so starting out, some stuff I had installed previously. the head unit, 0ga power wire, all rca's, amp ignition wire, and some engine bay wiring improvements were already in place.
starting with the door speakers. the ia performance speaker adapter spacers are great. the full kit is only like $40 and has everything you need to upgrade speaker sizes. the depth of aftermarket speakers is usually a problem for GD impreza's what with window clearance etc, but the kit had everything i needed. it came with 2 thick brackets for the rear, 2 thick and 2 thin brackets for the front, extra washer type spacers for huge speakers, every screw you'll need, a brief install guide card that was actually quite helpful without being too in depth, a sticker (as everything comes with these days) and a sweet little weird smiling review mirror hangy ball decoration (which my roommate's cats immediately perceived as some sort of diabolical enemy and proceeded to tear to tiny shreds). the thick rear brackets were perfect first shot, no clearance issues anywhere on the 5.25". i had window clearance issues when i tried using just the thick 6.5" front brackets, but doubling up with the thin bracket under the thick worked awesome. the kit comes with extended door skin clips as well so you won't have clearance issues with the cone or surround of the new pushed-out speaker hitting the factory speaker grille.
here's the passenger rear door, all bracketed and wired up
here's the beefy 5.25" 2-way installed
and here's the finished product with the extended door clips. can't even tell
comparison of crappy stock plastic speaker and new sexy real speaker
comparison of stock and new door clips
the front doors were quite a bit more involved. i actually had no problem whatsoever installing the tweeters, because the case around the new set had a hole in the center of the back side (right where the stock tweeter screws to the bracket). all i had to do was use the same screw to chew some threads into the the hole in the plastic case, and voila: mounted new tweeter to stock bracket. lucky i guess
feeding speaker wire through the rubber boot for the door wiring harness is terrible. horrible. worst ever. the rest was pretty good. with the 2 brackets on each 6.5" woofer, there were no clearance issues, and once again there was lots of grille clearance thanks to the new door skin clips. also, lots of room under the armrest lumpy ridge thing to put the crossover!
once again: can't even tell what's in there. perfect
the trunk area makes me happy. the Audio Integrations enclosures are pieces of art. they use every little hole and dip in the rear corners of the trunk to make the biggest possible boxes that take up the least interior trunk space. each enclosure has roughly 1.15-1.25 ft3 of inernal volume, which is pretty bang on for a lot of moderately powerful subs in a sealed enclosure. might not be the best match for a 2500watt competition sub, but you're not in the market to save space if you're running something like that.
the boxes are thick fiberglass, they bolt right to existing holes in the trunk pan, they are solid and the carpet matches really well. i'm super happy with them.
one of the deciding factors in amp choice was size. i went with something compact enough to give me lots of mounting options (i still haven't finalized mounting spots yet). i can mount them on either side of the pass through and still have it fully useable, or i can mount them under the rear deck and retain a maximum amount of useable trunk space. yet to be decided.
here's a couple snaps of the trunk as of now.
once everything was in and wired up, i had some alternator whine and startup/shutdown popping. i did some research about possible issues, and it seems like a lot of head units (pioneer especially) have a very sensitive internal pico fuse for the grounding circuit of the RCA outputs. apparently when this blows, the external outputs from the head unit can't ground their signal at the source and must use the whole length of the rca cables to ground at the amp. this extra length to find a good ground allows the engine noise and other problems to enter the cables themselves. i'm not sure when mine blew (head unit was purchased used, and previous setup used harness speaker wiring not RCA's) but i tracked down a couple potential solutions involving grounding the outer shield of the RCA outputs from the head unit right to the case of the head unit itself. this provides the same ground impedance as the internal grounding circuit would, and essentially simulates the original circuit being unbroken. i did exactly this with some random wire i had lying around and, lucky me, it works perfectly! not a single noise, hiss, whine, pop, nothing except pure audio signal coming out of the system now!
i haven't tuned the setup yet, and i haven't blasted it real loud. i'm going to wait until the new alternator is in before putting the system through it's paces, but even now it sounds terrific. the components are known to be pretty bright sounding, so i have the crossovers down to -6db. the highs are still nice and crisp, but not tinny. the speakers are absolutely clear as a bell, and the performance for the price can't be beat. in fact i've had speakers in previous cars that cost easily twice as much that didn't sound this good.
the subs, well lets just say i underestimated them. the w3 is a pretty mid-range sub for JL, and i was expecting not a massive amount of volume, but some good punchiness and quick response. just so happens that they are loud as holy hell, and STILL quick and clear. no slop, no out of phase echo, definitely a great sub for a sealed enclosure.
so there's still a few things left to do, but i'm very pleased with how it's turning out. going to have to chase down rattles, put a little bit of dyanmat in the doors to warm them up a little, general tweaking. i put a lot of thought and planning into matching the pieces of this system in an effort to keep it as simple and efficient as possible, and i'm very pleased so far.
i can't wait to finish off the beefier charging system and really give it some gas
-sean
