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Welcome to the board. As MikeMc posted, Richard Bevan's audio guide is the place to start.
Dean will eventually post here to say the first thing to do is upgrade your dash 3.5" speakers to Infinitys and add a capacitor...if you search Dean's posts, I'm sure you'll read about it. That's one way to go, and it will help. It's a different approach from what the SE does, though, which is to add woofers in the doors.
To do a simple equivalent of the SE upgrade, you'll want a 2-channel amp and a pair of 6.5" woofers for the doors. Feed the amp from the line-out jack (8-pin DIN) Use an LPF (there may be one built into your amp, depending on the amp) to direct only low frequencies to the doors...set it to maybe 500-800 Hz. The dash and rear deck spoilers are still run off the head unit.
I went the components route so that I could get cleaner sound up front than the head unit's built-in amp could provide. I bought Infinity Reference 605cs components on ebay for around $65, I think. I got a 2-channel low/mid-market amp as a free perk from work, but I'm sure it wouldn't be that expensive to buy a similar one. (As a note, I originally had a much more expensive one in there, but the components were much more complex, and it shorted out when I had some damp stuff in the trunk and the temperature dropped...water condensed on everthing. I'm not running at high power or listening in a highly sound-insulated environment, but for what I need, the cheap amp sounds just as good to me.) I also bought some 6x9 Pioneer TS-A6905 speakers on ebay for another $40 to put in the rear shelf. I was hoping for more bass than the stock 6x9s, since I don't want to take up space in the trunk for a subwoofer. I didn't get as much as I was hoping for...probably because I'm still powering them off the headunit.
The sound is greatly improved. In a perfect world, I'd move more of the midrange up to the dash, which is more the balance that the SE has, and I'd move some of the bass to the rear. To do this, I'd probably build new crossover units that split the front signal at a lower frequency (the 605cs xovers are at 3.5kHz, I think). I'd then put 2-way 3.5" speakers in the dash. Last, I'd want to replace my amp with a 4-channel and power the rear deck speakers off the amp...maybe with a bass boost.
Search this board and the NG900 board for what other people have done, and read Richard's site. That should give you some ideas about what you want to do. Bottom line is that you can spend a lot less than $600 and end up with something much better than the SE sound.
Matt
'99 base
posted by 12.101.2...
, Thu, 18 Dec 2003 14:24:12
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