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Tim92gts
Posts: 624
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2016 6:01 pm
Location: Essex

Post by Tim92gts »

Hi All,
just an intro and thanks for acceptance.
I'm in the process of talking myself into buying a Macan.
So far I've only done a bit of tyre kicking and looked at the options list, quite interested in the Burmester upgrade as main interest is music, mud flaps will be of interest, colour choice looks dire so I may be up for some bad taste colour option.
Definitely a Porsche fanboy, current drive is a 928, OH has a 996, I don't change cars very often. The 928 is nearly 25 and the 996 14 years old, both great adverts for the brand. Thus I don't mind going for some costly options as i'll be keeping this one until I die!
It'll be replacing a Suzuki Jimny so a substantial upgrade, the 996 replaced a Skoda Fabia and the 928 an Alfa 75 3.0.
I'm sure to be back with a few stupid questions.
Tim
Tim
PP Turbo, LED PTV ACC Pano 20"Macans collected 6th September 2017
1992 928GTS
2003 996 Cab

Bigboyrolo
Posts: 1393
Joined: Wed Mar 18, 2015 9:33 pm

Post by Bigboyrolo »

Hi All,
just an intro and thanks for acceptance.
I'm in the process of talking myself into buying a Macan.
So far I've only done a bit of tyre kicking and looked at the options list, quite interested in the Burmester upgrade as main interest is music, mud flaps will be of interest, colour choice looks dire so I may be up for some bad taste colour option.
Definitely a Porsche fanboy, current drive is a 928, OH has a 996, I don't change cars very often. The 928 is nearly 25 and the 996 14 years old, both great adverts for the brand. Thus I don't mind going for some costly options as i'll be keeping this one until I die!
It'll be replacing a Suzuki Jimny so a substantial upgrade, the 996 replaced a Skoda Fabia and the 928 an Alfa 75 3.0.
I'm sure to be back with a few stupid questions.
Tim

Hi Tim, welcome to the forum. You'll get all the info and advice you need on here. Think it's probably the first and last time we'll see 'mudflaps and burmeister' in the same sentence.
Porsche don't do mudflaps, and it seems the Macan needs them, but you can get them here ......
eBay - item 391506032870 - from seller direct4x4 at £49.99.
We await your spec considerations with interest.

"Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time" Pink Floyd.
BMW 2019 440i Convertible
2016 Panny S e-Hybrid Black/Cream sold Apr 19
Macan S VG/Luxor, sold @ 9700 miles March 18
Macan SD Dark Blue/ Pebble, sold @ 16k miles Dec 16
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goron59
Posts: 5788
Joined: Sun Aug 09, 2015 10:15 am

Post by goron59 »

Hello. As someone who's owned a Macan with the Burmester, but no mudflaps, I can only be half helpful.
Loved the Burm. Wish I'd specced it again for the second Macan.
Used to have 2016 Macan Turbo PHCKCL70
Previously a 2014 Macan Turbo.
Now a 2021 Tesla Model 3 LR
EviL Ras
Posts: 1163
Joined: Wed Aug 10, 2016 1:27 pm

Post by EviL Ras »

Welcome to the forum!

Wondering what to spec on the macan? Why check out my "what to spec on the macan" thread! Then come back to this thread, and post your build code so we can tell you to spend more money on it! Hahaha!

Carmine and Partial Garnet GTS Delivered Jan 17' www.porsche-code.com/PHE2IGH7
Our collection video - https://youtu.be/B-HvzRYztqc
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Paul
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Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2014 6:19 pm
Location: Bristol
Contact:

Post by Paul »

WelcomeTim. " must haves" and " no brainers" will now fly in thick and fast!

"A Macan needs a minimum of £10K in options" will echo around......but just which options to choose!

You'll post up your modest 2.0l spec to be upsold into a used SD, then into a GTS and finally end up with a Turbo PP!

Joking aside, you'll get advice and opinions on here; for you to sort and retain anything relevant to your needs, wants and budget!
1st Sapphire SD
2nd Sapphire GTS
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=4296
Current 992 S Cab
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=9845&p=196465#p196465
Col Lamb
Posts: 9323
Joined: Fri Oct 30, 2015 8:38 pm
Location: Lancashire

Post by Col Lamb »

Welcome.

