Luke Jones

Ported boxes deliver slow woolly peaky Bass, often louder than other designs but only at set frequencies. A REAL free air sub in a proper baffle (a la IB8 in the LS rear deck) will sound very musical, go pretty deep and smooth. What I noticed was that bass wasnt just a tone, but i could hear the difference between synthisized 40hz and bass guitar 40hz, hearing the strings in the bass sound I have 5 years experience with installing car audio, I specialised in large saloons. I cant recommend enough that you try your hardest to make the rear deck IB speaker work as a solution for you. Lexus spent a LOT of time and money sound deadening that boot/rear seat area to prevent noise and road drone from entering the cab. It will block the bass in a standard sub box just the same. There is only 1 other real option for serious bass in a car like this (other than a lot of large sub's running really high power to get bass through the cars interior). A design I came up with using an enclosure type called 5th order bandpass These are different because the bass is delivered out of the port alone. The cone is not visable on the outside of the box. The picture there shows the port running inside the box, I realised i could move it to be half inside the box, half protruding from it, its the length of the tube that matters. The portion that sticks outside of the box i took up through the rear deck and sealed to the shelf. This way 100% of the bass energy is delivered into the listening area, not trying to fight through a petrol tank, sound deadening, a rear leather seat and eventually into the car. down side is each box needs custom designing to specifics of a sub driver. the results are worth it though.

my solution to this issue was to use a bullet cam and recorder (activity sports junkie) inside the arch and replicate the problem. you can look back at the footage and SEE what is moving and clunking. Think of the footage from F1 GP cars where you see the suspension working hard. the little £30 clip on sports cams are very useful and good quality if the idea interests you.

Mike, I own a '98 vvti LS400, and I have the exact same fault desciption at 212k miles. I 'feel' its a drop link. What makes this harder is our suspension will be worn out in many ways, leading to false diagnosis. A mechanic friend has been stuck without a car for 3 days and has borrowed my LS. He will take a good look in the next day or two. I will report the findings. I intend to buy a polyurethane bushing kit (lasts forever .. ish) and fit that to tighten the front back up again. any that are not available I will be making myself.

There is also a Pioneer free-air sub that fits the 8-inch opening with a minor modification, although you will need a new amp to go with it. I provided a detailed post on this a while ago. If you're interested, just look up my previous posts. These are rare but do come up from time to time on ebay, JL Audio 8IB they would no doubt suit very well. I had a pair of 12's on a large parcel shelf and loved the open sound.

I have read up on previous forum information stating that the LS400 uses Gen 1 Satnav, CD based. This limits what the system can store (postcodes etc). I looked at prices for updated CD based discs, £120 ish, then thought to look and see if a DVD based nav brain would fit instead. What do you guys think, here are two ebay items, one shows a LS400 unit, the other from an avensis which if i understand correctly only came with DVD nav, being a Gen2 satnav. the units have different part numbers as i'd expect but seem to share identical connectors. I guess touch screen could be an issue there, so perhaps a 2001 GS300 gen 2 dvd satnav would be a better choice. ebay avensis item 400097479721 ebay ls400 item 250669576577