Upgrading rear speakers - 986 Forum - The Community for Porsche Boxster & Cayman Owners

shaman1204 · 03-29-2009, 04:22 PM

I installed my OEM rear speaker kit and the 6 channel 996 amp last week. I really can't hear a difference. From what others have posted the upgrade was like night and day. There is definitely sound coming from them, but I can barely hear the highs. Is it possible to swap out the OEM speakers with 2 ways? The speakers are 3.5" I believe?

KevinH1990 · 03-29-2009, 05:22 PM

While researching my rear speaker purchase, the consensus of the on-line forum posters was that the speakers in the PNP (Harvey) kit were better quality than those in the OEM kit. So, it seems like there is a potential to improve the sound. If you could find someone with the PNP kit in your area, you might want to see if you can hear a difference before you invest in new speakers.

I have the PNP (Harvey) speaker kit and a 996 amp. I originally powered the rear speakers off of the head unit. I found that to be an improvement over the system without rear speakers. When I added the 996 amp I heard further improvement. A check against my friend's Boxster with head unit powered rear speakers confirmed this assessment. Both improvements were subtle, so it may not be worth a costly upgrade.

rick3000 · 03-30-2009, 04:38 AM

I installed OEM rear speakers over the summer and they made an improvement for me. If you want to upgrade the speakers any 3.5" speaker should fit, and you might be able to fit dedicated tweeters in there, I know a few people have.

Have you tried adjusting the balance? If you can't hear anything from them, turn up the sound from them, I had to mess around with mine, until they filled in the cabin nicely.

shaman1204 · 03-30-2009, 07:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rick3000

I installed OEM rear speakers over the summer and they made an improvement for me. If you want to upgrade the speakers any 3.5" speaker should fit, and you might be able to fit dedicated tweeters in there, I know a few people have.

Have you tried adjusting the balance? If you can't hear anything from them, turn up the sound from them, I had to mess around with mine, until they filled in the cabin nicely.

I haven't really messed around with the fading except to make sure the rears were working. I'll try that and see if it makes a difference. I just figured that the 996 amp would be pushing the same wattage to all speakers, therefore reducing the need to fade as you have to when the rears are wired directly to the headunit.

I have swapped out my dash speakers with Infinitys, maybe they are overshadowing the rears. I'm going to swap one side of the rear with some 2 ways and compare, I'll report on the difference.

ChrisZang · 03-30-2009, 10:46 AM

for reasons beyond my understanding it seems that you need a separate amp wicth much more oomph than the stock (4 channel or 6 channel) amp can provide.
At least this is how I got my rear speakers to finally "talk to me"