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B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification)

dwasill

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I've seen dozens of threads commenting, talking and complaining about the B&O Stereo Systems available on the 2021+ F150s but none that give the information really needed to tackle a complete amplification upgrade of the 18-speaker system. I bought my 701A specifically for the OEM speaker locations and the fact the system had unique 'surround' speaker locations and with full knowledge that I'd be upgrading the system once received. There are a million schools of thought on what is the best upgrade and why (speakers, amplifiers, DSPs, Passive, Active, blah, blah blah) but over 30 years of tinkerin with all sorts of stereos I've found that the most 'effective' initial upgrade is MORE POWER!!! Even the crappiest speakers can sound great with amplification "headroom" and frequency restrictions (crossover) so my initial goal was to replace/upgrade the factory sub then add amplification (or headroom) and active crossovers to ALL of the B&O Unleashed systems other 17 speakers...

The first trick was figuring out exactly where and what Ford & B&O is counting for their "18" speakers.
Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) locations_5580b24d291fa5fc9099edbe0088c3610ec82451

B&O Unleashed Factory Speaker Locations

Above many of you will likely see 16 speakers but each of the rear doors has a "Co-axial" speaker meaning a tweeter is suspended within the cone of a larger mid-bass assembly making each count as 2 speakers...
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dwasill

dwasill

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Assuming you don't want to hack and slash your factory harnessing the first step is to get two harnesses to tap into the OEM speaker wiring. The first is the PAC APH-FD02 harness common to older F150s though when it shows up do yourself a favor and throw the instructions away as they are entirely wrong when tapping into wiring for the Unleashed system. The second harness is from the guys over at @SoundsGoodStereo who make a custom T-Harness (B&O Unleashed - Custom Radio Integration T-Harness - Compatible with 2 – Sounds Good Stereo Online) which gets you to 6 of the system's 18 speakers through a connection at the head unit (more about this later). The PAC harness, being designed for earlier Ford systems with far fewer speakers, will need to be modified to feed all the speakers for the Unleashed system. Below I'll post the full speaker wiring pinouts in which you'll notice that one speaker pair (the right-side headrests) actually spill over onto the amplifiers Power/CAN connector (which is also part of the PAC harness kit).
Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) 05_small__f66a82275e5e10932038714ff711ea1ef5535be8


You'll probably note that the PAC harness above (modified) doesn't match the one below (ordered) which is because this specific kit wasn't designed to interface to the Unleashed system though the connectors are the same, so it'll work in a pinch. I won't get into all the mods/wiring necessary (I'm presuming you'll only tackle this if you have some reasonable stereo wiring capabilities) but the pinout table should relay all that's necessary to make the necessary modifications. For the Unleashed system ALL of the harness wires pictured below will be utilized, including the bundled short yellow wires not utilized in earlier B&O systems.
Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) pac_86b7f80d8aebaf89d8d26dd6f83ac73f85e0be61


Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) er_wiring_2b19b3d56c52c2543138b442a07d789eced20d27


Disclaimer: The "Frequency" values and ranges are my approximations of the likely specifications of the OEM B&O speakers and were for me to configure and tune MY system... I'm sure there are some of you why are fact-checking me right now (you know who you are) :p
 
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dwasill

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Now that ya'all know how to get to all the speakers you need to decide how you want to amplify the system. To interface to the A2B head unit signals I chose the NavTV ZEN-A2B / DSP12A-A2B interface as it was one of the more popular/common and longer-standing interfaces on the market that claimed to be compatible with the system. Amplification will be another personal choice. Money no object I notice that the guys over at SoundsGoodStereo have a multitude of pre-configured packages though from the signal count it looks like most of them are configured to run on the 8-speaker B&O or only partially drive the Unleashed system. For me it was imperative to keep all of the speakers functional as I wanted the 'surround presence' they were going for when B&O conceived the original system. For my system I put in 10 channels of configurable full-range amplification plus a monoblock sub amp brining my channel total to 11 (though I'm only using 10). I happened to already have an AudioControl LC-6.1200 and an Epicenter 600 from an earlier system so I filled it out with an AudioControl ACM 4.300 to drive some of the ancillary Unleashed speakers.
Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) ed_re_amp_a6f0e587ee75f317d80c046a76792563a188e2ab


My config above is only an example of how the system can be driven. I wanted the biggest sub I could hide behind the seat as I didn't want to lose under-seat storage functionality, so I ordered the single 13.5" sub box from MTI Acoustics and paired it with a JL Audio 13TW5.
Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) dsc_2329_85e06044b20ce5cb2d92f44a6bf59c17db4afde4

Because I needed all of the rear wall space for the subwoofer I built a custom amp plate to fit under the left-side rear seat on the floor behind the rear seat storage. Again, one of my prerequisites was to have an OEM look and full functionality of floorspace and storage.
Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) 28_132905_a5c9cf4cfe57bd8341042427ff257c141ab3da47


Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) dsc_2338_c8df52adf69828309965edec90c11e2c84ef1997
 
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dwasill

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Prompted by a DM I figured I'd put some of my response here to give background on why I posted this and my experience in my system:


I've been an audio nut for a long time and used to do Yacht stereos semi-professionally and have seen posts from a few of the professed "audio experts" that seem to leave a lot of pertinent information out of what makes the best upgrades... In my experience improving the source side through amplification is always a more effective initial upgrade than slapping in a bunch of over-priced speakers on a system that really can't utilize them. A lot of what I do is trial and error but I've gotten pretty good at predicting the outcome and while dozens of people told me that the Unleashed satellite speakers (overhead, dash, headrest, etc) couldn't take any more power I've got a truck that says otherwise and sounds great!

Admittedly I knew the speakers needed more volume (power) and figured if they couldn't handle it, I'd be following up my amplification with select speaker replacements... Also for full disclosure, while my bass sounds great and a vast improvement over the OEM sub I did expect more out of the JL 13TW5 than I'm getting, having used that same driver in Yacht applications very successfully. Historically I've been a JL 12W6 fan as I like the lower bass notes and the hair-drying air movement. The frequency roll-off on the 13W5 is much higher on my setup than what I've experienced in my 12W6 installations. Having the same requirements (reserve under-seat seat space and utilize behind the seat), however, I'd probably still put in the same though I'd love to compare my box to a twin 10TW3 setup.


Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) 13TW5-MTI Acoustics
 

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Thanks for sharing!
Very generous and I really appreciate your approach to leveraging the existing Unleashed components first.
 

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Very cool. I was surprised to see that the headrests have a right and left channel in each. I assumed it was some sort of mono fill at first.

I wonder if your amp sees a two ohm load on the headrest speakers since they branch off later in the harness.

Anyway, nice job and great choice of amps.
 
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dwasill

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Very cool. I was surprised to see that the headrests have a right and left channel in each. I assumed it was some sort of mono fill at first.

I wonder if your amp sees a two ohm load on the headrest speakers since they branch off later in the harness.

Anyway, nice job and great choice of amps.
It took me a while to track down the wiring to the right side headrest speakers as that pair overflows the capacity of the "speaker" connector on the DSP amp and land on the Power/CAN connector. It was pretty satisfying defining my system on paper (as I was awaiting my order) pre-assembling and wiring the amp rack and then just dropping it in and having everything just work :) I'm not sure if the paralleled tweeters drops to a 2 ohm load but I actually wired the headrests in parallel with the A-pillar front tweeters to run them off my high-pass configured channels (1/2). The overhead and dashboard mids run band-pass and in parallel off my 3/4 channels and my front door woofers run off my low-pass 5/6 channels.
 

Zyvin

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Nice, I bet it sounds great. For anyone else trying the same, here is the connector split out where you can see the right headrest on connector C31558.
Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) 48A4BFC6-4400-4636-BD89-D00364A4A8F4
Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) F7E61909-1789-4159-9DD3-BB107699A5A4
 

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dwasill

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Nice, I bet it sounds great. For anyone else trying the same, here is the connector split out where you can see the right headrest on connector C31558.
Thx for posting these, I managed to find a set when I was trying to figure out where the headrest speakers wired and to confirm my PAC harness wiring
 
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dwasill

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Figured I'd post and update and note come changes I made from my original design... My first design was centered around the NavTV Zen which is super-common to F150 update applications yet lacks any features for channel cross-over or time delay so there's no accommodating these needs with the setup I started with. Taking this into account I switched to the mObridge DA-G2.PRO A2B FORD PREAMP & DSP, which accommodates 12-channels of independently configurable audio output. As I already had non-DSP quality audio amplifiers I figured this was an easier route than upgrading to DSP configurable amplifiers. The added benefit is that all control is in one interface rather than being dispersed across multiple amps.
Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) 20221207_151208
Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) 20221204_214155
 
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dwasill

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Adding the mObridge DSP also allowed me to reallocate my amplifier channels more effectively routing the higher-power channels to the speakers that could use it and better-balancing the system.

Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) Unleashed Re-amp DSP (Large)
 
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dwasill

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Finally, keen eyes will not an amplifier change from the Epicenter 600 to an LC800.1 as my original installation had the EC600 driving a 4-ohm 13TW5v2 (the only available model at the time of purchase) which I was to realize later that in that configuration the power-hungry driver was only effectively getting 250W RMS out of the 600W amp. As a 2-ohm load still didn't get the power to the driver I wanted I did both, switch my 4-ohm driver to a 2 AND swap the Epicenter out for the more powerful LC800.1 to give the subwoofer the overhead it needed.
Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) 20230327_083213


Ford F-150 B&O Unleashed Upgrade DIY Thread (Sub & Amplification) 13TW5-MTI Acoustics
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