Best Laid Plans The original plans included making a couple of trick slide out trays that would house audio components under the seats. However, the very limited amount of room under the low slung Insight seats made that impossible. Van Wagner pushed for a different approach, and thus the hatch floor amp chamber idea was born. To minimize weight the entire chamber was made out of aluminum. The lid of the chamber had to be strong enough so that items tossed in the hatch area could rest on top of it without any flexing. And you had to be able to lift it up to allow access for adjusting the electronics. The underside of the lid would show off the legend detailing how the system works.
The amp chamber houses the pair of PG 400ti amps, the PG EQ232 1/3 octave "house" EQ/signal processor, and the pair of MB Quart front stage passive crossovers. The amp chamber is a two-piece affair with a lower main body and a tilt-up lid. The main body is mostly flat with just a turned up rear wall. The main flat portion that sits on top of the carpeted hatch floor has two countersunk holes that align with threaded holes in the battery/controller compartment lid; and beveled flat head screws cinch down the chamber to the floor. These screws are hidden from view once the amplifiers are mounted. There are threaded holes for mounting the two amplifiers, a 1/3 octave EQ/processor, and the two MB Quart front speaker crossovers. Both metal pieces of the amp chamber are painted purple, and the entire lid is carpeted in a nice grey with "HYBRID" embroidered in a matching purple thread. A new hatch floor carpet was made to match the carpet of the chamber lid, so it all looks as though it came from the factory.
The Insight has three identical rectangular grey plastic air vent grills visible on the interior of the car: two on the rear hatch area walls and one battery intake grill just behind the passenger seat. These are used to facilitate air flow for cooling the motor speed controller/inverter, the factory 75 amp DC-DC converter (replaces the conventional alternator found in ordinary cars), various electronics, and the NiMH battery pack. Wayland ordered two of the battery intake grills and mounted them over the air intake openings of the amp chamber lid for a factory look. He also cut two hot air exhaust ports into the side walls of the lid where the pressurized air of the amp chamber can escape. All three of the Phoenix Gold equipment pieces are finished in a "Titanium" silver that matches the car's "Silverstone" metallic paint job perfectly; and the amplifiers have Plexiglas viewing windows that allow one to see the electronics inside. The MB Quart competition crossovers also have clear viewing covers for a trick look.
Perhaps the most intricate piece of metal work, is the one that cannot be seen: the CD changer/devices mounting plate assembly that allows various components to be placed in the passenger side rear corner of the car. Since there would be no holes drilled in the Insight's body, and any cutting or modifications could only be done to parts that were replaceable and/or removable from the car the mounting plate assembly was a sheared and trimmed, brake-bent, notcher-shaped aluminum affair that drops into the corner section at the rear of the car, beneath the hatch floor and to the right of the sunken cargo well. The plate makes use of three factory holes (one in the battery compartment, one on the right quarter panel wall, and one in the rear wall) to facilitate a secure mounting into the car. After first making sure it fit perfectly into the tight confines of the area, the mounting plate assembly was then removed and worked on outside of the car. The various components were positioned on the plate and then, using transfer punches, marks were made for all the mounting screw locations. Holes were then drilled and tapped to hold the 12-disc JVC CH-X350 CD changer, a Phoenix Gold "Bass Cube" bass processor, a "Todd" 30 amp DC-DC converter, a high voltage DC relay with magnetic blowouts, a small but extremely powerful "Johnson Controls" TMF 12v battery, a 100 amp fuse w/mounting assembly, and a 500 amp 50mv shunt to send information to a remote mounted "Emeter" battery computer. Whew!
12 Volt & a Dozen More The secondary 12v supply is perhaps the most interesting part of the Insight's sound system. To understand this second 12v system though, you first need to understand the primary 12v system of the Insight. As it is with electric cars, the 12v power supply for a hybrid car is quite different than anything you'll find in an ordinary gas vehicle. Instead of a heavy, inefficient, and power consuming alternator driven off the engine via a belt, the Insight car uses a compact, lightweight, and very efficient DC-DC converter, a switch-mode power supply not unlike the ones used inside powerful car stereo amps. Whereas the internal car stereo amp DC-DC converters take a low voltage, high current source (the 12 battery) and step it up to high voltages inside the amp, the DC-DC converter of the Insight car takes high voltage juice from the 144 vdc NiMH battery pack and converts it down to low voltage at high current (14.5v @ 75 amps) to power up the 12v system, and to charge the small under-hood 12v accessory battery. The secondary 12v supply to run the stereo system needed to be able to produce up to 100 amps of instantaneous current while maintaining 14+ volts. It needed to be compact; light in weight; isolated from the chassis 12v ground; automatic in its operation; and to not interfere with the factory operation of the Honda IMA (integrated motor assist) system. At the same time, it also needed to communicate with it so as to keep the NiMH battery pack in a safe operating area. This was accomplished using a second 30 amp DC-DC converter by Todd Engineering and a small six pound thin-metal-film (TMF) electric vehicle drag racing battery that acts as a current reservoir and can dish out 800 amps on demand. Essentially, the stereo's amplification setup, though a 12v system, gets all of its power from the 144v NiMH battery pack.
Signal Chain The audio signal chain is pretty basic, and it starts with the JVC KD-LX30 Kameleon AM/FM/CD head unit. Though this very capable machine has a myriad of inputs and outputs, in Wayland's final design only one of them was tapped into. With a full complement of outboard signal processing and high powered amplification, none of the CD player's built-in chip type amplifiers are used, nor are the front channel preamp outputs or the dedicated subwoofer preamp output. Instead, only the rear pair of preamp outputs are used and fed to the right rear corner of the car. It was a hard decision to make, because doing it this way eliminates the fader control and the nifty subwoofer control from the deck and the deck's remote. The plus side is that Wayland has a separate Bass Cube control that affects the subwoofer's output; and with just the two front speakers, there really was no need for a fader effect.
The CD player's rear preamp outputs are routed to the input of the first signal processor, the Phoenix Gold Bass Cube. The Bass Cube is a bass processor that is operated by the remote controls located in the dash mounted tilt-down change drawer. These consist of a single rotary control. This knob can be pulled or pushed to activate or deactivate the Bass Cube's effect. It's a trim level adjustment knob that selects what bass frequency range is to be attenuated, and a power-on LED indicator. The Bass Cube also has a sub sonic filter that can be set to a predetermined frequency, or it can be set to shadow and follow the lowest frequencies. The subsonic filter is used to protect the subwoofers from non-musical inaudible frequencies, and Wayland set the Cube to the shadowing feature. The Bass Cube's preamp outputs feed a pair of RCA cables that leave the rear corner of the car and take the audio signal forward again into the amp chamber, where they plug into the preamp inputs of the second signal processor, the Phoenix Gold EQ232, a dual 30 band, 1/3 octave combination equalizer and signal enhancer.