The Bronco is a properly good vehicle with a properly difficult cabin. Flat glass, hard plastics, thin trim, and a roof and doors built to come off — every surface in it either reflects sound or leaks it. So when a repeat client from Vancouver told us his 2023 Bronco's factory B&O system was thin on bass, short on volume and vague about where anything was coming from, none of that was a surprise. It is what the vehicle does to a system built to a price.
He did not want a patch. We rebuilt the system.
The front stage
The single biggest change was getting a real driver into the Bronco's rear-of-cab speaker location. From the factory that position holds a 4″ speaker in a moulded pod, which is roughly the smallest thing that can legally be called a speaker. We built new pods for that location to take 6.5″ Helix Compose Ci3 C165.2FM-S3 coaxials instead, and replaced the remaining 4″ drivers with the matching Ci3 C100.2FM-S3.
That one substitution does most of the work. Cone area is what produces midbass, and no amount of processing invents it. With the bigger drivers in place the system got noticeably louder before it got harsh, and the soundstage widened out across the cabin instead of sitting in the doors.
Power and processing
Two amplifiers run the system: the Helix M FOUR DSP, a four-channel amplifier with a 10-channel digital processor built into it, and a Kenwood eXcelon X802-5 five-channel — about 1,200 watts across the pair, with the subwoofer on a channel of its own.
The processor is the part that matters most in a vehicle like this. A Bronco cabin will always be a difficult, hard-surfaced, asymmetric room. The DSP is where that gets dealt with: level and crossover set per driver, timing corrected so the stage sits in front of you rather than beside your ear, and the response tuned on-site rather than out of a file.
Bass without losing the back
The owner uses his cargo area, so the usual answer — a box behind the rear seat — was out. After several Broncos we have settled on a better one for this vehicle: mount the enclosure on the inside of the tailgate. It is dead space, it is out of the load floor entirely, and it puts the subwoofer firing forward into the cabin.
The result is a Bronco that plays properly loud without falling apart, holds its imaging at highway speed, and gave up no cargo space to get there.