# Atlas Cross Sport factory stereo upgrade



## grayghost42 (Jan 9, 2021)

The factory stereo in the 2020 Atlas Cross Sport (non-fender version) leaves much to be desired. It has very little mid bass and vocals do not come through clearly.

I was unable to find much support online as of this posting so I'm including details in this posting of what was accomplished. 

The factory speakers in the front and rear door were replaced. The locations appear to be similar to that of the Atlas from other forum postings, however the version of the cross sport I have did not have tweeters in the rear door.

The front location had a 7" woofer and has sufficient depth to mount a 6 1/2 speaker using a slightly modified Metra speaker ring
The front and rear tweeter locations can easily fit a 1 inch tweeter
The rear location had a 5 1/4" woofer and is very deep but smaller than the front
All of the factory speakers were replaced with Morel Maximus 602's and are initially being driven off of the head unit's amp
I found BlackAtlas' post very helpful in planning this install, and where steps are the same i will not repost details for the cross sport: Upgrading your speakers in a non-fender audio Atlas

The power wiring was simple on this vehicle as the factory installed bus bar on top of the battery had an unused 125A location (maybe for the Fender audio version?) and a convenient place to run a wire through the main firewall grommet.









Factory grommet with spare wire hole just below (you'll need to cut the end of the "nipple" from this part). This grommet is just behind the battery, however you'll need long arms to reach. I was able to push a screw driver into the opening in the grommet and then cut it from the inside driver foot well.










The kick plate was difficult to remove until seeing a video for a VW Golf (which used the same system). There is a small clip behind the hood release that needs to be pulled. Once the hood release is out of the way, there is a small screw behind it. The wire was run with a split loom cover shown in the picture below.









There is plenty of room in the wire channel for the doors (on both sides of this car). The only difficulty I had once through the firewall is to get the wire from the passenger door area into the trunk. It turns out that there is route under the wheel well from the door threshold that leads up and in view of the plastic panel seen removed below that is ideal for managing wires. This channel was used on both sides of the car by snaking some wire channel with a smaller wire and then feeding the cables through to the rear of the vehicle. 










The door speakers and harness were also similar to that of the golf, however the door speaker harnesses I purchased on Amazon did not have the colors mapped correctly from other documented sources for positive and negative, so I swapped the pins.

The rear doors have a "fake" tweeter location in the car, but luckily VW didn't bother to take the speaker grill away, and instead installed an easily removable cover plate.









All of the speaker wires for this car come from the CD player in the glove box (which requires a VW radio key to pull out). This harness is very short and has a number of connections. Enfig makes a harness "Enfig AAI4-VW16" with a breakout for speaker wires that is very helpful in order to make the "T" harness connection for driving an amplifier.









There is plenty of space under the spare tire cover for a spare tire subwoofer and amplifiers.










The JBL Basspro Hub was used as a spare tire sub, and greatly improves the bass in this vehicle. JBL says it does not fit - I assume because the Cross Sport does not have a threaded rod in the spare tire that is removable. The threads on the cross sport are metric M10 1.5 spacing - all that is required to adapt them is to purchase a coupling nut and similarly threaded rod extension. The factory wing nut can be used to hold the tire and sub in place.

Update after initial post:
I went back and changed the system to drive all speakers and sub with the output of a JL-FiX86 DSP. When only the door speakers had been changed things sounded better. Driving just the sub from an amp seemed to add some kind of timing delay that using the DSP and line level inputs for all amps seems to have fixed 









I did end up powering the FiX86 from the accessory fuse location F40 in the drivers side panel. You can make this accessory circuit stay on when the radio power would be on by moving the fuse position one higher

Hope this posting helps someone else with a VW Atlas Cross Sport


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## mr_atlanta2kx (Aug 5, 2004)

Great post - I had the same problem with my ‘19 SE-R and now use the same JBL sub. I’m looking to work on the rest of the speakers this year do I appreciate the intel!


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## %% (Dec 21, 2007)

grayghost42 said:


> The factory stereo in the 2020 Atlas Cross Sport (non-fender version) leaves much to be desired. It has very little mid bass and vocals do not come through clearly.
> 
> I was unable to find much support online as of this posting so I'm including details in this posting of what was accomplished.
> 
> ...


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## 2020AtlasDad (Mar 14, 2021)

grayghost42 said:


> The factory stereo in the 2020 Atlas Cross Sport (non-fender version) leaves much to be desired. It has very little mid bass and vocals do not come through clearly.
> 
> I was unable to find much support online as of this posting so I'm including details in this posting of what was accomplished.
> 
> ...


Any chance you would happen to know what color the rear speaker wires are? I have been up and down the internet and cannot seem to find a definitive answer. I don’t want to splice into what could be an airbag wire by mistake 😕


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## arkitect06 (Mar 11, 2018)

2020AtlasDad said:


> Any chance you would happen to know what color the rear speaker wires are? I have been up and down the internet and cannot seem to find a definitive answer. I don’t want to splice into what could be an airbag wire by mistake


May help










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## grayghost42 (Jan 9, 2021)

arkitect06 said:


> May help
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Great picture of the pin out. The brown 8 pin plug is indeed what I used. Those colors are different inside the door for me as the must pass through another connection in the door. Continuity checks out from the door speakers to the harness on the back of the CD player.


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