After receiving several outrageous quotes to finish up my car stereo installation, I decided to take the day off and do it myself. Sure was nice having a dry day . . . but talk about heat and humidity! I'm just about done now . . . calling it a day (very tired AND my hands are pretty hacked up). I'm driving around without most of the interior panels and trip pieces (w00t - weight savings).

Today's accomplishments (may not seem like much, but I've never done car audio before):

1. Remove pretty much every interior panel to gain access to a hidden "cubby" behind the driver's seat (location of amps)

2. Install 4ch amp (bridged for 130x2)

3. All wiring (power, ground, signal, speaker cables, etc.) to the amp

4. Remove door panels (surprisingly harder on the Z than on the A4) and remove factory speakers and tweeters

5. Fabricate spacers for the new front speakers and install

6. McGuyver'd up an install for the tweeters. Seems to work just fine.


All that I have left to tackle tomorrow evening is:

1. Figure out where to install the crossovers and do it.

2. Button everything back up

SO . . . when all is said and done, my system will look like this:

Alpine 9835 Headunit
Alpine iPod Control
Alpine Amp Control
Alpine MRV-F340 (130x2 Front Amp)
Alpine MRD-M501 (300W Sub Amp)
Infinity Perfect 6.1 Component Front Speakers
Infinity Perfect 10.1 Sub in custom enclosure

Yeah, yeah . . . nothing too fancy, but the Z is a noisy enough car that spending much more on car audio seemed rather silly.

Yup . . . . i got sick of staring at all this stuff in my closet AND sick of the absolutely intolerable stock stereo system in the Z.