Planet 9

Have been wanting to upgrade my Cayman sound system (non-bose) for a long time, but haven't figured out exactly what I want to do.

Wondering if anyone has disabled/removed the rear and center speakers, and is just running door components on each side (2 way or 3 way).

Its either that, or go all out with rear speaker replacement and another amp, not sure if its worth the extra weight.

I'm confused. Do you want to upgrade it or remove the speakers?

I've got the "base" system with just the door speakers and (I think) some tweeters or something in the dash. It's really lousy. If you take your other speakers and amp out, feel free to send them to me!

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I think Kor is trying to take the system to a more 'pure' stereo state by disabling the extra speakers. If so, I'm not sure there would be any benefit. If you just fade fully to the front and turn off the surround you will achieve what you are suggesting, sonicly. I am pretty sure the center speaker only works when in the surround mode.

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Gator Bite
PCA Cayman Register Advocate

Hi,

I was faced with the same dilemma and decided on doing something fairly
unconventional. See my "Latest Audio Thoughts" thread. The Sound System
Plus can be made to sound good, it just requires a lot of equalization. I
started out by putting in the Dension iPod adapter and then noticed that
starting from "flat" -5 treble +4 bass 03 fader resulted in more-or-less OK
sound.

My thought was that if those setting could make that much of a difference
then with a very detailed equalizer I could fix up all the problems. I believe
it has worked out nicely and I only added a very small equipment stack in the
location where the DVD drive goes under the hood. There is no avoiding
the replacement of the 4 amplifier channels in the head unit because any
equalizer you are going to get takes the speaker level outputs down to
preamp level. It's an alternative to consider that doesn't involve ripping up
the car.

I've installed complete new systems in past cars and I found that the car
environment is tricky to work with no mater how good the source equipment
you use is. My philosophy is to find "good enough" not to seek out
perfection. Even if you install all new high-end equipment, you will probably
still need some equalization to make everything sound good. The reason is
pretty simple. Let's say you install into the doors only and into the rear
deck locations with new speakers. The 4" speakers won't be able to cover
the same frequency range as the fronts so simplistically you are starting
from a frequency response that will look like this:

rear spk > ____________________________
range / \
________/ < front speaker range \________________
/ \

sorry, diagram not displaying correctly

This just happens because the rear speakers boost the volume you hear
in the frequencies they reproduce. The other big problem in a car is that
sitting so close to the drivers and having the drivers at different distances
from your ears introduces phase problems that make the music sound bad
too. Easy example is that the sound waves from the tweeters in the dash
probably hit your ears before the sounds from the door drivers. There
probably should be some type of delay line added so that the timing of the
waves is right. Anyway, cars really are lousy sound environments, so that
is why I just seek out "good enough." The head unit and the speakers in
the factory system aren't that bad, there was just poor attention to the
results when they stuck all those part together. Porsche could have put
in some volume attenuation on some of the drivers and probably leveled
the response out a bit. The tweeters in the dash are way too loud
for the rest of the system and the woofers in the doors are way too quiet.

Steve