Bobby Kinstle

Well... I did all the installation myself which included fabricating custom mounting brackets for the front door woofers and all of the tweeters and opening up the door woofer grill. There are door woofer adapters available now but if you paid a shop to do what I did you'd be waaaay over $2K. I've been working with a local shop to buy parts and do research and he said he'd charge $2500 in labor to do what I did.

But buying raw drivers from places like parts express can save you a ton of money over car audio gear.

bruce_miranda

As Bobby said, the labour is going to be what makes this job expensive, its all the panels that need to be taken out. And if you follow the repair guide, that is a lot of panels.
But there are ways to cut that expense down too. e.g. Bobby used his existing speakers as the mount and cut out the OEM drivers to make a frame for the new speakers. I didn't do that. I spent so much time buying and returning (where I could) off the shelf parts that you could use instead. Yes you spend more on parts, but you save on time and you have your original speakers intact. Parts I used were all there, just not sold as suitable for the B9 A5 Sportback. Some parts are from an A3, some from an older A4 etc.
I could also never recommend someone spending the time, like Bobby did, to grind the B&O front door grills down. Just buy the OEM grills from the ***. I am sure grinding those grills is about a couple of hours labour. Swap them out takes less than 5 mins.
But Bobby's sheet should be your starting point. Using speakers from a speaker shop is always going to be cheaper than buying Brand names. True you don't get bragging rights, (Hey look I have a xxxx system) but you get fantastic sound.
Maybe you should speak to a shop and ask them for a labour hourly rate to install the parts and speakers you supply. I am quite confident that a BOM can be put together for each speaker location you want to change. Heck, in my speaker replacement threads, I've even given screw sizes that I have used, if I need to buy them.

Bobby Kinstle

It took a few hours with a belt sander to open up the front door grills, but I also had the B&O and didn't want to lose the white LED light pipe. A lot of that time was waiting for the plastic to cool down so I could sand it cleanly. That being said, even opened up I think the grilles still block about half the output from that speaker. Fabbing the front door woofer mounts isn't really needed anymore as we've found adapter rings that work, and the midrange I used doesn't seem to be available anymore and the faital 4fe32 folks are using is pretty easy to install. I think all of the locations except maybe the subwoofer have wiring harnesses available which also helps. I didn't cut any of the factory plugs except the subwoofer.

These days the most labor intensive part that's hard to avoid is the tweeters. I bought bare elements that were the same size as the factory elements and then cut the plastic around the magnet to remove the factory tweeters and then secured the elements in with hot glue. Took about 10 minutes per tweeter, which isn't that bad. Bruce bought tweeters with a faceplate and sanded them down to match the shape of the factory tweeter so it could lock in place. Actual work is probably the same either way.

The subwoofer can be a pain getting some amps and Line output converters to work with the B&O amp. The Kicker Key500.1, <!--td {border: 1px solid #ccc;}br {mso-data-placement:same-cell;}-->Planet Audio MB600.2D, and the Audiocontrol ACM-1.300 are the only amps known to work plug and play without resistors and active converters.

If you are going to use an installer, show them the guide and see what they think about it. Some will opt out right there, some will quote a huge price. Probably don't go with the cheapest quote. Many of the speakers aren't that hard as a DIY either. Taking the door panels off is super easy and using a metra bracket and a wiring harness to build up the assembly first means you just unbolt the old woofer and bolt in the new one. Plug in the cable. I took almost 2 years to work through all of this but a lot of that was finding time in my personal life and trying to figure out the best way to do things. I mainly only use professional installers when I need wires run.

bruce_miranda

I had planned to cut the face plates and did test doing it. But in the end I didn't sand or alter any thing on the tweeters.
I just mounted the tweeters with the face plate using two zip ties. Took about 5 mins each side.
https://www.audiworld.com/forums/aud.../#post25502082

Nowadays I recommend the Dayton Audio car tweeters which you can notch the outer frame and put into the rear door locks too. The same tweeter works for the A pillars as well.

m444

There is a 6.5db SPL sensitivity difference between these tweeters:

Dayton Audio AN25F-4, SPL sensitivity 96.5 dB 2.83V/1m

Dayton Audio ND25FN-4, SPL sensitivity 90 dB @ 2.83V/1m

JohnEnglish

Hmmm, maybe this is something I could try myself. As long as I have clear instructions I could probably do it. Do you have pictures of what you did to the door grills? I'd like to keep the B&O ones since they have the LED trim light and I'm a sucker for gimmicky stuff like that. I'd have to follow up and find out exactly what parts/adapters/cables/etc. I needed to replace each speaker

Bobby Kinstle

Honestly, the 90dB ND25FN elements I used is too high. It really should be padded down 2-3dB. I have the treble control set to -3. I'm going to raise the crossover point from 4khz to 5khz and I think I can go back to -2. I've toyed with adding an LPad but I'd rather not have the heat and components in there.

Bobby Kinstle

I don't have super good photos but here we go.

The factory grill has about a 3x5" opening that corresponds with the output from the horn the woofer is loaded into. You'll see when you get in there. It's a pretty big WTF moment. I don't know how much cocaine it takes to understand why they did that, but it's a lot. Anyway here's the steps

1. Once you have the door panel off, the grill has some plastic clips that protrude into the back of the speaker pocket. Just unclip each one and push forward.
2. Disconnect the cable from the LED (or just get the light pipe out of the LED housing by spreading the clips with a small screwdriver.
3. Take the top cap off a belt sander so the 180 degree wheel is exposed
4. Lightly sand the closed section of the grill until the plastic starts to soften. Once this happens you won't be able to make progress and it'll make a big mess.
5. Put it down to cool and sand the other one until it starts to soften
6. Alternate back and forth until the area in front of the new woofer is open.
7. Clean up remaining flashing with an exacto knife.

bruce_miranda

And that extra sensitivity does wonders in the *** cars, especially when installed in the rear doors, for the front row passengers. The combination of having both the fader and Treble makes for finding a lovely sweet spot.
In the *** cars where people have swapped the dashboard tweeters for full rangers, these then become the only tweeters in the car that have to work against the 10K roll off in the car.
The AN25F has its own fixed tweeter grill, so you are going to lose stuff when it needs to go through that and then the car's trim grill.
In a B&O car the tweeters in the A pillar are aimed at you. Whereas in the ***, there is no tweeter aimed at your ears. But even with that, those that have installed the AN25F in the A pillars seem to like it.

JohnEnglish

Thanks. I was looking around at speaker grills after I posted that and I figured that's what you meant.

There seems to be two different designs to the back side of the speaker grill. The style you posted with the the "grooves" in the blocked off section and a solid design with a honeycomb pattern in the blocked off section.

GENUINE Audi A5 S5 RS5 17-on door card speaker cover grille LEFT 8W603 – Partshaus Ltd