by Daytona » Thu Jul 23, 2015 4:26 am
When I first got my 3.0R, I always liked the sound that Subarus are associated with and was curious as to why the H6 didn't sound like that at all, in fact, the H6 didn't make much of a sound at all! Well, she did inside the car when you planted your foot. I started a bit of a journey to make the car go faster more than sound at first.
What I did first was change the headers and cats. I stuck hiflow cats in (100cell) but do kinda regret that. As soon as the headers and cats went in (cats are Xforce) a huge amount of raspiness and overall and the car sounded really bad. I had some work done to put in a couple resonators before the collector and it got rid of a lot of the rasp.
This was with a the 3rd cat deleted but the rest of the exhaust was stock. Then came the catback, also from Xforce. I ended up only using the Y pipe and mufflers from that, the Xforce resonator is pretty useless. I replaced that with a larger, 22" resonator. Car started to sound better. I probably would not recommend Xforce as brand though!
At the same time I was messing around with the exhaust was tuning.
In addition to the actual exhaust, what I've found changes the tone of the exhaust is the tune and also the fuel type. In NZ you can't get the fancy stuff (easily) so I'm running on Gull Force 10 and that has actually removed the last of the raspiness I had (I was using Shell 95 before).
Anyways, long story short - as Pete and Adrian have said, the H6 is a beautiful engine and the sound it produces is nothing like a WRX type sound. In my opinion it's way better and she really does howl when she's free breathing. I have to get my butt in gear and get some videos of what my car sounds like, but it's pretty awesome. There are various clips of what she sounds like opened up online though.
When I take her up to 6k and beyond through real twisty roads - it is an absolute blast.
As Pete mentioned - look into tuning as a first step. You can get a lot of extra performance with just a tune. I would then definitely look at the exhaust before the sc install as that's generally a requirement of the sc kit anyways.