G'day, Arthur, and hello Floatplane for this inaugural episode of LMG Whips.
This is where I don't really know the format, but I have a 2021 Volkswagen Golf GTI, so
that's what you're starting with. You already beat me to the punch, I was literally going to ask you what make and model your
car is. Yeah, so it's a Volkswagen Golf, I'm sure the first thing that you're wondering is
why did you not get the Golf R? In 2001, it did not exist, so I had the option of either buying a brand new Golf GTI or because
of the shortages, and the fact that there wasn't a 21-mall-year-old Golf R, I would
have to pay the same amount of money for a four or five-year-old Golf that's been thrashed
by some teenager, and it kind of has a bit of the shakes down the highway.
Not a good time, I just wanted the new one. And what did I immediately do?
I have ruined it, there is no warranty left on this thing.
I'm full third-ownering this thing right out of the gate, man.
How long have you had this car for? Two years, two years now, 40,000 kilometers, not too bad.
If we look here, it's in cornflower blue, and also it has a nice scratch rate here, that's
from the Forklift in 105, so I put an extraordinary sound system in this, we'll get more into
it later. But very unfortunately, I was working in 105 over there, and I had to have the Forklift
forks up so that it could fit in there all nice and good, and the power went out at five
o'clock at night, and we were just like, ah crap, I guess we're stopping now, and I forgot
to do anything with the Forklift, and overnight the forks slowly went down, hit the hood, put
this big scratch there, and that sucks, I'm going to fix it at some point.
Anyway, the lights are fantastic, absolutely love them, fog lights on this one, really
good. We have the rims from the Club Sport in Europe, which means that they are extraordinarily
light, I think it's only like 17 pounds per corner, and Pilot Sport 4S's from the factory,
well this didn't come with them, but I made them put them on when I bought the car.
Coming around here, we have construction noises.
If you're wondering, the worst thing about filming car videos and anything outside is
the amount of noise that you have, just constantly.
There's people working on whatever that is, there's cars driving by, motorcycles, planes,
it is just constant interruptions when you're working outside.
We had people doing tricks in planes over top, I mean there's children over there, it
is disgusting filming outside, anyway.
Looking in here, we have my crap on a low gym bag and swag, but you don't care about
any of that. And of course, if being a golf, it's very practical, you can put the seats down.
And previously, this floor right here could go down another about 3 inches for when you
really wanted to cram stuff in there, but you cannot do that, oh jeez, sorry, you cannot
do that anymore because I have a complete whole new sound system in here.
It was a lot of fun to do this, probably took me, I don't know, 100, 150 hours, something
stupid like that to do all of it.
It was a lot of work, like a lot, a lot of work, and it sounds absolutely exceptional.
I am lucky enough to very regularly drive around in $100,000 cars, and this blows them
all completely out of the water. So first thing, big dirty subwoofer, it's disgusting, this is a high excursion sub from
Soundstage, that's an in-house brand for vision electronics here in Canada.
It is not particularly great, but my hope was simply that by using the wonders of digital
processing I could make it sound good, and I did.
Also there's Hertz Mealy pros up in the front, they're not the highest end that they make,
but the second highest end, they sound really good. But the most important thing here is the DSP, it's from Mini DSP 8x12, and it has support
for Dirac Live, which is the exact same thing that they use for Bentley's, the Volvo S90,
lots of different, I think Genesis has used Dirac.
So what that allows me to do is have actual room correction in the car for things like,
I don't know, the sound bouncing off of the window beside you.
It can help with polarity issues, or it can help more so with phasing issues, it is incredible
with that. So if you think about, this is a really dirty subwoofer, it is not particularly good, but
I was able to make it sound good by taking like a bunch of math, I don't know how it
works, but you listen to what it does and then you're able to compensate for the phase
changes that it will do and have everything be in phase at the driver's seat as you are
going through stuff. We'll look a little bit more at that, but don't worry about the fact that it looks like
a fire hazard, it really is not. We have a fuse up front, we have a fuse here, we have more fuses here, almost everything
is fused at least twice, most three times.
It looks a little bit disgusting, I'll clean it up eventually, but realistically I don't
care too much. For everything else in here, we have the LC2i, so that comes just simply from the head unit
that's up there and allows integration with the DSP.
We have an Audison Beacon, which allows us to have high def or high res audio directly
from this. It's a little Bluetooth thing to the DSP totally digitally, so that sounds way better
than this with its wires going all through the car and VW's crap sounding crappy and
so on. Rockford Foskate amplifier is a full active setup, so every single tweeter and woofer and
so on gets their own channel, so this right here is about 1200 watts and for the rear speakers
we have a little crappy $100 soundstage amplifier that's completely fine for running the stock
You don't really use the rear speakers a whole lot in car audio for the most part, they're
just kind of like surround ambiance stuff, so you don't really have to worry too much
about making that fancy. Popping into the backseat, I have my laptop here just to show you how big of a difference
it has made going from the stock to the current sound system in here.
The big thing is that the stock one, what I really hated is that the mids were just
terrible. Here, around 600Hz, there's a 12dB boost around 800Hz, it's about 10dB, that just sounds
disgusting, it hurts your ears listening to vocals and stuff like male vocals just never
sounded correct. I had to destroy the mids with the EQ just so it sounded okay-ish, but then you lose
everything that's sort of around that peak, anyway it's all fixed now, that's what the
green line is, it looks way better and it's stupid loud.