Great choice, you will be astounded by the test drive.

Following is more advice to read in conjunction with Evil's link.

Note there are two distinct texts, one general and one specific to audio.

Sorry for the length of this particular post
.
.BUYING A MACAN

You have made the right choice just considering a Macan, a test drive will ...... well, I will not spoil it for you.

Research the car first, read up on posts and download the "Good to Know" App and RTFM first to get a flavour of what is or can be included in the car.

Sign up to the Porsche website and spend time looking at what is standard in each variant, then look at the Configurator at what Extras are available and note what you think you will want to specify. Doing this prior to visiting a Dealer you will have a fair amount of product knowledge.

Hedge your bets by visiting a number of OPCs and test driving a Macan at each them. Ask each their estimated wait list for the model you are considering, ask them how many of your preferred model they have had collected in the last month, ask where you will be within their wait list. Not all OPCs are the same and the quality of the SEs vary considerably, the numbers of cars they sell varies considerably.

Do test drive as many Macans as you can via different OPCs noting the extras fitted to each car and also take images, it will help you during the many hours on the configurator. Do try to test drive a Macan with the same wheel rim and suspension setup as you are intending to have fitted, the same goes for seats, a long test drive will confirm your choice.

Typically on a 2.0, S and SD extras are added in the range £8k - £15k. With up to £20k being added by some Macan owners. Conversely a few are on a strict budget and £50k can get you a Macan and if this is what you want.

The GTS and Turbos include as standard quite a significant number of extras that are additions to the 2.0 litre, S and SD.

Placing a deposit will generate an invite to attend a 1/2 day driving session at Porsche PEC at Silverstone in the Macan variant you have placed the deposit on. Give the PEC a ring 3 weeks after you place the deposit to set up your attendance, if you wait for them to send you an invite it may be that you will not attend before you lockdown the specification. Search the forum for prior posts on the PEC.

RECOMMENDED "EXTRAS" to have fitted
(some are standard on certain variants).

SPARE WHEEL, does not come as standard, an empty sealant can and a flat tyre and you will wish you specified it. Additionally I would suggest that you buy a couple of the cans of sealant/inflators to give options just in case. Some members say why bother call just Porsche Assist, well if you have an unrepairable flat in a remote location or a slow puncture and a used can then you will be thankful for a spare (been there had that happen to me, never again) its a low cost so to me the logic of not specifying a spare is severely flawed, yes call Porsche Assist and let them change the wheel but with a spare and bought cans you have more options.

XENON or LED lighting, many Macan owners who have standard halogen lights reports that they are very poor and they wish they had upgraded. The PDLS gives a dynamic control of the lights and the PDLS+ system illuminates sideways at junctions via the SatNav data. If you do not intend to upgrade the lights please test drive a Macan with standard headlights in the dark. I have had Macans' with Xenons and LEDs and both work well but I find that the LEDs are outstanding.

INTERIOR LIGHT COMFORT PACK, adds LEDs instead of bulbs and more internal lights, including the all important illuminated vanity mirror. It brings the interior lighting up to what is standard on other marques.

14/18 WAY SEATS, standard 8 way may be OK for you but if you do not test drive a Macan with the 8 way seats you will run the risk of them not being as supportive as you require. Upgrading the seats is one of the first ticks I would make in the configurator to ensure I like to have seats with the excellent lumber support and adjustable squab length and only the 14 and 18 way seats fulfil this criteria. Check out the18 way, for entry and exit, the side bolsters are high and the range of adjustments of all the bolsters are limited, that said they do hold you very well and many report that they are the most comfortable of the seats. I prefer the 14 way as the tight fit between the bolsters on 18 way is a bit to tight for me. Do test drive Macans with both 14 and 18 way seats to check them out for your own needs.

