Cliffnotes: I'm tired of trunk rattling from subwoofer. Buy materials to soundproof car. Trial and error, trial and error, trial and error....Trunk still rattles a bit, sound system sounds far improved.


My car has Polk 6x9's in the rear, and Polk 6 1/2" coaxials in front, then I'm running a JBL 12" sub...needless to say, it sounds absolutely awesome. The bass is clean, the sound is loud and undistorted, and I'm really happy with it....

When I'm in the car.

So after going through months of trunk rattling annoyance, I decided I would try and do something about it. I did a bunch of reading from various audiophile forums around the net, and decided to hit up my local hardware store and purchase some home insulation (36 sq ft. of fluffy fiberglass material), and since I couldn't find rolls of rubber peel n' stick vinle I bit the bullet and bought the Dynamat Xtreme door kit.

What I had read was that Dynamat by itself is not a soundproofing material, so I can't expect to Dynamat the entire car and expect results (an exception to this would be using excessive amounts of it, but anyone that has tried to purchase Dynamat should be familiar with how expensive it is.) However, these forums suggested that the millions of billions of fiberglass strands will help to absorb sound and disperse it before hitting the metal, makes sense to me. So I figured I would try it out.

$11.38 later I'm reaching into my trunk and stuffing every single crevice I could with the stuff. I ripped out the carpeting and spare and cleaned everything up and put as much as I could in there!

I thought I was done, but lo and behold, I close the trunk....and it doesn't latch. I stuffed the latch area so much the cable couldn't pull and release. So...I had to dig that out. After that was fixed, I figured I would start laying Dynamat over the center of the trunk (behind where the license plate would be) because that is where my rattling came from. I then stuck two sheets to the license plate itself and a bunch more on the top of the trunk....

It's been a long day, this took a lot longer than I expected...but hopefully it will be worth it, right? I close my trunk, which SLAMS down...Alarmed I open it back up again and realize that my trunk weighs a TON! Well, the second kind of soundproofing other than dispersement is weight, weight absorbs sound...so I figure it MUST work!

I turn on my player and circle around the car ready to enjoy a job well done....brrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRbbrrrRRRRR....

Fail.

I press the bottom of the license plate, the rattling stops. Why can't Honda have made the license plates with 4 mounts instead of 2????

So I drilled that bastard into my trunk. Much better. Still rattling, but overall it is an improvement over how it used to be before I started the project.

Unsure if I should be disappointed or not, I hop back in the car....

Woah, the sub is hitting MUCH harder now...what happened? It's usually set on -6 and now I can really feel the air pushing me inside the car. It sounds incredible!

Looks like I succeeded at making my system more efficient, but not at stopping the rattling...At least I learned something from it. I'll try and upload the few pictures I took later on, sorry guys I really didn't plan on writing up about it later....

I'm there with you brother. Now my car has no interior, and a bunch of shiny metal (D. Xtreme), but that's about it.

Not only that, but may have made some things worse. The license plate garnish plate doesn't adhere firmly to the body anymore.

... I don't know, man, I don't know.

I went throught that for away than gave up and took my subs out. When I moved outta state and changed my licence plate I found 2 spounges I'd had stuck back the a couple years ago I was crackin up

Yeah, you could just put some foam tape on the bottom side of the plate

yup i definitly have a piece of foam from sum tv packing wedged behind my license plate lmao

Yeah, you could just put some foam tape on the bottom side of the plate

Ah well, the thing is I used to have a BMW with the same rattling problem...my friend suggested sticking a bunch of sponges behind the plate...Didn't work so I didn't try it again this time around.