2000 audio upgrade - help with rear speakers

[Mangosmoothie]

I believe I the m490 option - dash speakers, door speakers, rear speakers, DSP controls. Car currently has single din Kenwood HU. The rear speakers are not working at all

I ordered power acoustik single din car play

Kicker KSC40 for the dash and included metra pnp harness

Metra 70-1787 for head unit and included crutchfield diagram.


I've gathered from searching the rear are run off the head unit itself not the amp. I'm totally new to car audio and don't understand what I'm really doing. I've seen to replace the amp with a 996 6 channel and run it off that. I guess I can run it off the head unit itself, I could run 1 speaker off each head unit output? FL FR RL RR, that would be each of the 4 speakers. How would I do this using the factory harness if I go that route? what output do I hook that up to on the receiver?

[Mangosmoothie]

I've decided to just fit some cheap 6x4 in the enclosure. I will run right side of RR from the head unit and left from LR of the headunit.

The output of the headunit is 17w RMS.

We will see how this goes

[Starter986]

Originally Posted by Mangosmoothie

I've decided to just fit some cheap 6x4 in the enclosure. I will run right side of RR from the head unit and left from LR of the headunit.

The output of the headunit is 17w RMS.

We will see how this goes

17W?

Consider installing in the trunk a 400W amp... power the fronts and rears (100 X 4). Get a powered sub (the Kenwood is nice).

Abandon the OG setup. It's tired and from what I've read... a boner. Start over.

Run some wire and crank it up.

[Mangosmoothie]

Yea the new Hu is weak. Eventual plan is do pretty much what you say. People seem overcomplicate this trying to retain the factory stuff.

[Starter986]

Originally Posted by Mangosmoothie

Yea the new Hu is weak. Eventual plan is do pretty much what you say. People seem overcomplicate this trying to retain the factory stuff.

Yes on the overcomplicated. That's fine for purists.

I meant frunk for the amp... footwell for the sub.

I'm running the Kenwood KSC-SW11 Compact Powered Subwoofer and it is mounted at thee top of the passenger footwell... covered by the floor mat.

Easy peasy.

[Danimal]

I did have the same m490 package. My rears were also run off of the headunit. I bought a 996 cabrio 6x40w amp and ran the rear speakers up to the amp instead..then sourced the correct pins for the amp to connect them. Then botched connecting them. Then paid a pro to fix it

End result….sounds about that same as when I ran it off the headunit. I won’t bother with it.

The biggest change was the Sony headunit I put in with 5v preamp outputs, modern processing, wireless CarPlay, etc. I would focus on the headunit and dash speakers for now.

[Danimal]

Also, the car distributes volume to the speakers by using speakers with different ohm ratings. I tried a pair of high end JL speakers in the dash, but they were low compared to the others because of either their ohm rating or sensitivity being different. Basically the doors were still getting the same bass volume, and the dash wasn’t with the new speakers. So you may want to try something like infinity reference speakers. I might try those at some point. I’m back to factory speakers for now.

[Mangosmoothie]

I thought the dash were 4 ohm so that's what I picked, but no clue on sensitivity. Hopefully it works. If not.... Crutchfield return

I did know the doors were really weird with a low ohm and the amp has some crossover that only sent lows. I wasn't planning on messing with those for now.

[KevinH1990]

https://986forum.com/forums/boxster-general-discussions/79558-door-speaker-recommendations-4.html

I understand that you are working on the rear speakers and not the doors, but you may find this link helpful when you consider further upgrades. I also purchased an OEM 6 channel amp to power my rear speakers. I thought it was marginally better than using the head unit, but it probably wasn't worth the effort.

I think that installing rear speakers and upgrading the dash and door speakers will give you the best return on investment. The OEM speakers are poor quality and any decent speaker from a good brand will sound better. I was able to cram 6.5-inch woofers in my doors and powered them with a separate amplifier. The increase in bass response is noticeable.

I'm sure that other owners have installed better systems than mine. However, my thought process is that the Boxster is an inherently noisy environment and that making it sound very good versus merely good would cost a considerable amount of money and (in the case of large subwoofers) intrude on limited cabin space. I do think you can make the audio sound much better on a relatively modest budget.

Good luck with your upgrades.