In keeping with trying to make the car as passenger friendly as possible. There’s no doubt replacing the rear resonator on the exhaust with a straight through pipe earlier this year increased cabin noise quite a bit! Don’t get me wrong, the exhaust sounds good! But too intrusive for it to be a comfortable tourer for passengers.. Has always considered some sort of sound proofing for the scoob and now I had a reason to go for it! So thanks to Mark (Warrior08) for setting up the SIDC member discount with Noisekiller the kit was ordered.

When the stuff arrived I had no idea it was going to be so heavy.. at 24kg this stuff is pretty heavy duty! Also quite a lot more pads and sheets than I expected.. Although one thing I’d of liked to see in the kit is something similar to dynomat material for the speakers. Other than that a pretty thorough kit for the car!

For the sake of giving the kit a proper test, I also bought a noise meter to accurately monitor noise level inside the car. Sure I could have used an app for the phone but would rather use a proper device which is more likely to be accurate.

So first off Readings before sound proofing.

Idle: 63dBA

60mph: 82dBA

Heavy right foot: 85dBA

Note: all readings taken holding the noise meter above the gear lever at about shoulder height-ish in order to give fair test. Car suitable warmed up so exhaust is hot before testing..

Boot..Quite a lot going in here.. First off was the spare wheel well, heavy duty sticky pads wrapped it all up!

Then again similar pads around the rear wheel arches both inside and outside the rear wings!

Another set of pre-shaped pads for the boot lid

Then to finish off the sound proofing in the boot there’s a under carpet mat which is pretty dense foam stuff sandwiched between two sheets of rubber! This sucker is by far the heaviest part of the kit. Fortunately all the mats are low down in the car so despite adding weight to the car it’s all low down.

In order to test the effectiveness of the boot kit I went out for another noise test:

Idle: 63dBA

60mph: 80dBA

Heavy right foot: 83dBA

So from the meter readings there is a reduction of 2dBA when moving.. No change on idle.. Although perhaps not a huge surprise since the PPP backbox is quite subtle when on idle..

From a hearing point of view.. Still lots of road noise! this will probably reduce once the rest of the kit is fitted into the interior.. But exhaust noise is less pronounced.. Can still hear it but it’s not overwhelming.. To hear it properly you now have to open the window which before didn’t seem like there was any difference.

Bottom line.. Still much the same level of road noise.. But less boomy sound from exhaust, noticeably more subtle..

With the boot done, it was time to move onto the cabin area of the car. There are mats for under the rear seat, all four footwells have their own mat, which although tight fit can be done without removing the driver/passenger seats and just removing bits of trim on the sills to gain access to slide the match under the carpet.

There is also a couple mats to go along the transmission tunnel between to the two front seats, since I was pulling the center console apart to tidy up some wiring this gave suitable access to slot these mats in place.

Finally there were a couple sticky rectangle mats to put inside the doors. This is where I think the kit should really have some sort of matting for around the speakers, since you need to remove the door cards to fit these in the cavity may as well have something to improve the sound quality, although I guess this isn’t strictly reducing driving noise.

Final results are a bit of a surprise it has to be honest..

Idle: 65dBA

60mph: 80dBA

Heavy right foot: 84dBA

Recorded Idle noise is up! 60mph test is the same and heavy right foot is louder!!

From a listenign point of view.. The car does seem quieter.. But will agree there is still a lot of road noise at 60mph Maybe that’s due to the air turblence in teh wheel arches with the ar beign lowered and the stiffer suspension causing more noise/vibration throughout the car!

However, Ddin’t record the noises at different speed previously, but at lower speeds the car is fairly quiet.. Even a drop to 50mph the car sounds pretty quiet at 74dBA. Lower speed town driving is much reduced.. But I just cant get past how much noise there still seems to be at 60mph cruising speed. .

Didn’t think I’d end up saying this, but not that impressed TBH.. Clearly it does something good, but at the high cruising speed, hasn’t really helped. Maybe it’s the suspension changes on the car which has forced more noise through the chassis. One thing that “may” imrpoove it is putting a sheet ont eh back of the rear seats to try and block off some noise from teh boot area. Infact what I may do is remove the footwell mats (since they don’t appear to have done anything and stick them behind the rear seats to see if that makes a difference..

Had high hopes for this, wasn’t expecting miracles but did expect to measure a difference.. 

my2cents…