I am looking to take some BestBuy gift certificates and turn them in for stereo equipment for my 93 Maxima (without BOSE).

What sort of parts do I need? I mean, what size speakers front and rear?

Are there any gotcha's or snags with 3rd gen installs? Anything I need to know?

Where should I mount the amp and sat "brain"? How about the satellite antenna?

Does BestBuy sell anything good for car stereo?

Thanks!

you're lucky, if indeed you dont have bose you have 4x6s in the doors nad 6.5s in the rear deck, all youll need is a cd player, wiring harness, and antenna adapter

so you think I should keep my stock speakers?!? Will that sound OK?

You probably shouldn't keep your stock speakers. The Clarion sucks. I've got a 93 and my surrounds were completly worn away. Your doors can hold 6.5 with some modification. I wouldn't let best buy install anything. How much you got on your gift cards? That'll help. I'd only by Pioneer and Kenwood stuff from them.

if you are going to shell out the money for a satellite set up, you should most definitely upgrade your speakers. You can go 6.5" all the way around. Try to at least get some decent coaxials. You might have to get some speaker pods for the front, but the sound will be much better than from 4x6s.

Best Buy has some nice stuff. Not "the best" but very nice. If I had gift certificates there, I would look into some of their products. I think they have Alpine, which I like for HUs and I thought they carried Infinity, which are good sounding reasonably priced speakers.

I have about $300 in credit to spend. Anything else I need I can get from some other store if needed.

I don't want to get into heavy modification. I want something easy to isntall and would rather do it myself.

So 6.5" all the way around? Do I need any work to make it happen?

Thanks for the input!

You'll have to have new speaker pods for the 6.5's to fit. Check with James92SE(I believe). He sells them cheap and they look great(plus: bolt right into current baffle position with no snags). Hit him up with a PM or check out his sig. It is extremely worth it to upgrade to the larger speakers in the front. 1. More sound 2. About as cheap as 4x6 speakers because they are more common. That's what I would do. Don't keep factory. I would replace speakers before adding satellite.

I highly recommend the Infinity Reference speakers for the price. 6.5" upfront and 6x9" in the rear with Bose or I believe 6.5" in the rear without Bose. Easiest way is to get the pods from James92SE like Chris was saying.

I really like Apline and Eclipse for headunits. Personally I have an Eclipse 5423 (check ebay, they are cheap now) and am extremely happy with it. I paid $150 for it (well, actually I paid $50 + some computer parts but still).

I think you're thinking about Circuit City. Best Buy doesn't carry Alpine or Infinity. Side note Circuit City is dropping Alpine and picking up Kicker. Might be some good buys on Alpine there.

Get about the best deck you can from bestbuy to use up your $300.The clarion setup is amped so they need to be rewired to use the speaker outputs on the deck itself.

I defiatly recoomend getting a good deck with the money from best bu then get ebtter speakers as you can afford them so you cna do it the correct way instead of having a sub par deck with sub par speakers..

Up until recently I have been using the stock speakers with a decent (by no means great) clarion cd player and for the most part it was ok untril i coudl afford to get the stuff I really wanted to do it right.So now however I got rid fo the clarion cd deck and replaced it with a Nakamichi CD-400 with a set of Infinity Kappa component 6.5's in the front with co-ax's in the rear.


BJ white

You don't need the best hu you can get. if you get a decent hu, nice speakers, nice cables/wires, and a good amp, it will sound really good. but buying a seperate amp and cables will suck up a lot of that gc.

I currently have a pioneer hu, with boston nx coaxials front and back, a rocksford fosgate amp, and some good monster cables, and just a crappy bazooka tube sub. but the sound quality is amazing. this set up was pricey though. $1K with install from ultimate electronics.

Just go to best buy and listen to the speaker set ups they have there mess around with the controls, your sure to find something you like.

and if you want to change your gifcert into cash, buy something just over $300 and return it they should give you cash back.

As DMad8724 said, get a cd-player, wiring harness and an antenna adaptor. For speakers, I built a custom adaptor to house 6.5" speakers in the doors like a lot of people did. It's not too hard.

Something that I also did was that I added some tweeters. I bought some Infinity Reference 1" tweeters, drilled a hole on the top front part of the door panel, installed and wired them up parallel to the front speakers. It brightens up the highs like you wouldn't believe.

MrSector9 brings up a good point also. There's a small round amp mounted on the underside of the rear deck. If you install everything, but leave this plugged in, you'll notice that your sound will be biased to the rear even with the fader in the center position. What's worse is that the amp doesn't amplify very clean (sound quality) with an aftermarket deck.

