Used Gene at Drive in Auto Sound (former fighter pilot who knows his stuff). Just under $2K invested. Great deal on install and shopped Ebay, etronics and sales extensively (wife aint happy I'm doing this.)

Alpine 5 channel amp just in front of reat cross brace - mat hides all wiring and it's perfectly matches the colors of a sheer silver Z. MB Quart RSC 216's up front and Boston Acoustic Fx6's for the rear fill. Pioneer XM and 12 disc changer controllers fill Nav cubby - fit nicely behind passenger seat and still leave room for stuff. Kenwood Excelon 10 inch sub with custom MDF enclosure and 3 cans of Blue Noise Killer throughout.

Factory Bose and XM are $1300 and dont sound nearly as good - plus my 12 disc changer holds double the music and I can have several cartridges that pop in and out. Guarantee my amp blows the Bose amp right out the window looks a whole lot wickeder IMHO.

K

 

I don't know why this POS attachment scheme will only let me add one photo at a time - dont have time for the rest

 

I'm with you on the idea of using the smaller "glove box" for the CD changer, but I wanted a 12 disc unit as my wife has the same one and we have extra cartridges for different music collections.

The 12 disc unit was too big for that spot. I mounted it off center in the bigger space behind the passenger so that I could still use some of the space for the owners manual, etc.

I wish the XM unit had a remote like the changer does. With 170 channels it would be nice to have, still by putting the larger XM unit on the bottom it's a pretty easy reach.

 

I heard the Delphi unit requires that you have a tape player to work in an auto. They are working on a regular FM modulated system, but to my knowlege it doesnt exist yet. I like the look of it better with the amber backlight, however, its too big to fit both the CD changer and the XM unit in the cubby space, so you'd have to have it outside the cubby and there really is no good place to put it. My goal was to have an install where everything looks totally stock with the Nav cubby closed so as to limit my risk of vandalism.

 

The stock head unit has 12 presets. Two of the 12 are used by the FM modulators. The first is at 89.1 and the other can be any other frequency that has no overlap. Still leaves you with 10. XM is so sweet that you will normally leave it on FM1 89.1 and allow it to fire up whenever you turn your radio on.

 

They both work great without any special treatment. What you will find with even one FM modulator is that if you want to listen to regular radio you should have the XM or CD changer powered off. Interestingly, they dont interfere with each other at all - you can have them both on and switch freely back and forth without any static.