LCP

...in the front doors. Over the course of 2 days, it took me about 11 hours and probably cost me missing about 14 innings of the Astros games. Oh well; a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

I'd bought some Image Dynamics CXS54 5" midrange and NX30 tweeters with crossovers along with a pair of ID 6" midbass drivers from another Audi-ophile about 5 years ago. Since I had a boxed 12" Orion sub from my previous A4 as well as an Alpine 11-band EQ and a pair of Orion 225HCCA amplifiers (now those are about 16 years old now!), my S4 has pretty much been waiting for a stereo system since I brought it home. But between go fast mods and sound good mods, guess which one has been winning out so far. Anyway, my drivers side door speaker had begun to rattle so I figured that I might as well start back down my former dark side -- car audio. Although I'd never really done any installation before, I'd fidgeted around with things quite a few times tinkering with what's already there.

So, I'd just do the 5" components in the front doors this weekend. No pansy-*** MB Quart adapters for me though! First, I had to take the door off -- easy enough once you realize the wiring connectors almost all just pull off instead of having to pinch them in to unhook them first. Replacing the tweeter was pretty easy, just used copies amounts of liquid nails and duct tape to hold in place since it was a fair bit deeper than the OEM tweeters. Then I jigsawed out an adapter from 1/4" plywood by tracing the 4" holes and my 5" speaker and fitted up to the holes for the 4" speaker and mounted the 5" speaker into the wood. Finding room to place the crossover was a major PITA though. No room in the kickpanel. Wiring room was cramped as hell getting through the door to the kickpanel area anyway, so I found one place to fit it on the doorpanel, about 2 inches aft of the speaker. Since I was mounting straight onto the plastic of the backside of the interior door trim, I simply used copious amounts of duct tape to secure it. Glue would have been the only other real option.

Got the door back together and things sound amiss. Bass response is gone. I find out I did 2 things wrong: somehow wired the midrange with its polarity reversed and once I had proudly confirmed that the adapter I had made would fit and would allow for the speaker to fit without banging into anything, I forgot to go back and fill up the gaps around it. So the door came off again and I filled up the gaps around the adapter between it and the hole for the 4" speaker with copious amounts of caulk-like sealant. Of course, I nearly broke the mirror remote control when unplugging the harness for it this time, so I had to take that apart and get it all back together the right way.

Then I do it all over for the other door. There's definitely more clarity from these Image Dynamics speakers than there were from the OEM speakers. The OEM speakers were louder though -- at least in the midbass and midrange frequencies, so with the puny head unit powering these, there's probably a couple dB trade-off from top end, and I've adjusted the fader to 2 notches to the front as a result and reconfigured the hidden EQ settings to add more bass and midbass to the front speakers and take a little more midbass, midrange and treble out of the rears. When the amplifiers, sub and new rear midbasses get in the car, that will all seem moot and hopefully it will all be balanced if not at least adequately powered.

Anyone got rear speaker mounting adapters or a line out adapter from the head unit or know where I should get those from? I hope that the rest of the install goes a little faster...some people could have done the entire system in the time it took me to put in a pair of door speakers.

HIS4

I tried the whole replacing speakers and amps and connect to the stock head unit. I just couldn't get it to sound exactly right. As you mentioned, the bass response from the mids was just not there. I've shared this on the forum before but my conclusion is that the so called "hidden eq" is not really an EQ. It seems that it is introducing some sort of phase shift into the system that would cause cancellation between the front and rear speakers in the midbass frequencies. No matter what I did while the stock head unit was in, the midbass response as always weak unless I faded the rears all the way off. At that point I decided to change the head unit and all the cancellation problems were solved.

reefer_bob

<center><img src="http://pictureposter.audiworld.com/45294/mvc-009s.jpg"></center><p>You can get the line out from the wiring harness in the drivers side rear of the car.

It's pretty straight forward.

LCP

I don't have Bose; will I still have pin-outs for it?

HIS4

It might not be plug and play but it can be used to tap the line outputs from the stock head unit. If your stock harness is a three piece harness, you can just plug the Blaupunkt harness in place of one of the stock ones and you're good. If you're stock harness is one big harness, it requires actually removing the female pin connectors from the Blaupunkt harness and inserting it into the stock harness. The pins you remove from the Blaupunkt harness will have a pair of RCA's connected to them. The pin diagram for the stock head unit is on the top of the unit.

Check out the link for a description of the adapter.<ul><li><a href="http://forums.bostonaudi.org/viewtopic.php?t=3945">http://forums.bostonaudi.org/viewtopic.php?t=3945</a</li></ul>

B5QShip

All the duct tape would scare me a bit, but it sounds like everything worked out okay. ID is good stuff - nice choice =)

LCP

...so it was a lot easier to just use what was laying around. Sometimes I'm a sucker for the path of least resistance.