Speaker Upgrade

After nearly two years I finally decided to do some upgrades to the DSP-based system supplied as the "enhanced" sound system on the Boxster. While the DSP did provide some boost when set to Hi-Fi it was marginal at best. One criteria I had was to not spend $5,000. At least not yet. Several of The Babblers have had Monney Car Audio do system upgrades for them. After speaking with Leo Monney I opted for starting off with a speaker upgrade. The changes made do not impact the cosmetics of the car and leave the DSP in place. At least for the time being. This is a sub $500 modification that makes a noticeable difference in the sound quality. The highs are no longer lost in the general sound and have clear definition.

	I set up a 10 am appointment with Leo for a Tuesday morning at the Redwood City store. It was a simply gorgeous day. I removed the hardtop for the season the following day!
	The Redwood City store is large enough to easily work on 6 or more cars at the same time. The day I was there they had 5 cars in the shop as well as several that got worked on just outside where they were installing alarms and such.
	One of the first things to do was help remove the hardtop in order to provide easier access to the rear storage compartment. The storage compartment gets removed in order to upgrade the existing rear speakers.
One of the other cars being worked on was an AMG. This was getting a major installation along with a custom subwoofer enclosure. Although I was originally going to wait for my car I chose to just do a drop-off. Leo was kind enough to loan me his car.
	Here's a shot of the custom subwoofer enclosure that they build for the AMG. It looks like it could have come from the factory.
	After extracting the storage compartment and the front speakers they got down to the real work. This is a view of one of the existing front speakers and the decidedly low-tech crossover.
	Since the new speakers are larger, the factory supplied grills required a little bit of customizing. Here the existing mounting points are being removed and the overall opening being enlarged slightly. None of these changes are visible when the unit in reinstalled.
	Once both grills were modified the new speakers were installed and tacked into place with some hot glue. Once the hot glue had set the speakers were permanently mounted by using quick set epoxy. This was allowed to set up for about 20 minutes before the completed units were installed back in the dash.
We're now ready to move on to the rear speakers contained within the storage compartment.
	This shows one side of the rear speakers after removal from their enclosure. The existing speakers did provide some moderate fill so long as the fader was adjusted sufficiently.
	The route that was decided upon, in the interest of cost, was to add a new tweeter and modify the crossover. This left the existing rear pairs in place. Here's a view of the first step of adding the new tweeter mounting.
	The modified rear speaker mounted back in its enclosure.
	Hooking everything back up.
At this point all that's left to do is reinstall everything and fire the system up for a test.
	Here the front speakers are being reinstalled along with their new crossovers. This part did necessitate adding some new wiring but none of the existing factory wiring was modified.
The crossovers supplied with the speaker kit allow for adjusting the brightness of the front tweeters by either 3db or 6db. We tested the system with it at an initial setting of 0db. We then set it to 6db. It sounded good to me so it was left there. After having a chance to listen to a wider range of CD's I have since set it to the middle setting of 3db as horns tended to be a little too brassy for my tastes at the 6db setting. Am I happy with the upgrade? Definitely. For slightly more than $400 the system sounds much better. I would like a little more power but can easily wait a while longer for when I have a spare $2000 or so for the next upgrade!