After playing with various combinations, here are the results:

Remove rears - slight burble, drones a bit.

Replace rears with Lukey Hi-Flow straight throughs - not much change.

Remove both centre mufflers, replace with pipe - better, but not much.

Remove all 4 mufflers, way too loud!

So the single resonator had to go.

Booked back in to my friendly exhaust shop at the end of April '03, and left the car for a few hours.  The plan was to remove the resonator, make and fit a kiss balance pipe, then straight back to the rear Lukey mufflers.  The exhaust shop ran short on time, so ended up with 2 pipes from the cat back, no balance pipe.

I arrived back to collect the car, and there was another Soarer in the yard, fully Lexus badged, both the owners and Chris, the exhaust guy, thought it was a "real" Lexus.  The other car left as I arrived, so no chance to talk to the owner, but it looked very nice, gold pin-striping and V8 badges on the side. Apparently they had heard mine as it was driven off the hoist and immediately booked to have theirs done the same.

Not having heard the car, I asked Chris what it was like, he replied that he loved it, but I would find it too loud!   That wasn't to be the case, it has a nice deep rumble, sounds soft if I drive soft, and sounds hard when pushed, but it isn't excessive in the cabin and best of all, NO Drone!  The car isn't as loud as some of the V8's I have heard, but most people like the balance.

Chris wanted me to come back another time for the balance pipe, but I am so happy with it now that I don't want it messed with.  Another owner claimed adding a balance pipe reduced his noise level by 10db, not for me, but nice to know that if I ever want it a little mellower, it can be done easily by adding a balance pipe.

Performance wise, the car is excellent.  On the Great Western Cruise from Geelong in October, Peter Scott and I had a brief drive of each others cars, and while he was driving mine, we did an impromptu 0-100k test on my RSM. Two people in the car as well as the general cruise junk, no pre-revving or anything, and it pulled 6.34 seconds. For a car rated at 7+ seconds for 0-100k, that was very satisfying.

Results of a simple noise level test that I did, the meter was placed about 500 mm behind, between and level with the exhaust tips on a concrete car park.

What does it sound like? This is driving in the city centre, windows down, microphone freaking out from the wind noise.  I need to get a better recorder.

City 1 - 185 Kb.