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I finally got around to installing these. Ordered from CarDomain for 109.95 , the free shipping to Canada was an unexpected bonus. Installation was a fairly simple job, nothing fancy like fiberglassing a new enclosure, but I'm happy with it so I thought I'd share.
Modena's post inspired me to do the same thing, i.e. flush mount the tweets instead burying them behind the stock Bose grill like MrWigggles and some others did. This lets me aim the tweeters using their swivel-mounts.
Removing the stock sail pods has been covered before. It snaps right off easily, but it takes a little fiddling to find the clip within the foamed connector, so fingernails come in handy (
After removing the driver, you can see all the plastic that needs to be removed to make room for the NX30 mounting cup:
The NX30 comes assembled with the tweeter sitting inside a mounting cup, a plastic ring screwed over top, and two metal brackets attached to the back of the cup (sorry no pic). Thanks to MrWigggles for pointing out that the ring screws off, it would have taken me forever to figure that out. I diassembled everything and discarded the black brackets.
Next I used some Dremel cut-off discs to open the Bose grill:
then remove some of the plastic 'cylinder' behind it:
Using the sand-paper drum attachment, the hole was enlarged (very gradually, I didn't want to take too much off and end up ordering a new pod from Mazda):
Eventually, the mounting cup just fits so that it is flush with the surface:
When the ring is screwed on, it covers up any imperfection from the cutting:
Using the ring to hold the cup in place, I used the appropriate plastic epoxy in the back:
While waiting for the epoxy to set, I took the Bose drivers and snipped the foamed wire (so that I could re-use the connector and avoid cutting the wire on the door) and snipped off the 22uF crossover caps.
I passed the NX30 speaker wires through one of the holes in mounting cup, then resoldered the capacitor in series with the negative wire. The other end of the cap and the positive wire were spliced onto green and red wires of the leftover connector respectively:
Some electrical tape partitions and hides the ugly solder job:
After re-attaching,
the excess wires were folded up into a foam tube:
and neatly folded into the trailing edge of the pod to stop the wires from rattling:
Then the pods snap back into place:
There's no clearance issues with the ring; here's another view:
They sound terrific! Nice and bright. I'm still playing with the firing angle, though.
Hope this helps convince others to buy them. Like bruce_van said, these should have come standard with the Bose system.
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Excellent job with the post and pictures. I also got the NX30 tweeters, but went the easy way and mounted them behind the pod.
One thing I've noticed since getting the tweeters is I don't have to crank the music to 20-22 in order to enjoy the music. I'm fairly happy with listening between 12-15 now.
The hiss is noticeable, but is only annoying if I'm sitting in car with the engine off, which happens rarely. In fact, there's been a shift in my choice of aural entertainment since I bought this car: in my old car the stereo was always on; however, with the 8 I am perfectly content taking in the symphony under the hood. This engine has such character, from the whirly burble at idle to the scream towards the redline, that I usually only turn the stereo on when cruising on the highway.
But I did just that last night for a few hours; it's nice to hear the highs in my music again. I used one of the old Boston Acoustic imaging CD mixes to help with aiming the tweets, and I'm pretty satisfied with them. Next is to hook up the Infinity Kappa Perfect I have sitting inside my 4080 box, then I'm pretty sure I'll be happy for a while.
I did exact same thing with the Focal K2 but changed the cap to match the 4 ohm output to the 6 ohm Focal. The sounds is good enough to live with until I get into the front doors to replace the woofer.
Linear Mode
