Retrofit speakers in E93

[james22]

Just bought a E93 335i secondhand.

Lovely car and spec (and more importantly) price was great. Only problem was, as with all these things, I had to make a compromise, which in this case was speakers and I have ended up with the bog standard speakers in a 3.

Whilst i have absolute no interest in bass bins or other such "Pimp my ride" additions I would like to better the speakers whilst keeping the original housings etc.

Any ideas as to how best do this in a sensible way economically??

Thanks

[E21_Ross]

where are you based? a company in southampton did mine and they are very, very good. guy who owns it has a lovely black M6 too if you are near there, i'll give you their details. seriously good there.

doh, just seen your profile says london. never mind!

Edited by E21_Ross on Monday 22 March 20:12

[gizlaroc]

Speakers are fine, just add the Logic7 tweeters for a start, they plug into the mids.

Then you can buy an amp to drive them properly, if you go 4 channel you can replace the underseat subs with some decent 8" versions.

Check out the threads on www.e90post.com forums under the UK section, we have discussed it at great length there.

[james22]

Thanks for that, been on E90 (for a number of hours) and not being the most engineering savvy person in the world, am now a little more confused than I was originally!

My choice seems to be to go for the Alpine set up or your set up as described.

Or do I go to Evolve first......

[fraserbottomley]

I'm thinking about getting an E92 and was having a look on the e90post forums last night. In the UK technical section there's a stickied thread about the Alpine retrofit upgrade (includes tweeters, upgraded mids and an amp to power the mids and standard underseat subs).

Looks like what I'd do if I got a car with stock speakers. Comes out at about £230 I think excluding fitting. I'm pretty confident with car audio stuff so I'd do the fitting myself but if you aren't you'd have to budget extra for fitting. From what I remember I think BMW charge over £300 for fitting!!! Probably better off going your local car audio specialist to get it fitted.

Edited by fraserbottomley on Monday 29th March 11:15

[LocoBlade]

I fitted the Alpine kit in my 123d and it was pretty easy, although you need to be confident/proficient at taking trim panels off without breaking them otherwise you'll either spend hours and hours carefully taking trim off trying to ensure they don't get broken, and/or you'll break the odd fastening clip etc. Overall it took two of us about 3 hours but my mate who helped had done two previously, so knew how it went in.

The only precaution Id say is to speak to your dealer and nail them down about how they'd deal with a return in the case of a faulty amp. The reason I say this is because there's a fairly common FM radio interference issue you get with some of these kits, its usually caused by a slightly faulty amp with insufficient supression in it's circuitry but can occasionally be caused by the installer routing the cables incorrectly. I had this issue with my first amp and had a hell of a time trying to convince BMW to swap it out. This was complicated by the fact I was taking it to a different dealer than the one I bought the kit from (group buy, not local dealer), who wanted to re-wire the amp to determine fault, and if it had turned out to be the wiring, charge me 3 hours labour, even though I'd followed BMW instructions on the install routing! Eventually I had to take it to the supplying dealer 150 miles away who agreed to check it over FOC, but even that didnt go smoothly because radio signal was stronger in their area so the fault couldnt easily be replicated, but it got sorted in the end.

The audio performance is much better now though and well worth doing, although the price for the kit is now nearer £300 thanks to the Euro exchange rate inflating UK prices.

Edited by LocoBlade on Wednesday 31st March 16:23