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First of all most of us know that detonation is the foremost reason that boosted engines die. Headgaskets pop, rods bend, and pistons burn up.

So how can we find out if we are detonating or not. Well you could rely on the computer to retard timing based on what it thinks is detonation, fed to it by the factory knock sensor, or we can listen ourselves. Here's how.

Since a knock sensor is just a microphone bolted to your engine block I figured why not just splice a 1/8 microphone jack onto it and plug it into the laptop and listen for myself.

What you need is a laptop, netbook, or headphone amplifier, and an headphone jack, oh and some earphones, whatever style you prefer.

Take your headphone jack and cut one of the ends off and splice it back some. There should be a red and black wire, and some bare copper shielding wound around both. Peel back the shielding as you wont need to connect that to anything and strip a 1/2" back on the red and black wire.

Now go to your computer of the car and find the plug at the very bottom. This is plug A. Now before you go and **** something up, DISCONNECT YOUR BATTERY!! Go back to plug A once this is done and unplug it and pull it back to get some slack on it. You want to locate Wires A8 and A9 they will be side by side A8 being Yellow and A9 being red/blue

Carefully strip a small bit of the jacket of these wire back and solder your leads from the headphone jack to them and tape it up with electrical tape.

Note: it doesn't matter which wire goes to what color, so long as there is one on each.

Plug everything back into the computer and put your battery back on.

Plug your 1/8 jack into your MIC jack on the laptop and turn the MIC on so that you can hear it through the speakers or (headphones) and enjoy hearing everything that goes on in your motor.

Note: if you are only hearing small bits of noise check your mic settings and turn off any echo or noise cancellation that may be enabled.

The recording quality is **** but when your listening to it in the car it is clear with no breakup.

 
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I didn't know this.

Why would you need to manually do this test if the ECU is already doing this for you as you drive (especially since the engine conditions are always changing as the RPM fluctuates).

 
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The main reason is that the factory computer isnt the greatest thing at interpreting what is and isn't a knock. This is completely fine when running a naturally aspirated engine because a small knock at the power levels being produced will do little to no harm. When you have much higher power levels coming out of the engine you are stressing the rods and headgasket much more then they were designed for. When knocking occurs at the higher hp levels the light knocking can stress the components over their limits. AKA blowing headgaskets, and bending rods.

 
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Fine, but you can't be continuously be listening for knock while driving.

 
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that would drive me insane no pun then i would most likely crash my car on purpose to stop it.

 
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If Satox connected the stock knock sensor to the input on his amps for the radio setup, then I could understand better.
There ought to be an easier way than doing all this.