Speakers . . .

[A6C5V842]

Hi all.

So I'm looking at changing, updating, upgrading the speakers in the 4.2. I think the Bose OEM's are just getting a little tired after 15 years.

What's good, what fits and what is your experience.

Bear in mind I'm a professional mix engineer and I'm definitely looking for a pretty good improvement over the stock stuff, which when EQ'd ain't exactly bad.

Cheers.

G

[JediJoker7169]

I'm also an audio engineer. You're right: while I'm not exactly fond of the Bose system, it's not bad. I would imagine you're familiar with Dynaudio through their monitor speakers? They do automotive speakers, too.

[carmudgeon]

Mine were blown when I bought the car, don't recall the model but I bought a set of relatively inexpensive 2 ohm Infiniti speakers from Crutchfield. I think it sounds great, although in the interest of full disclosure I'm probably half deaf at my age. ;)

[V1nny]

http://www.sonicelectronix.com/item_...io-MM6501.html

Best speakers for any C5. Consider deleting rear door tweeters for proper soundstage. High efficiency and low impedance make them suitable as direct replacement.

[A6C5V842]

Thanks guys.

I did know Dynaudio did car speakers but wasn't sure how good they really are. I've always had a love/hate relationship with their studio monitors. Good idea about deleting the rear tweeters as it definitely messes with the soundstage.

The Polk stuff looks interesting. Did you replace everything, tweeters as well as the mid/bass drivers and just leave the subs in place?

[Mad Cow]

If you're serious about sound quality you'd need to get rid of the bose amp too, it does all kinds of processing and filtering to make those paper cone speakers sound decent and it'll be all wrong with proper drivers.

Sent from my MI 5 using Tapatalk

[V1nny]

Thanks guys.

I did know Dynaudio did car speakers but wasn't sure how good they really are. I've always had a love/hate relationship with their studio monitors. Good idea about deleting the rear tweeters as it definitely messes with the soundstage.

The Polk stuff looks interesting. Did you replace everything, tweeters as well as the mid/bass drivers and just leave the subs in place?

Replaced front directly, both midbass and tweeter, replaced rear door midbass and disconnected tweeter, sold extra tweeter on ebay (beautifuly sounding, if somewhat bright polk twitters). Upgraded subwoofer speaker with beefier dual coil speaker, since magnet did not fit inside sub, mounted cone-in, with magnet outside enclosure. Most equalization is done inside headunit, it has a "Bose Mode", that can be tuned off with vag-com. There are also additional hidden equalization modes (at least in my RNS-E, both first gen, and second gen that I installed last year), which I tried, and settled on flat, no equalization. My Allroad is not Bose, but pretty much everything applies. Biggest issue with C5, is that speakers are mounted to flimsy door cards, not to the metal door, like in B5. The only way to mitigate resonances is to apply dynamat, or similar deadening material all over the door card. I also covered sub enclosure with dynamat. My background is in classical music, but I also made few remixes and DJ in 80's and 90's.

[julex]

+1 to dynamat. We have flimsy cards and very light door skins, which makes for easy door handling but is opposite to what you want for speakers. When applying dynamat, you'll notice that factory actually applied deadening material to the skin, just very little of it. In my case, the cards would rattle like crazy and only applying generous amount of dynamat to inside of cards (make sure to literally enclose the card packets in dynamat from the back) would quiet it down. Since the back of cards has tons of little cavities, the task is labor intensive but make sure you cut a "dynamat sticker" for each cavity and you won't regret it.