PASM, gives an adjustable suspension with three settings. The comfort setting will give a far smoother ride than a Macan without PASM, The two sport modes keep a comfortable ride but increase the dampening effect when cornering, very much like the progressive dampening of old. If you have doubts about including PASM please test drive a Macan without It and you should find that the ride is harder (like BMW M and Audi Sport) and there is more body roll. A Macan will benefit more from PASM and will give a more comfortable ride on wheels 19" and above. Air suspension is also available, it is equipped with PASM as standard and takes the ride quality up by a very large leap.

PS+, gives a variable power steering at low speeds and progressively it reduces assistance to zero at town speeds. If you do not specify PS+ please ensure you test drive a Macan without it to be sure, its not a high cost extra.

REVERSING CAMERA or SURROUND CAM, check out the reversing views during a test drive without using the rev cam and you will find a restricted rear and rear quarter views. A Rev Cam makes sense its just which one works for you best, that said once you have SurCam you will probably specify it again. Try bay parking and parallel parking on a test drive without using the RevCam which is a pretty standard extra fitted to demo Macans' and this exercise should demonstrate that Cameras are a great safety addition.

75 LITRE FUEL TANK, its free so no reason not to tick it, as when full you get greater range..

SUGGESTED "EXTRAS" to include

INTERNAL STORAGE, adds under seat storage trays and seat back pockets, I find the internal storage limited hence I would now always specify this extra.

SATNAV, its standard on so many vehicles and its strange why its not on the Macan.

CONNECT, gives the connectivity for a mobile phone, check out the details in the configurator of what this actually does as Connect+ may fit your criteria better it may also more futureproof the car. Connect+ includes better live traffic updates and more functionality. Search prior posts on the latest PCM system, ask your SE for an SD card which has the related videos and also get a full demo of the systems, this should help you decide.

WHEEL SIZE, 21" and 20" are the most popular, a Macan with either of these sized wheels arguably looks better, the bigger the rim size the better the handling will be, however there will be more road noise, and more "thump and bump" on poor road surfaces, that said it will still be acceptable for the majority of Macan owners. If going with 20" or 21" then PASM or Air Suspension will improve the ride comfort dramatically compared to the standard non-PASM suspension. If you choose the larger diameter wheels but not PASM or Air, please ensure you test drive a similarly equipped Macan to confirm that the ride comfort and handling is what you want

HANDLING AND PERFORMANCE

If handling and performance is paramount to you (it is a Porsche after all) then the following are the minimum extras (or included parts in some variants) that will maximise the handling and the performance of the engine and gearbox:-

21" wheels
PASM
PS+
Sports Chrono pack
18 way seats
PTV

/>OTHER POPULAR EXTRAS

PANO SUNROOF, adds light into what is a dark interior, popular for perceived resale value.

PRIVACY GLASS, fitted to the rear windows and give the Macan the stealth look, another popular fitted extra in the resale market.

HEATED SEATS, a little luxury on a cold morning but you may well find it more worth it.

HEATED STEERING WHEEL, the first time I used it on a cold morning I was glad it had been included.

SPORTS DESIGN MIRRORS, an aesthetic extra, check out the quality of the base of the standard mirrors if you doubt fitting the SD mirrors

PARTIAL or FULL LEATHER, check out what works for your lifestyle.

ROOF BARS, its an SUV and hence in some eyes can look a little odd if they are not fitted. If you intend to carry bikes and a top box do compare the Porsche roof bars, accessories and top box against other manufacturers like Thule and you may save a few hundred pounds.

BOSE, an upgrade to the audio system, check out standard audio quality prior to including Bose, if you are an audiophile just tick this or the Burmester box. There is an inbuilt hard drive (called Jukebox) in all Macans, it has shrunk in size in PCM changes and will hold c3000 MP3 music files.

ADAPTIVE CRUISE CONTROL, does just what it says, Its worth trying a Macan with it on a quiet Motorway, set the speed and distance from the car in front and it will maintain the gap and vary the speed automatically. ACC includes PAS which is an automatic intrusive braking system which is active when the ACC is engaged. If you do not do much motorway cruising standard cruise will probably be sufficient.

