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Now that I fried my factory stereo and almost finished the audio system upgrade process, I thought I shoudl give the board the results.
Starting point: 99 9-3 base with CD player.
Speakers:
Added Infinity Kappa component speakers up front. Opened up the door speakers grills and connected the mid range speakers to the factory wire that is prerun to the doors. Crossover in the dash, and surface mounted the 1" tweeters on top of the dashboard grills. $100 on ebay.
Added used Infinity Kappa 6x9s in the rear. You have to do some fussing to get them to fit, as the factory holes are slightly too small, but they do work. These are really for rear fill sound. $60 on ebay.
Added Infinity Basslink in trunk. Pretty small unit - maybe 10" wide by 14"x12". Mounted it upright with the included stands on the drivers side front of trunk. Hand tightened the connection screws to the stand so that if you really need to fill up the trunk it can easily be removed. When I had the speakers running with the factory head unit, I ran the Basslink feed off of the rear speakers, but with the aftermarket it'll be attached to the RCA outputs form the head unit. Vecroed the basslink volume control to the center console just in front of the parking brake. Does a really, really nice job of pushing big bass, and is very controllable. $200 on ebay.
With the factory head unit, the speakers sound very good. Nice separation and very nice clarity - better than I expected. They aren't very loud, however, which is where the basslink comes in - really helps fill in the sound. I think the factory unit wattage is 37/channel max, so just about any aftermarket will push quite a bit more volume.
Head unit:
I'm installing an Alpine 9856 head unit with a pocket filler panel below it. My wife has the Alpine 9845, and it's a similar unit with more power and direct Ipod controls. It'll play mp3 discs, take any auxilary input (like a non-ipod mp3 player, or a DVD audio feed) and control your Ipod. It's is signifigantly more powerful than the factory head unit, is compatible with Sirius/XM, and will get HD radio with an (overly) expensive tuner option.
Auxilary/Ipod:
Ipod Video with a Alpine 422i controller (controller should work with any Ipod). It's a big improvement over early controllers - easier to use and almost as fast a the Ipod itself, from what I gather. I'll post more info when I have it up and running. Ipod plug will come into the back of the new filler pocket below the head unit, so I can just plug in the Ipod and slip it into the pocket, exposing no wires. It also charges the Ipod, which is nice. Since the head unit controls the Ipod, you don't need to touch it once you've hooked it up.
Please ask with any questions. I hope this helps anyone trying to upgrade their system, and thanks to all the folks here who helped me figure this out as I was going.
Beece
posted by 71.33.23...
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