Jaguar F-Pace SVR 2024 – swapping premium Meridian for decent car audio
What could be more decent than premium standard Meridian car audio? Why do owners of such cars come to us if they have already paid for premium music? Why are they not satisfied with what the manufacturer considered “decent” car audio? Should I tell you the truth? So be it – because money and profit decide everything. You do not buy a car because it has decent car audio, but you are ready to pay a significant amount of money for the additional word “premium” – because it will add status to you. The only thing is that you will pay money for a cheap stamped mass-market something that cannot play so much as AH, but the manufacturer will get the maximum profit on this part. That is, premium car audio is not really for those who value sound quality, but for those who care about show.
But enough of the long introductions – let’s talk about this project. The car arrived to us beautiful, cheerful in color, elegant inside, brought us its owner, who was not satisfied with the sound of the standard Meridian audio system, and who trusted us to change the standard sound to something more adequate. We happily took on the job.
Looking ahead, we share a review from the owner of this Jaguar F-Pace, who wrote about his impressions of our service and the quality of the work performed, as well as the result obtained:
Meridian standard audio system in Jaguar F-Pace
What is the standard Meridian audio system, which is considered premium? In this car, the Meridian audio system includes 12 speakers together with a subwoofer and a standard amplifier. Six speakers are installed in the front – midbass and midrange speakers in the doors, tweeters in the dashboard, plus a central channel.
There are four speakers in the doors at the back (midbass + tweeter). The subwoofer is installed in the rear left wing and is a subwoofer nominally, because it is simply inaudible at any settings. We made a short video about this misunderstanding:
As you can see, there is a fancy nameplate that shows everyone that the music in your car is not simple (which is not true), and even the standard speakers are made in Belgium (probably this is where the premium quality of Meridian lies).
For those interested, we recommend looking at the Car Audio for Land Rover section, where there is an article about how we improved the standard premium Meridian car audio in the Range Rover Velar.
The composition of the new audio system to replace the standard Meridian
Of course, you are interested in what equipment we offered for the Jaguar F-Pace? I would like to immediately note that the set of speakers, processor and amplifiers is not the ultimate truth, that is, it is simply the optimal set that was selected based on the needs of the car owner, the ability to install it (meaning how compact the equipment is and how suitable it is in size) and another important factor influencing the final choice – availability in the warehouses of suppliers in Ukraine.
So, this is what the future car audio for the Jaguar F-Pace looks like (in fact, all the components have been well tested and familiar to us for a long time, there definitely shouldn’t be any surprises):
Speakers for Jaguar F-Pace SVR
The first thing that usually interests us in the context of speakers is what’s under the trim? Every time there is a glimmer of hope that under the beautiful trim (true, very cool in this car) we will see at least a hint of vibration insulation or noise insulation. But no – as always, even in a car costing about 100 thousand euros there is no acoustic preparation of the doors.
But we traditionally fix this – without this stage there is no point in installing powerful high-quality speakers. We make noise and vibration insulation in three layers – two layers of vibration insulation on metal surfaces, a layer of noise absorber on the plastic of the door panel:
Pictures of the factory speaker and the Blam Signature speakers in the front doors of the 2024 Jaguar F-Pace SVR:
We mount the midrange speakers as standard on the standard mounting points; it’s good that there’s enough space for the speaker, which has a fairly impressive magnet.
The standard midrange speaker of the Jaguar F-Pace SVR looks like this (a stamped basket like the cheapest acoustics from the market):
The midrange of Blam from the French manufacturer from the Signature series:
We won’t write anything about twitter here – we talked and showed a lot about it in our full video (at the end of this article).
Subwoofer for Jaguar F-Pace SVR
We decided to install the subwoofer in the trunk, of course, but without taking away any useful space. How can this be achieved? This is possible in those cars where the trunk has a false floor, where there is enough space to place a custom enclosure for the subwoofer. This is what the trunk space looked like under the false floor:
We were able to take the maximum space for our devices – there was room in the trunk for two amplifiers and for a case with a 10-inch (25-centimeter) subwoofer speaker. As we wrote above, the standard subwoofer of the factory premium Meridian audio system was not heard at all, because it was located in the wing of the Jaguar F-Pace SVR and played God knows where, but definitely not in the cabin. Our version of the subwoofer installation is implemented so that low frequencies can be heard even when the five-liter engine of this car is running.
Processor and amplifiers for Jaguar F-Pace SVR
As you have already understood from the photos above, our audio system now has two amplifiers – a monoblock for the subwoofer and a processor amplifier with 12 amplification channels for all speakers. You can also learn more about them from our video.
