my fiance wants to upgrade from that POS system, whatd you put in place of the 8" subs...did you have to make a custom mounting bracket?

I used the kicker ssmb8. It's actually a midbass driver, but works fine. I had to drill a custom hole pattern out of the mounting frame on the speaker to get it in the door and to mount factory grill back on (for stock appearance). I would rather risk buggering up a speaker I can easily replace than screwing up a door panel that will set me back 5 bills to replace.

Finding an 8" driver shallow enough used to be near impossible, but there are quite a few available now.

Mounting depth is something like 3-5/8", I think. The diameter of the magnet on the back of the driver is important too. The enclosure in the door gets pretty narrow towards the back. I think I might still have some notes I took doing my research and putting it all together. I'll look sometime if you're interested.

The big problem is driving the speaker. the factory door sub is a dual voice coil sub. Each coil has something like 1.6 ohms resistance. the amp for the speaker is a dual channel amp. it's actually made from 2 dual channel amplifier IC's, but each circuit is bridged internally from the factory, so you can't bridge the factory two channel OUTPUT from the amp to pump all of its power into a single voice coil driver. It just doesn't work.

Good luck finding a 2 ohm, dual voice coil, 8" inch shallow sub or midbass driver.

Running a 4 ohm single voice coil sub off of one channel of the factory amp will yield you maybe 14-18 watts. Not very impressive AT ALL.

My solution - I "retasked" 2 of the 4 single channel amps from the shaker 1000 from my trunk to under the dash. That took some figuring to make it all work and fit. those amps are rated by ford at 125 watts each into 4 ohms, my best guess is maybe 40-50 watts of real power. The kickers hit plenty hard though. Side mirrors are useless when cranked. just a blur. The JL Audio amp and subs now in the trunk make for a very well rounded system that still looks bone stock, except fot the nav unit anyway.

gotchaaa....ya man if you can find the notes on the maximum basket size i can use thatd be awesome

as far as the stock amps go, i was gonna do away with the entire ford system and use aftermarket multi channel amps.

im upgrading my speakers too, but right now im still in the middle of researching....i have 9" subs on my doors and the only component speaker set that comes close to that is Dynaudio with 8" woofers...but that 6 speaker set goes for like $7-800

http://cgi.ebay.com/DYNAUDIO-SYSTEM360- ... 18Q2el1247

...thats jus for the front...the rear set is like 500. so even tho you get what you pay for, im tryin to find something like that a little cheaper otherwise it will be a while before my speakers get ripped out. and thats not counting the 2 w6's, amps, and custom enclosures. any suggestions?

Is this for the mustang? Or are you talking about your car? RX-8 was it?

What year? What all have you done? How far are you willing to go?

im talkin about the rx8. its an 05 with the bose system. idk how far ill go TBH.. and all i have done is the f700bt