Sound Deadener Showdown
Version 2 Updated: October 19, 2005
Products Reviewed: B-Quiet Extreme and Ultimate, Brown Bread, Cascade Audio Engineering VB2, Dynamic Control Dynamat Original and Dynamat Xtreme, Elemental Designs eDead v1 and eDead v1SE, FatMat, RAAMaudio RAAMmat BXT, Second Skin Damplifier and Damplifier Pro,
Should You Do This?
I did a pretty extensive installation in my own car, a brand new Honda Civic EX - not to the extremes that a serious competitor might go, but a pretty thorough job for a daily driver that needed to look and function like a normal car. I did it before I even touched the stock audio components so I had a good test case for before and after comparison.
With this experience under my belt, I feel qualified to answer the question at hand with a strong probably. In my case, after the fact, the answer is definitely. I would and will do it again. Anybody upgrading their audio system will be wasting their time and money if they don't do it. Anybody who really enjoys a quiet ride should also give it serious consideration.
That said, this might not be for everyone. The materials can be had for anywhere between a few dollars to a few thousand dollars, depending on the choices you make, but the process is very labor intensive. If you do it yourself, expect it to take longer and be more difficult than you can imagine. If you pay someone else to do it, be prepared to pay for work that will take longer and be more difficult than you can imagine. The difficulty isn't the rebuilding a transmission kind of difficulty, it really just takes patience, a willingness to kneel on hard surfaces for too long and placing yourself in awkward positions. If you choose to go all out, a shop manual will be a great help.
You'll need to really enjoy this kind of work, really want the end result, or have enough disposable cash to get it done for you. In my case, the first two requirements fit.
There are only two other possible downsides that I can see. Installation requires that door panels, and if you go at it like I did, seats, carpeting, headliner, trunkliner and every piece of trim be removed. This means some wear and tear.
You will also be adding some weight to the car. In my case, just over one hundred pounds. I choose to look at this as the weight reserved for one super-model. Since it would always have gone unused anyway, it was available for this purpose.
To my mind, the upside so far outweighed the negatives that it was an easy decision to proceed. Since I had never seen it done or heard the results, the upside was theoretical and imagined and the negatives were severely under-estimated, but the end result far exceeded my expectations.