What I did was just bypass this amp alotgether. I simply unplugged the harness that went into the amp, then I looked in my Chilton's manual for the electrical schematic for this part, figure out which colored wires were which, then just made jumpers to connect the right pins. Problem solved.

One more thing I did was to soundproof the doors. I went to Lowe's (local home improvement store) and bought a product called Peel & stick (Sp?). It's a asphalt/aluminum foil sandwiched tape that comes in a roll. It's original application is to patch roofs and gutters. Needless to say, you'll find it in the roofing section. Each roll isn't that expensive and I think I used 2 or 3 rolls.

I removed the front door panels and then applied a couple of layers of this stuff to the inside of the door skin. It tightened up the bass quite a bit. Also made the car a little quieter.

Also, the rear speakers aren't true 6.5" speakers. They are 6.75" speakers. or "oversize" 6.5" speakers.

Last but not least, Crutchfield has all kinds of techincal info for the stuff they sell. If you want to know the details of anything you might want to buy at best buy, you'll find it. http://www.crutchfield.com

Take a look at my setup... http://www.cardomain.com/memberpage/749143/2

I managed to get all that in my car without any major problems. I used up all space between the wheel houses in the trunk from floor to roof, about 60cm from inner wall and out, plus I raised the floor to fit the amps. 2x 6x9" behind the back seat (that thing... don't know what the english word is ) and 6.5" speakers in front doors with tweeters just in front of the door handle. I had to make new speaker seats but that was easy, just made them out of wood.

Lightning Bolt, lol, what the hell is that?! Come on man, you gotta step it up and get good ****.

If you need a stereo kit, i have one and can sell it to you cheap.

Oh yeah?

What all is included?

Pics?

FYI it plays pretty good... LA is the daughter company of Rockford and I belive they know what they're doing

Rockford Fosgate is a decent brand, but nothing to brag about. Can't you get a good deal on MB Quart or Rainbows or something over there?

its got a bunch of plastic pieces for the dash and such to fit nearly any after market hu.

I've never heard of Rainbows but MB Quart is sold here. A very close friend of mine works down at the audio shop so I always get nice prices but the MB quart 10" sub was still about $170 while the LA was about $100. Added up, this is way to much for my wallet. But it plays good though

Rockford is actually the brand ppl think the highest of here. It's what the shops all stock and it's the one winning like 80% of all the contests (except dB of course).

My audio setup was at a total about $3500 and I'm pretty happy with it, for that kinda money. I'm not looking to spend more than the car is worth

Phatsta, I hope you are joking, but from the sounds of it, your talking to some low-end guys. Rainbow makes sweet speakers. Have you ever heard of Focal, PPI, Diamond, heck even Eclipse?

Hornswoggler, have you done anything to the stereo in your ///M?

Well obviously there are better products, not saying there isn't, just that it's not that common. At least not within my knowledge, but then again I'm no soundfreak of that caliber

I guess if you compete you'd have to move up in the $10000 surroundings but as I said, I don't.

To mention some brands that's common here: Rockford, LA, Infinity, GAS (really low-end but still), MB Quart and JBL where the latter two would be the finest. That's what you can get from BRL (largest chain in sweden) and if you'd want something else you'd have to order from outside the country or go to a special dealer, I wouldn't know of any though... The one who won the dB contest last year won with Pyramid speakers In an interview they asked him like wtf?? and he answered 'yeah they're good for about one hour, enough to win'. Gotta be a real madman to even compete with Pyramid but he still did it and won... beats me.

Oh if you haven't heard of Pyramid it's like ****ty really f**k low-end ***-speakers that's no better than my moms hearing plug. Well not that bad but still very, very bad.

No. But it came with an Alpine HU when I bought it used a while ago. I honestly never liked it... just kinda dealt with it for now. (putting the money towards performance).

I am kinda torn, actually, on which car to put the stereo in. On one hand I want to upgrade my M as it is my "nice" car, and the one I will probably keep the longest. OTOH, I don't want to add any weight to it and it is also a little louder than my Max (plus I tend to be WOT a little more in the M, hehe). Might be hard to enjoy a nice system when there is a decent amount of exhaust note. Not unbearable, but definately noticeable. Dynomat and such is out of the question as I don't want to add a pound more than I have to.

If I did spend my gift certs on a system for the M (well, it could buy a HU atleast... maybe an Alpine in the next few months from BB when they start carrying it), I can cascade what I have in there now to the Max, as my factory stereo has gone bad. The display doesn't light up, the tape deck doesn't work, doesn't play MP3's or CD's, and I get a lot of crackle on FM stations. It is really almost unbearable.

So maybe I need two systems. Sheesh.