A customer stopped by the other day with a car he had just bought. He said it had a horrible sounding stereo system and he wanted to improve it, so we went out to check out his vehicle. It was a beautiful yellow 2002 Porsche Boxster S. It was in pristine condition. He was absolutely right… The stereo sounded lousy. We noticed that this car had the base level system in it. It came with a tape deck in the dash and one pair of 4″ speakers in the dash. Not exactly high fidelity! He also expressed two other things he wanted to improve besides sound quality. He wanted more volume so he could enjoy his music with the top down, and he wanted a navigation system with Bluetooth and iPod control. We agreed to the tall order and took the car into our bay. The first important thing to address in this vehicle was that this car only had two speakers. Period. And they were small. That was going to be a problem in getting him great sound quality and enjoyable output levels. So we scoped out the car and noticed that we could modify the doors to hold a 6.5″ woofer. The problem was that we had the surface area for the woofer but we had very little depth. Since this car did not come with the optional door speakers there was very little depth behind the door panel. No problem! German Maestro to the rescue! German Maestro is a high quality speaker manufacturer in Germany that hand-build all of their products. They also make a 6.5″ woofer in their Epic series where the magnet is made of neodymium and is actually on the FRONT side of the speaker. This allows for very shallow mounting depth while still giving the speaker full excursion, meaning lots of good bass in a small package. OK. Now we have the low end covered. On to the midrange and treble. To accomplish this, we chose another set of German Maestro speakers, this time from their Status Line. The SV4009 speakers employ a 4″ midrange and a 1″ tweeter in a package that fit nicely in the dash locations in the Porsche. Since the customer wanted this to not only sound great but also to JAM, we chose a JL Audio HD600/4 amplifier to power the system. This amp supplies 150 watts per channel to each of the woofers in the door and each of the 4″ component speakers in the dash. The JL amp has a great crossover network that allows us to divide the musical frequencies, sending bass to the woofers in the door, and midrange and treble to the speakers in the dash. The amplifier is very high tech and has multiple patents, with one of the patents allowing the amplifier to be very efficient making for a small overall size. We designed a protective cover panel for the amp and installed it in the front trunk floor of the Boxster S. We covered it in a material that looked factory. The floor was only raised up 3″ so the customer lost very little of his already precious trunk space.
Finally we moved to the dash. No one makes a plastic dash kit for this Porsche like they do for a Camry for example. To us a Porsche deserves better than that anyways. We had a custom aluminum dash mount made for this car. We then dyed it to match the factory color in the vehicle. In that trim piece we installed a Pioneer AVIC-Z120BT Navigation system with Bluetooth and iPod control. From the pictures you can tell that it looked as if Porsche installed it. We were very pleased with the outcome of this vehicle. The customer felt we met all of his objectives and was very pleased with how the system looked and sounded. I would say a job well done!