SPORTS CHRONO, gives the Macan Sports+ mode and an enhance gearbox and throttle map when compared to Sport mode. I have seen it described in other forums as the Porsche button. It also give timing functions and a stopwatch dial on the top of the dashboard. Once you have placed a deposit for a Macan and have received your Silverstone PEC invite please ensure that you ask them for your car to be equipped with at least PASM and Sports Chrono so you can have the In
Col
Macan Turbo
Air, 20” wheels, ACC, Pano, SurCam, 14w, LEDs, PS+, Int Light Pack, Heated seats and Steering, spare wheel, SC, Privacy glass, PDK gear, SD mirrors, Met Black, rear airbags
Col Lamb
Posts: 9323
Joined: Fri Oct 30, 2015 8:38 pm
Location: Lancashire

Post by Col Lamb »

MACAN AUDIO

Options
Standard, Bose or Burmeister
Listen to them all if considering upgrading for the base system fitted to your Macan variant. Take anSD card or USB stick with a few of your favourite music tracks and to get the best out of your listening encode the MP3 files from a CD at a high data rate such as 320 kBps. You may want to obtain a FLAC music file and recreate the test as I explain later.

Preparing your music for in car listening
This depends upon your listening preferences:-
Music can be placed on a USB memory stick or SD cards (2slots currently available)
Music can be transferred into the inbuilt 10Gb Jukebox
Music can be streamed from mobile telephone
iPod or similar will connect up directly to the PCM

If your music is already digital then it is simply a case of copying the music albums/tracks onto the memory device and inserting the device into the car.

If your music is on CD then you can rip the discs to folders on your PC or Mac.
iTunes is a free download and you can use this to rip your CDs to a specific folder, do change the standard encoding format and data rate to MP3 and 320kBps for the highest quality. Once you have ripped the CDs copy the whole Music folder which contains all the ripped albums to the memory device and you are good to go.

If your digital music is oldish rips them you may wish to download MP3TAG and use this freeware to check the data that there is on each album and that it is consistent between the tracks, t may well be that it needs editing and this software will do that. Generally if album art is not being displayed in car then the PCM will use the Data SIM to go online to Gracenote and it will download the artwork. The software will also enable you to download album art (800x800 max) that Gracenote does not find and place the jpg file in the album folder and link each track to the jpg file. Once you have checked the albums copy all the music onto the memory device.

If you use Playlists or would like to within iTunes you can create your own Playlists. Once you have created one you can export it as an M3U file into the root of your Music folder as a belt and braces situation as the iTunes Playlist will be in the iTunes sub-folder within your Music folder and also within this sub-folder iTunes will have placed copies of the album artwork that it has found. iTunes also has a Genius mode, enable it in Preferences, select a specific favourite track and select Create Genius Playlist, it uses your selected track to add other similar style tracks, or at least that is the theory.

Do note that other CD ripping software is available and many do a better job than iTunes, I only suggest this as its free easy and certainly compatible with the PCM.

CD audio is sampled at 44.1kHz/s 16 bit stereo therefore if considering re-encoding it to a Lossless file if you try to increase the sampling rate it will not produce the quality of file you expect, you would be better advised downloading a new FLAC file at the sampling rate that you desire.

Playing your Music in Car
Insert the memory device in the appropriate slot, select media source and you are good to go. Once you have your music playing spend some time adjusting the balance, fade, base, trebble etc to get the quality of audio that suits your taste. With a Bose system do also check the Surround mode or uncheck it to see which is best for you.

You also have the option of transferring the music to the Jukebox, but remember it is only 10Gb and can take quite a few attempts to get the music all transferred. I would only initiate the transfer once all the album art has been correctly assigned and that the PCM is accurately displaying the albums/artists, do not that compilation albums may cause issues if you have not checked and corrected the data with MP3TAG.

