Ah.. I did a lot of horsing around in the back seat of my RX-8 today, and came to at least one conclusion:

Replacing the rear 6x9's or the 2" rear, is a heck of a lot of work, which includes pulling out the rear seats!

Step 1:

Lift up the front or the rear passenger seats. It takes a good bit of force, but will work

 

Then lift the seat up further, and slide the seat botom out:

 

Then unscre both of the 12mm bolts on the bottom of the seatback

 

and the 2nd one:

 

then lift the seat back out, and you're left with this:

 

then you need to remove the two push-pins in the decklid cover, and disconnect the 2" tweeter harness:

pushpin #1 (behind the seatbelt):

 

pushpin #2 (and tweeter harness to disconnect)

 

the seatback may have held on to one of the white plastic retainer clips, for the upper seat-back, remove it from the seatback metal bar, and put it back in the clip holder:

 

start by lifting up the decklid cover on the front, center of the car, corner of the decklid. It's easy to get the very corner part up, but then it takes a lot of force to get the push-clip from 4-5 inches further down to lift up. It'll be hard, but it should pop out. Rember, be careful, you don't want to mess up your car..

 

Then slide the center side of the decklid cover forward, and lift a little bit. The entire decklid cover, along with the 2" speaker should lift out. If the left hand side is still being held in the corner, rotate the cover further

 

Now, to remove the speaker, open the trunk, and remove the harness from the back of the speaker. Then you will probably need either an angled screwdriver (the offet type or some adaptor to get the angle) or a flexible screwdriver angle.

Once you've done that, pop in the replacement, and screw it back in, connect the harness and reassemble everything in the reverse order. The only tricky thing was getting the decklid back on properly.

slide the corner in first, and keep up the edge as high as you can, but get the lip of the decklid cover in under the side-panel cover, and push it up as close to flush as you can get it. (My picture shows it on top). You should be able to get everything back together and get the sound cranking from there!

Bring on the Speaker replacements!!!

OverLOAD

 

Great!

Do you have a shot showing how the 2" speaker mounts to the decklid cover? If you've already put the car back together w/o doing so, it's not important.

---jps

 

2" speaker mount:

The tweeter is screwed to the decklid mount like so:

For reference, the wire is going to the front of the decklid..

 

Holey Smokes!!! that is some work just to get to speakers.. whew.

Excellent pics OverLOAD!! Hat's off to ya..... Didnt realize it took that much. And all I want to do is find a rattle that's back there heeehhe.. while I'm at it, I might as well get new speakers too heheeh..

May I ask, what do you you have planned for yours?

Also, is that first pic of the seat bottom? Where the butt goes?

 

Thank you!

---jps

 

Yup, that first pic, is of the underside of the rear seat, with the two yellow retainer clips. They hold that seat down pretty well..

My plan for the 8, is to replace the 6x9's with Infinity Reference (Model REF96031) 3-way 6x9's.. I've got a pair nailed down for $169 MSRP..

Also planning on adding an Infinity Kappa 10.5t 1" CMMD tweeter to the front A pillar. (MSRP also 169)...

See attached pic.

They have the best frequency response, and should fill out the car properly with the missing high-range. The Bose 2" tweeters may go away, depending on weather or not they actually add anything to the system.

Also definately going to add a JBL 10" sub & Amp to the trunk. Then it'll be complete.

 

Hey thanks for the pictures, they will definitely speed up speaker changes. You deserve praise for helping out our community.

My paranoid mind says that Mazda and Bose deliberately conspired to make changing the stock sound system almost impossible. Removing the seats to change a speaker? And what about integrating the AC with the head unit? The Infinity G35, which was my second choice for a new car, also has the same AC/head unit configuration.

Car manufacturers know that the inability to change head units will probably not hurt their car sales, and so we held hostage to their choice of sound system.

Hmmm. I wonder if car stereo manufacturers could sue car manufacturers for deliberately obstructing aftermarket sound units? Kind of like the lawsuit against Microsoft for integrating their browser and other utilities, obstructing 3rd party manufacturers?

This pisses me off!

 

Very nice, thanks! Let us know how the new speakers sound!

--SL01

 

Everything's all about integration these days in the automotive world. I don't think the aftermarket manufacturers will have a case. They can just as easily make an aftermarket plug module for the environemental controls, is the argument for the big car makers.

At the end of the day, Bose, Pioneer, Visteon, and all the other players in the automotive world are stuck with using common components. Other than the use of a 2" (? what where they thinking!) tweeter, the system is pretty normal.

The low profile 9" subs in the door aren't very normal either, and I bet they'd be good candidates for replacing with a 6.5" mid-range speaker with a 10" sub in the trunk.

Then, the next step up the system is replacing that amp under the decklid. If you want to go to the trouble of replacing that, you mught as well rip the head unit out too, and hack the environmental controls off, and see what will work with the system.

But, I just want to bring the sound up to a good level of realism, I figure rear speaker replacement, front 1" tweeter addition, and 10" trunk sub will fill it out. Everything should be complete after I recieve the rest of the parts, in about 2 weeks..

OverLOAD

 

Don't forget, they used 2" tweeters for a lower crossover point, to better match with the 9" "mids". So that's something to keep in mind when you are only replacing one item at a time.

---jps

 

The tweeter's I'm putting in will have their own crossover, and I'm going to put them in to supplement the 2" speakers at first. They'll be pretty optimized... I'll keep you posted on the actual install.. I'm going to wait for all the parts before I start replacing speakers.. The photos from today were more like exploratory sugery..

OverLOAD

 

This is a really helpful bit of research!!!

I've never been a fan of oval speakers or setups with the smaller speakers suspended above the larger - they've always seemed to be a bit of a compromise.

Can't wait till I get my car tomorrow ... I'm going to really take my time upgrading to serious hifi.

 

Well, that wasn't a concern about hurting the tweeters, but having a hole in the frequency response because the smaller tweeter might not be able to cover the frequency range of the 2" tweeter.

---jps

 

Sweet, man seems like a lot of work!

I had an older car that was the same, grrr take the entire car apart for the speakers!

I had a cavalier that was smart though you just undid the screws from inside the trunk and VOILA, done!

 

So the Bose 6 by 9 is only a 1way??