This is about 1400W of power somewhere around there, I've been in a lot of cars from different
manufacturers that are about the same, they'll say they have like a 1300-1400W amp, it's
not the same. I don't know what kind of ILS, which is if lightning strikes ratings they are using,
but oh my god, the chassis of the car is what is stopping it from getting louder, not the
amount of power that is on tap. If you look here, I have a USB cable coming from my trunk, there's also one coming from
the engine but we'll talk about that later, but this allows me to control everything with
the DSP, I think we've seen enough of the back seats. Oh, you should really get your dog a seatbelt, it's super not cool to just have your dog
floating around, they'll try and get on your lap, and if you get in a car accident they'll
go through your windshield, Mr. Winston will not be doing that because I have a seatbelt
on. The driver's seat, these seats are absolutely exceptional, I have lumbar support, it goes
up and down and in and out, it's freaking awesome, it's very nice that I can go from,
like I said before with the sound system, but even just with the seats in this car,
you can go from 70-80 thousand dollar cars, get back in this and be like, hmm, it's more
comfortable, especially when you're going from like a big dirty EV that has this much
tire on 20 inch rims for some reason and 5000 pounds of battery, getting into this
it'll have a nicer, more comfortable suspension than these what should be very cushy luxury
vehicles, it's rather funny. What else do we have in here? There's a steering wheel, it has physical buttons unlike the Mark 8 Golf, we also have
actual climate controls which shouldn't be something that you have to say about, but
it does, and a stick shift, right here, it's a full manual Arthur, do you know how to drive
in Forza Horizon, for a set of Corsa? I don't know if that counts, I'm sorry.
For technology, it's a, we have wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, that's pretty much
all that I use, unless if I want to be streaming to the Bitcoin, here we have the DSP remote,
it has a little 3D printed carrier that in theory I'm going to upgrade, but in practice
this actually works fine, so we'll see, but I have four presets, so we have, you know,
the nice preset for just Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, that sort of stuff, then the rest of
them are either driver or passenger high res audio, so that's when you really want to have
that nice high fidelity experience, and you can also still have the controls through the
head unit, if you're using like a Samsung phone, you can dual connect to this, and the
high res player, so you have the high res audio, and also the ability to use your steering
wheel controls, which is sweet. Of course, we have to play Crab Rape, I'm going to talk about the sound system a whole
bunch, the sound system is fantastic, solid center image, lots of bass, it will shake
the car.
Anyway, we can turn that down, you could legitimately like permanently damage your hearing in this,
not particularly hard, but I try not to do that.
Let's go for a little drive, we need to be fairly quick about it, because I have 15
kilometers of range up in the gas tank, and one of those people that just sort of really
takes it to the absolute limit, like, now if you look at the gauge cluster here, there
are, like in the Gulf, are you able to get a digital gauge cluster, it's all fancy.
I don't really want any of that, this right here is perfect, so I have actual speedo,
actual tachometer, and in the center I can just change it, so the important stuff that
I actually want is easily accessible, so speed, go up oil temperature, 85 degrees Celsius,
so I can actually push it if I want, and the range 15 kilometers, so we don't want to push
it for too, too long. When I first got this car, I did not like the way that it handled or drove, or kind
of anything about the driving experience. Coming from a Fiesta ST, it was not very good, lots of understeer, pretty vague, shift sucked,
but all of that has been fixed, so rear sway bar, I have a 24 millimeter one now, that
cured the understeer problem for the most part, but another thing that was just terrible
about this from the factory, is that you cannot turn off traction control.
There's this fun little dongle shimmy called an OBD-11, and by using that I was able to
fully get rid of traction control, and then we saw why Volkswagen had that really stupid
traction control, because the wheel hop was just so terrible, just absolutely atrocious,
so wheel hop for those of you that you don't know, when you have a torquey car and you
hit the gas, the wheels try to move forward, the car doesn't, and then they sort of bounce
with all of like, just the sort of not stiffness that you can get from different bushings and
stuff like that. I was able to fix it by changing out the dog bone mount, so this engine has three mounts
on it, right, left, and on the bottom, I changed the one on the bottom to a full polyurethane
one that's about 70 dirometer, from the factory it's about 30, and that made an absolutely
huge difference, and also made it not very nice to drive, it was just the noise, harshness,
and vibrations were just unbearable, but I got this thing, it's called a Rock Euro
drivetrain stabilizer, it's like a little metal bar thing that replaces the factory
one, and it just completely solved the harshness while not introducing any of the stupid wheel
hop back in, and with this right here making the definitely stock, definitely still warranty,
290 horsepower, 320 torques, this thing's quite fast now, I don't actually know how
fast it is, but we can just put it in sport mode here, wait, come on.
There we go, sport mode, I think the 0-60 is somewhere around 5.7, 5.9 seconds, something
like that, we're not going to launch it, I don't feel like putting my car, maybe we'll
have, we're going to just floor it, but the handling is absolutely fantastic now, not
only did the drivetrain stabilizer fix the really bad wheel hop, but it also really helped
a lot with the turn in of the car, and this is coming from the GR Corolla, this is faster,
it's pretty funny, especially with the amount of torque that this has compared to the Corolla,
getting in what was like a really racy machine, and that is a more fun car, like putting in
all the dynamat and crap means that I cannot hear the engine at all in this, like it's
pretty quiet, but at the same time it's heaps of fun, and I would much rather have this,
this one that I have modified over the GR Corolla that is completely stock, and also
this has a nice little center armrest, wait, the GR Corolla doesn't have an armrest?
Whoa! It's quite bad, this is an extremely comfortable car, like you can just, you can go down the
highway for hours on this, like I've done like six, eight hour road trips and you just
get out and you're like, oh that was great, like the Fiesta where you go on a four hour
road trip and you're just a broken man when you arrive back, but yeah anyway that's my
Golf, it's a great car, oh I guess other reasons that I really like it, it's safe, it has the
front collision detection, so that gets you a lot off your insurance and will save you
if someone just stops in front of you, that did save me one time, adaptive cruise is great,
it's just a great old car, see you later Floatplane.