Porsche Communication Management (PCM)
Technical data: Audio and video files from MY17 manual

Supported media

SD cards up to 128 GB

DVD drive Audio CDs up to 80 min., CD ROMs up to 700 MB, DVD±R/RW, Standard Video DVD, Video DVD compatible DVD Audio

Portable players MTP Player, USB 2.0 devices of "USB Device Subclass 1 and 6" such as, for example, USB sticks, USB MP3 players without special driver software, external USB Flash memory and hard drives

DVD changers Audio CDs up to 80 min., standard video DVDs, video DVD-compatible DVD Audio

File system

SD/SDHC/SDXC/MMC memory cards

USB mass storage exFAT, FAT or FAT32, NTFS file systems with a maximum of 4 partitions

DVD drive ISO9660, Joliet, UDF

Format

MPEG 1/2 Layer 3; Windows Media Audio 9 and 10; MPEG 2/4; FLAC, MPEG 1/2; ISO-MPEG4; DivX 3, 4 and 5; Xvid; ISO-MPEG4 H.264 (MPEG4 AVC); Windows Media Video 9

File extension

.mp3 (does not apply to DVD changer); .wma; .asf; .m4a; .m4b; .aac; .flac; .mpg; .mpeg; .avi; .mp4; .m4v; .mov; .wmv

Playlists

.M3U; .PLS; .WPL; .M3U8; .ASX

Characteristics

max. 320 kbit/s and 48 kHz sampling frequency; max. 2,000 kbit/s and 720x576 px. at max. 25 fps

Number of files

DVD drive max. 1,000 files DVD

Jukebox (max. 10 GB storage space) max. 3,000 files can be copied

USB mass storage and memory cards max. 10,000 files per medium

Metadata

Album covers up to 800 x 800 pixels; GIF, JPG and PNG formats or via Gracenote database

Video DVD region codes

Code 1: USA, Canada and US Colonies

Code 2: Europe, Greenland, South Africa, Egypt and the Middle East, Japan

Code 3: Southeast Asia, South Korea, Hong Kong

Audio Comparison Test
I took one of my FLAC audio files and put it into one of my Audio editing programmes (Adobe Audition for those interested) and converted it into mp3 files with various encoding bitrates, and as a matter of interest I encoded the FLAC as AIFF and WAV to see what file size they produced

Source as a FLAC of file size 85,444kB

MP3 encoding data rate ----- File size in kB
96 ---- 2,264
160 --- 5,435
320 ---- 10,863

As a matter of interest I encoded the source into a WAV file and it was 208,394

Also being fully lossless the AIFF encoding gave a file size 208,394

With another forum member we sat in my Bose equipped Macan and listened to the FLAC and mp3 files.

FLAC was a clear winner with rich tones and a clarity of the brass instruments that the mp3's failed to come near.

MP3 at 320 gave a perfectly listenable file for most music but even at the high data rate there was a lack of clarity in the tonal quality and a slight edge to the brass.

As the MP3 data rate was lowered the audio quality got worst as expected, with the 96 file listenable but not something you would want to do regularly on a £800 Macan extra, you would certainly want the higher quality media files.

Whist it was certainly not to lab standard of testing it was an interesting exercise to actually be able to hear the difference and for me and my old ears I was pleasantly surprised that I could discern as much difference as I did.
Col
Macan Turbo
Air, 20” wheels, ACC, Pano, SurCam, 14w, LEDs, PS+, Int Light Pack, Heated seats and Steering, spare wheel, SC, Privacy glass, PDK gear, SD mirrors, Met Black, rear airbags
Jeeves
Posts: 474
Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2015 12:30 pm

Post by Jeeves »

What Col has just put up with his two consecutive posts is priceless information and should be made a sticky.

All you or anyone else need do with it is tinker it for personal preferences.


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ScotMac
Posts: 5326
Joined: Tue Mar 17, 2015 6:39 pm
Location: Scotland

Post by ScotMac »

Welcome Tim Big smile
jonmacan
Posts: 5233
Joined: Fri Sep 19, 2014 8:25 am

Post by jonmacan »

Welcome Tim Big smile
Me and Scotmac are the quiet ones..welcome Tim..your in the right place for advice.. jonmacan2016-12-28 22:24:54
http://www.porsche-code.com/PGj3NIA8 spec.
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