Not significantly.

I have the bose system and Ive dialed it in after a week and I think it sound just fine you have to dial in both the cd and the radio seperatley

Based on my impression after my first few days of listening to the Bose system I never would've thought I'd agree. But now that I have:

- Done the subwoofer mod
- Allowed for break-in of the speakers
- Adjusted the settings

I think the sound quality is quite good. Although I'm a bit of an audiophile I would not upgrade the system to achieve better sound. It would be nice to get more functionality though, like being able to play mp3's, bluetooth and nav. Considering hooking up a handheld or getting a PCM unit. Is there a good description of the capabilities of the PCM (the manual was somewhat lacking).

Go for the Bose. I wish I would have. The sound quility is very different. Also do the 18" rims ... the looks is very different.

What is the biggest improvement for the money on the audio plus system ( the one just below the Bose upgrade)? Adding a subwoofer, changing out the speakers or replacing the headunit?

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Bose is AWFUL and has .5 ohm speakers that are impossible to replace with aftermarket.

IMO order base and just replace the speakers. 2 nice aftermarket speakers will sound much better than the Bose set.

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.5 Ohm? Are you sure? That is nearly a dead short and would require an incredibly high current amplifier and tremendously large speaker wire. I suspect you are mistaken. A .5 ohm speaker just makes no sense.

I do not believe that BOSE is aweful. Could it be better? Yes. But if you actually spend the time to tweek it out, I believe it sounds very good.

My recommendation: Go to a dealer with your favorite test CD and give it a listen. I suggest turning the surround off, the AP off, fader to the rear 3-4, bass & treble to taste. The system tends to be a bit boomy and bright. The suggested settings will bring the mid-highs to more acceptable levels (fading forward and using surround amplifies the mid highs to a harsh levels). The lows are still powerful. Many have found that stuffing the woofer port with an acoustic dampening material brings the lows to more natural levels. This is a much easier and less expensive mod than trying to gut and replace the entire system, which is what you will need to do if you want to surpass the system's abilities.

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Adding a woofer and woofer amplifier and tuning it to be overly sensitive would bring you the biggest benefit.

By making the woofer amp at least 6db more senstive than flat, you wil be forced to reduce the BASS setting to make the lows more accurate. By doing this, you will also be reducing the low frequencies being delivered to the remaing speakers, which will effectively act like a high pass filter to the system. That will allow you to reach much higher output levels among the remaining speakers without distortion so you can match the output of the woofer.

Changing the speakers will have little effect unless you also add an amplifiers. These are tricky to interface with the Porsche sound systems.

Replacing the head unit would provide little benefit in sound, cost a lot, and be very difficult to properly interface with the system.

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I have a 2000 ML320 Mercedes SUV and many years back replaced the Bose speakers with MBQ. Many folks said that it wouldn't work/wouldn't sounds good, etc. but after 8 yrs, it still sounds fine; the MBQ's are wondeful speakers. I now also have a 987S 2007 with the Bose system. I don't listen as much to the Bose since I like listening to the engine, but I would assume (based on my experience with the ML320) that it would be okay to just replace the speakers with MBQ if one wanted to??

I could be wrong about the .5 ohm
But the ohm rating on the Bose system is much different than aftermarket. To my understanding that is what prevents just replacing the speakers and not changing the head unit.

We need to find someone who has pulled their Bose system. The ohm rating is probably printed on the rear of the speaker.

I had a Bose system on a previous Miata. That Bose system was 1/2 ohm.
1/2 ohm and .5 ohm are the same thing right

Anyway, Clearwater audio makes 1/2 ohm speakers for the Bose system. They sounded awesome! I bet they would work in a Porsche if they would fit.

Mazda Miata Page

So, somebody go pull a door panel and find the ohm rating

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I cannot imagine how the alcantara headliner have any acoutsitcal benefit or negative impact acoustically over the standard headliner. Get the headliner because it is a nice luxurious touch. If you want acoustics, install sound traps and do your headliner in acoustical foam tiles, do some extensive bass management and "room eq".ec etc.....(perhaps best to buy an Escalade and dress it up with spinners as well) lol

No, there are no such thing as 1/2 ohm speakers, but I can now see why you said that. If you took an ohm meter and tested any speaker, you will get about 1/2 ohm. That's because an ohm meter measures resistance by passing a direct current through the load, and if you really look at what a speaker is, it's just a piece of wire wrapped around a metal form that rides inside a magnetic gap, so it really should measure out at 0 ohms, but because we haven't mastered room temp super conductors, there will be some small resistance.

A speakers impedance is actually an imaginary measure of it's effective load when presented to an alternating current and actual resistance is a function of frequency. At a speakers resonant frequency, it's resistance will peak as high as 70 ohms. But at other frequencies it will fall as low as 3 or 4 ohms. The mean of these measurements is the speaker's impedance. I gets a lot more complicated because of a speakers inductive and capacitive properties, but we'll leave it at that. Let's just say you can not get an accurate impedance measurement with a multi meter.

What makes it hard to replace a Bose speaker is the fact that Bose speakers are usually unusual in their frequency response. If used alone, the speaker would sound undesirable. But Bose usually matches these unusual speakers with speaker specific equalization inside their proprietary amplifiers. Anyone who's ever listened to a set of Bose 901s knows what I am talking about. They contain nine 4" drivers yet they hit low and hard as if they were much larger, and the speakers come with a EQ that makes it impossible to use other speakers with the 901s. When you replace these speakers with a conventional speaker that was designed to be used without equalization correction, the results can be undesirable. Because of this, replacing Bose speakers usually necessitates replacing the Bose amplifiers with them. This presents the next challenge.

Bose amplifier use a balanced input from the head units. A balance input has a high and a low and the system cares only about the voltage difference between the two. The high wire will have a + voltage and the low wire will have a matching - voltage. All aftermarket head units use unbalanced outputs, meaning one polarity of the output rests at ground and the other provides voltage. Balanced inputs are superior at rejecting noise, but more expensive to make. The two are not compatible. So this makes it hard to add an aftermarket head unit to a Bose amp, or to add an aftermarket amp to a head unit made to work with a Bose balanced output. So the head unit has to go too. There are adapters that will convert an unbalanced output into a balanced output. This is good news for the Corvette owners with Bose. But not for Prosche owners.

Porsche does not use a balanced output. Nor do they use and unbalanced output. They have employed the use of a digital fiber optic output system to transfer audio to the Bose amplifier. This system is called a MOST bus. Media Oriented System Transfer bus. Audio data is transmitted digitally at many megabytes per second via fiber optic cable to the Bose amplifier where there is a digital to analog (D to A) converter that turns it back into audio. No aftermarket amplifiers have a MOST fiber optic input.

This is why it is so hard to upgrade a Porsche Bose system with aftermarket components and why I said you need to gut and replace the entire system with thousands of dollars worth of audio equipment to surpass what the Bose already does.

Sorry about the technical rant. Hope it helped.

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