Ordered full factory replacement setup: how does it look?

[mikerob97]

...the stock Premiums are far superior in every way: power handling, clarity, detail and ease of install.

To put it bluntly, I would rather listen to a set of 25 year old speaker that came from a junkyard than those miserable Fosgates....

...If you are gonna buy cheap shit, the best choice out there is this: http://www.powerbassusa.com/s-5c-525-components. These speakers have far superior crossovers, far superior drivers and actually fit the hole properly. If you can't take the time to find a set of Premiums, these are the best choice, and are about the same price...

Luke

Hello Luke - I grabbed just a part of your earlier post. Wanted to clarify something. When you mention "Premiums", are you referring to stock BMW speakers that came with the premium sound system in the E30? The premium sound system being the system that came with an external amplifier?

Thanks in advance your reply.

[blacktyevent]

The deck is fine, the woofer could be fine, but everything else is plain old dumb. The speakers you bought are absolutely miserable, probably the worst sounding 5.25" components I know of. The co-ax is also miserable, the stock Premiums are far superior in every way: power handling, clarity, detail and ease of install.

To put it bluntly, I would rather listen to a set of 25 year old speaker that came from a junkyard than those miserable Fosgates. I pulled a set of those turds out of an E34, the owner still had the stock drivers, so I was able to show him how much moire technically superior to his shitty Fosgates the stock Premium driver was, and what he said after the install was that "I can't believe those sounded so bad, I had no idea how much better the stock speakers are"

...

Now lets talk about that box...the Infinity claims adequate performance in a sealed box, but hopefully by now you have heard it...miserable, isn't it?

Two minutes with any box modeling software would show that the output falls off horribly at 50Hz and has a huge rise above 120Hz, exactly the worst thing you could do in an E30. That woofer is a horrible match for that box, period.

Not to mention that only the face of that chintzy turd of a box is MDF and that the whole thing is built with hot glue, its an absolutely horrid choice. There are plenty of generic vented boxes out there that would do 10X better for only a little more money.

Oh yeah, using a DVC 4 ohm/coil woofer on a 2 channel...yeah, you said you were going to replace it with a mono amp, but damn...right now you only have about 60 watts available, since you can only get about half of that amps power, since you are temporarily stuck using a 2 channel amp, find a cheap 4 ohm woofer on CL, you can get double the power out of that amp.

Hopefully you would find a less horrid choice for that box, too, so you might actually get some bottom end instead of the muddy mess that you have now.

Thanks for the response, Luke. I had the system pro installed last weekend. It sounds pretty darn good--MUCH BETTER than my expectations after reading your .

I have addressed your concerns by the following:

Replaced PowerAcoustic Amp with a Kenwood eXcelon X500-1 Mono Amp
Replaced the $25 Box with a GAS-E3010. I kept my word & ordered from you as promised.

The coax and component Fosgate speakers sound quite happy. I'm going to keep them in unless they blow, which i hope will not happen as i generally dont crank the volume up beyond what it takes to clearly fill the cabin and the cabin only.

Now with that being said, the installer ignored my requests to (1), utilize the existing wiring and instead rewired the whole car . The stock wires are still there but i am a bit annoyed by this. (2) The bastard soldered instead of crimping . (3) My antenna mast doesnt go up anymore when the car is turned on, which has caused poor reception of non-HD broadcasts :(. I would have expected this from say, the Geek Squad, but his shop boasted 30 years of pro auto audio experience, the man who installed it had an E28 for 7 years, and he seemed to take great pride in his work. He charged only about 1/2 what the more corporately-run shops in town would, and said he is willing to spend more time on it to get the antenna functional again. Ultimately, i got what i paid for, and am generally satisfied so long as my radio will work properly once more.

Thanks again.

-Ty