference. the aerospace set is to me, always super balanced, smooth yet with great detail right off the bat...but in this configuration, the center image was defnitely a bit shaper, the stage slightly higher, and the depth much better. the SQX subs were great, they are yet another balanced output/sq drivers that we can call upon from time to time. with double the cone area and power of our typical late model bimmer builds, this one really can give the interior a good shaking when called upon, but still blended beautifully when asked...

overall, prolly the best sounding late model bmw to leave the shop 

thats all for now, more later. 

Cheers 

Bing


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## DLO13 (Oct 24, 2010)

looking good.


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## eling23 (Oct 13, 2014)

summer's around the corner, another meet at SIS is due! great job! I especially like the gladen grills! i would def envy the stage height on this one!


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## mark620 (Dec 8, 2010)

Ok I think we should all get together and contact velocity network! They have all they car shows and most of them are boring as hell. We can pitch a show to them called "The adventures of the SIS crew" Just think you will have a guy doing the build logs in video instead of you typing and adding pics...LOL Well it would be awesome cause we would get an hour show instead of just a build log.... Great Job as usual..Keep up the great work and this just makes me want a M4 more now!!


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## carlr (Feb 27, 2011)

Superb build as always. Some of that trunk work may very well serve as inspiration for my upcoming F36 build.


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## sparcorel (Nov 8, 2015)

One of the best install I've seen. I have a F30 and I will will definitely copy some ideas .

I do have few questions though if you can answer:
1. what is the volume of the trunk subwoofer boxes. Looking on the Gladen website they recommend like 22 liters for sealed box. But from the pictures they don't seem to have that volume... or am I wrong?
2. What are the crossover points, especially for front 3 way speakers.

Thank you!


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## GLN305 (Nov 2, 2007)

Beautiful work as always! I love the pillars, that wrap job wasn't easy I'm sure. What do you use to dye the carpet? The color matching issue with trunkliner is one I have let slip by in the past.


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## sparcorel (Nov 8, 2015)

How does the subs sound vs IB setup with a 12"?


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## E63M6 (Apr 29, 2016)

I love every build you guys do! Can't wait to see what you do next.


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## KrautNotRice (Nov 2, 2015)

Amazing... as always!


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## ewward31 (Jul 5, 2016)

Very nice. Following.


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## safe d (Dec 4, 2010)

Can i ask what size rivet nuts/boĺts were used to secure the amp rack? Thanks. Great build. Beautiful car


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## dcfis (Sep 9, 2016)

Can you share your dying techniques?


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