I did. To be very exact, a first stage of<br> audio upgrade. As my car is equiped with<br> COMAND, i have no way of replacing the<br> head unit; however, stuck with COMAND,<br> one center-mounted CD player and six-cd<br> changer in the glove box might be not that<br> bad. As a former minidisc fan, i've just<br> bought cd burner and a pile of blank CDRs,<br> transferring all of my MDs into CDRs. Mercedes<br> CD player reads them very well. However, it<br> is unable to read CD-RWs as my sony did without<br> any problems. Back to the audio.<br> As an owner of 320T-Model (estate) i was told that<br> Bose was not available at the time of purchase<br> in the estate version. But on the other hand<br> i heard some bad rumours about new release of<br> Bose, so again it might be not bad to save some<br> money on the expensive audio system that just<br> dont work.<br> Factory speakers (six) sound very lousy and<br> when you hear that, you are pretty sure what<br> is the material they made speakers of - a paper.<br> Entire system sounds just like a paper.<br> No depth, low bass, distorted mids and very,<br> very annoying, attenuated range of 200-500Hz.<br> High frequencies sound pretty good due to<br> tweeters mounted in the corners of front<br> doors, but i feel that high fill could be a bit<br> better. Rear is also lacking highs.<br> But what you can expect of cheap speakers<br> with paper membranes and baskets made of a...<br> plastic! In fact speaker basket is a part of<br> element that mounts entire speaker to the door<br> assembly. This looks very custom and it is not<br> to be easily replaced. So i've bought a set<br> of four identical speakers (Helix; this is a<br> brand of german car-audio maker Brax; perhaps<br> not very old and famous but they were awarded<br> several times on various car audio contests).<br> Speakers were 16.5cm (6 and 1/2 inch), rated<br> 80W peak power - as far as i remember. There<br> were also tweeters and crossovers supplied.<br> I've removed factory 'speakers', and, of course,<br> destroying them, i've made sort of 'adapters'<br> off them, screwing on the new speakers on<br> the plastic elements. I've also mounted<br> x-overs somewhere inside doors, replaced front<br> tweeters with supplied ones. I;ve also cut<br> appoporiate holes in the rear door (WATCH THE<br> SIDE AIRBAG, my car has rear ones), putting<br> two additional tweeters there. Hint: to remove<br> door trim, take a closer look to the inside<br> door handle; it splits into two parts, if<br> you remove outer one, there will be two torx<br> nuts,another one is below the 'SRS AIRBAG' plastic<br> cover, you can pry it off with a screwdriver<br> but do it gently. Rest of the door trim holds<br> on bare clips, just use some moderate force<br> to pull it off.<br> <br> System doesn't sound cheap anymore, thanks to<br> far better speakers. Of course, you cannot<br> get very low bass from 6 1/2 inch spkr, so<br> my next step will be to install a sub<br> somewhere in the rear cargo space. As<br> you cannot connect amp to the factory<br> system (the only way to interface with it<br> is to connect speaker outputs to the<br> amp input, which is not the best way) i<br> decided to modify my COMAND unit, friend<br> of mine installed 4 cinch pre-outs into<br> my head unit. I already have approporiate<br> amp so i'm going to use it to drive<br> 2 rear & 2 front channels, and use<br> separate amp to power the sub. We will<br> see how it does. email me with any<br> q's, i think that i'm somewhat deep into<br> internals of new C right now, and still<br> learning.<br>
