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Since I've been driving Benzes since my first car right out of college (a 1983 240D manual), I am used to a complete absence of rattles and buzzes (NVH: noise, vibration, harshness) from inside the cockpit. I tolerate a bit of road noise because I don't yet know how to completely eliminate that, but if there are 2 coins in my cup holder and they start to make contact, I have to feel around for the source of the noise and somehow make it go away. I can't help it....
So since I got the E550, I've been going insane because I can't play my music as loud as I would like without activating various vibration/rattle modes around the car. Sometimes the engine or road vibration will also activate them.
I did a frequency sweep today and found two main sources which are loud enough that they may be masking other buzzing:
-the rear package deck speaker area (40 +/- 20Hz)
-the passenger side door (80 +/- 20Hz)
-driver seatbelt (not activated by audio, but still annoying)
From other threads, I gathered that possible sources of the rear speaker area rattle are the child seat retaining mechanisms, the center brake light (CHMSL), and the speaker grill itself (I believe there is a TSB on this, anyone have it?)
The passenger door noise is coming from the door card itself vibrating heavily. It's probably intermittently contacting something on the inside so I need to pull it off and apply foam to the places where this can happen. I think I saw a thread about that somewhere but I'm still looking for it.
The driver seatbelt latch mechanism by the side of the seat slides against the seat as the driver's body moves making an occasional creaking sound. I might see if putting some plastic safe dry lube on it shuts it up for a while. Otherwise, I'm not sure how to address this without adding an ugly patch of material to the side of the seat or putting a boot on the seatbelt latch mechanism.
Once I can get the speaker area and door taken care of, I'm sure I will find other culprits. I had a rattle from my center console that went away by opening the sliding cover, but that has gone into hibernation for now...
06-08-2024, 06:47 PM
It is part number: A 000 983 71 10 and it looks like this:
