This was a genuinely enjoyable project for our team. Yes it was challenging, but it allowed us to get a bit creative with design and fitment, and stretch our legs a bit on the tuning front.

The Morel Integration Reference speakers are based on the Morel Hybrid speaker series, which are an incredible sounding speaker – but they need some decent power to drive them properly and control those oversized voice coils. The decision was made to employ an Audison Forza AFM8.14bit DSP amplifier as our main DSP amp, so we could give a solid 90Wrms to each speaker channel whilst having the full suite of tuning controls and options available from the freshly updated BitDrive tuning software. This amp drives the centre dash speaker (Morel IR-MBZ), front door speakers (Morel IR-MBZ), rear door speakers (Morel IR-MBZ) and surround speakers (OEM Mercedes).

Then to give us the low end extension we needed, the factory Mercedes front footwell woofers were upgraded to a pair Match UP factory-fit upgrades which have some decent power handling and produce some impressive bass in their own right – but nothing beats a *real* sub. So with some careful measurement and clever design, we were able to squeeze a Hertz Mille Pro Slim 12” sub under the boot floor in the “dead space” where there would normally be a spare wheel (but not in this AMG!). The hand made hardwood Ply enclosure makes use of all the wasted space to give us maximum enclosure volume, and fits snugly in place such that there aren’t any errant rattles and knocks during more spirited drives or when the music is pumped. The inside of the enclosure is reinforced with fibreglass joins, and heavily lined with a “milkshake” blend to deaden resonance and provide more strength and rigidity.

To power the front subs and the big boot sub, a matching Audison Forza AFM4D amplifier is employed, delivering 150Wrms to each of the two front subs, and over 500Wrms to the 12” boot sub.

To deal with the road noise issue, a full 3-layer approach was utilised in the boot floor, with STP Black gold Deadener to eliminate vibrations, STP Aeroflex closed cell foam insulation to reduce and absorb external noise and provide decoupling, and STP Noise Block mass loaded vinyl to block and reject anything passing through.

The doors were treated to a combination of STP Black Gold deadener and STP Aeroflex insulation inside the door cavity, and the door trims themselves were treated to STP Biplast super-soft acoustic insulation to ensure that and unwanted noises inside the doors were absorbed and not passed through into the cabin space.

Then for a nice finishing touch, a one-off bespoke 3D printed mount was designed and made for the Audison DRC-AC digital controller, that’s hidden inside the centre console and gives the owners control over bass level, surround speaker level, tone control, and the ability to switch between 3 different tuning setups/configurations for different sound profiles and time alignment settings.

Following many hours of tuning, the car was returned to two VERY happy owners.