Rick and others here have previously said what I am saying. That the factory setup is too sensitive.
In my experience this is always the case with factory tunes. They tend to be on the safe side of knock, pulling timing at the very first time.
Just my experience and my observations. You don't have to agree with them...
You can adjust the amount of timing it pulls, but you are not adjusting that.
What you are messing with is the ECU's definition of knock.
The maps you are changing are not timing pull or amount to pull. The maps you are changing tell the ECU whether knock has occurred in a cylinder or not.
Either the flame front propagates through the cylinder uniformly or it doesn't.
If you want to modify how the ECU reacts to detected knock, then you are tuning the wrong maps! This is my point from the start.
I don't see how it's possible to dial in these maps cautiously or not cautiously - the OEM has pressure transducers hooked up to each cylinder, and they can exactly see when a spike occurs, and this is what they calibrate them to. If a reasonably sized spike occurs you are probably not going to make more power, because the peak is likely going to be before TDC.
But let me ask this. Who here has put set cans or sensors on the engine and compared the factory knock tune to audible knock that they could detect? Its one thing to say leave it stock and dong mess with it... but its entirely different to say that based on testing and data.
I've done this plenty of times on many different engines. And there are different factory calibrations as well.
I have experienced sometimes that the ECU detects knock when none is present, but that is usually on tunes where the engine block is not even the same...
I think what you want to tune in your case is the way it reacts to knock, not how it detects knock.
KFKEF are coefficients which basically tell the maximum permissible deviation from the base levels. The only right way to tune those is with in-cylinder pressure transducers.
You can do headphones and a multiplicative addition in a pinch, but I would not touch those until you verify that the ECU is seeing knock where there is none.
Look at the KRRA module, specifically KRFKN/KRFKLN, which tells how much to retard on a single knock event, as well as KRVFN/KRLVFN/KRVFSN, which is the speed at which the ignition angle is phased back in.
You can try to reduce the amount if pulls right off the bat, but if the amount you pull is not enough the first time, and you end up pulling more the 2nd time, you will lose power. As the cylinder heats up more and more due to knocking combustion, the fuel will be more and more prone to detonation.
