Re: Bose Audio and car stereo stuff

["Todd Paciorek" <blood@mindspring.com>]

>Car audio people please correct any mistakes I make.
>
>That said, the Bose stuff is all running at 3 ohms, so there really
>is no elegant way to make the stuff work. I've seen adapters so that
>you can use outboard amps, but that requires speaker replacement.
>I think you have to, at the very least, trash the amps and speakers
>and you'll have to use some adapters that will introduce noise into
>the system and generally reduce the sound quality. Otherwise, to do
>it right, you trash the whole system and start from scratch.

Actually, the resistance of the speaker is not as much of a concern as the
signal going to the rear amp.

In my experience with my '92 S4, I had a similar setup to the original
poster's 200. There is a single amplifier for both rear speakers. That
amplifier can be replaced by an aftermarket unit, but there will be
problems.

First - Bose uses some pretty heavy equalization to get their sound.
Sometimes that is in the head unit, sometimes in the amplifier. I don't know
which it is in the rears, but I hooked up an aftermarket head unit to the
factory Bose system in my S4 and it was terrible - the head unit had an eq
curve for the fronts that took out a large amount of midrange, so I was
running the Bose amps and speakers, but the sound was terrible. I suspect
you'll have something similar with just replacing the rear amp.

Second - On replacing the head unit - there is one major adaptor company
making an adaptor t fit the Audi Bose system - Sound gate. They are probably
the biggest in the field. Unfortunately, after many hours of troubleshooting
my car, we (the head engineer and I) came to the conclusion that sometime in
the production run Audi changed Bose systems. Either from #1 one that uses a
control power to the amp along with the signal to #2 one that uses just a
signal, or the other way around. (I know that sentence is confusing... they
changed from #1 to #2 or from #2 to #2 we didn't know which came first.) I
don't know which was produced first.

So, the upshot was that I did successfully change the head unit, but the
sound was terrible.

Bottom line - Either replace the Bose parts with like parts or bag the whole
thing and use good parts. I opted for the latter and have had an absolutely
fabulous sounding ride since then. It's a lot of work, since you have to
rewire the whole car, but the rewards are great.

I'll be of more help if I can.

Todd
'92 S4 (Blaupunkt, ESX, Diamond Audio)
'92 FM2 (Kenwood, Infinity Kappa)