987.2 ASK (Sound Package Plus) Wiring and amp upgrade how-to

This will be my first post here after lurking on here and ******** for quite some time. I'm hoping this will become a sticky for those who have the same questions I did pertaining to the 987.2 (specifically as I believe the 987.1 is different but I'm not at all sure) ASK stereo and amp wiring and how to get better sound out of it. I have been searching for months for a definitive answer to what speakers are run off the ASK amp, what wires go to what, and how can I upgrade the factory amp easily. I'm making this point to answer these questions for others as well as point out my success with some relatively simple upgrades. First I bought a subscription for Alldata to get the factory wiring diagrams (which I will upload here for you) so I could figure out finally what wires go to what and if indeed only the 8" woofers are fed by the ASK amp or if all 7 front speakers are fed by it. These diagrams are a little confusing at first as they show the wiring for every possible combination of options from totally base model 4 speaker with no nav all the way up to nav with Bose . Keep that in mind as you read these. To finally answer the question that I found so many conflicting guesses about, on the 987.2 ALL speakers are powered solely by the ASK amp (or bose if you have that setup). This includes the rears as well if you have those. There are factory crossovers for the bridge between mids and tweeters, and the factory ASK mid range has a little capacitor built into the side of it that is 100 microfarad which effectively is a low order high pass that starts to cut at 400 hz with this 4 ohm speaker. The amp controls the low pass crossover for the 8" woofers and the little 4" center dash speaker is a full range. The rears if equipped are full range as well. Now to the fun part, I wanted more bass and clarity as everyone wants from their ASK system but I don't like making permanent modifications (like cutting the door's sheet metal to put in 8" subs as some have) that make it impossible to revert to stock at some point. I've heard that both the ASK amp and head unit are sub par at best as well as all the ASK speakers. My input on this is that the factory speakers actually aren't too bad as well as the head unit but the ASK amp is most definitely lacking power. I had a blown mid speaker on the passenger side that had been crackling and driving me nuts for a while, and when my drivers inner door handle broke prompting me to pull the door panel anyway it was time to upgrade and replace. My parts list is small and very cheap. Mids were upgraded to CDT HD-4s that I had shipped from their warehouse in Cali for only $40 as they were "demo" models. They came in the factory box with all the factory covers and shipping protection still in place and look brand new. Amp is a Power Acoustik CA4-1600D which is a 4 channel, Class D amp that is very small in physical size. Cost was $90 I chose this amp as it had the highest RMS output at 130wx4 at 4 ohm @14.4V and also the lowest THD (total harmonic distortion) rated at .05% which isn't the best but is respectable. It would also surely fit in the stock location under the pass seat. I wanted the more efficient and cooler running class D as well vs the factory ASK being a typical class AB. When the amp got here initial impression was holy crap this thing is tiny, you'll see in the pics below that it is even smaller than the factory ASK amp by a good amount but the funny thing is it weighs more than the factory AMP and its heatsinks by about 50%. The mids were not a direct bolt in and required some very small modification to the plastic around where the factory mid mounts and to the bolt holes on the speakers. But they fit good despite having 10x the magnet hanging off the back. I apologize I didn't get pictures on them mounted up in the door panel. Next after the door panels were back on was to splice into the factory wiring with the new amp. I chose to cut the factory terminals off at the ASK amp and solder the new wiring directly to it. The Power Acoustik amp comes with convenient wiring terminals that plug into the amp making for easier removal and installation in the future if need be. So for those of you who have trouble reading the wiring diagrams here is the wires and what they do. Terminal A which is the bigger one houses the speaker outputs as well as the power and ground wires. Red - 12v Positive (30 amp fused factory which just so happens to the be the fuse rating on this new amp so I didn't need to run a new power wire making install much easier) Brown - 12v Negative White with red stripe - Left woofer + White with brown stripe - Left woofer - White - Left mid/tweeter + White with black stripe - Left mid/tweeter - Blue - Center + Blue with black stripe - Center - Grey with red stripe - Right woofer + Grey with brown stripe - Right woofer - Grey - Right mid/tweeter + Grey with black stripe - Right mid/tweeter - If you don't have factory rear speakers then this will be all that is in terminal A. If you have factory rears there will be outputs for the rears as well here (or they can be added if you want to add rears to the factory ASK amp setup). Plug B or the smaller one with smaller wires holds the inputs that come from the PCM and the 12v switched wire. Wiring colors are similar here. Grey - Front right + Grey with black stripe - Front right - White - Front left + White with black stripe - Front left - Violet - Rear right + Violet with black stripe - Rear right - Green - Rear left + Green with black stripe - Rear left - White with red stripe - 12v switched (remote wire) My installation here just required a ton of solder and shrink wraps to mate the factory wires to the new amps terminals and leads. I used the front channels for the mids and tweeters and the rear for the woofers as I don't plan to add any rear speakers (I don't think it needs it at this point) and the center is left unused (don't need it anyway, music isn't recorded in 5 channels anyway) A side note about the factory inputs here. Everyone labels these as a "high level" input similar to what you would use if your car has no RCA (low level) outputs and you want to add an amp which is speaker level voltage generally from an existing amplifier. Well most high level inputs reside somewhere between 6-12v whereas a good low level will max out at about 5v with typical being 1-2v. The output from the factory PCM that I fed into my new amp was at about 4v at 80% volume so roughly 5v peak. I would call this a low level input. The amp I used can use either and the gain dial is meant to go from 1v all the way to 12v. When setting my gain the optimal setting I found was right at about 5v as well. To recap the wires from terminal B (smaller one) go to your new amps inputs and the wires in terminal A (larger one) go to the new amps outputs and power terminals. Pretty straight forward. This particular amp could use the input signal as a remote as well so I didn't need to use the actual remote wire. I mounted the amp to the floor with adhesive backed 15 lb velcro strips for 2 reasons. 1 being I didn't want to drill holes in the floor, and 2 being that this way the amp has some cushions to ride on to keep damaging vibrations out as well as give it some air flow underneath for cooling. Which as it turns out it doesn't need as this thing barely gets lukewarm even after 20 minutes of hard pounding. One of the benefits of a Class D amp. My first impression is wow, the factory woofers actually hit pretty darn good and low even, and the new CDT mids mesh well with the factory tweets are are loud as balls with this new amp. I had to turn the fader 2 to the rear (remember I had them on the front channels and the woofers on rears) to get them dialed in properly. Do NOT use the gain dial on the amp to achieve this, that is not a volume knob and should be set to what the peak voltage level of the inputs are to avoid heavy distortion. The CDT mids are crisp and clear as can be, much better than stock, stock tweeters do perfectly fine, and this new amp definitely has much more power than the factory. It's very impressive for its size. I have the low pass set at somewhere around 150hz for the woofers compared to the factory at about 400 and the high pass for the new mids at the same. This setup will require new mids as the factory mids will not go this low! I could have gone lower to 80hz which is the typical *best* point for subwoofers to crossover but it actually sounded better up a little bit, plus these factory 8s are more of a woofer than subwoofer. The factory woofers with the new amp and new crossover settings now hit MUCH harder than before and cleaner and with no extra bass settings needed from the head unit. ( I had to have bass at 3 with the factory setup to get decent response). My frequency test shows they hit very hard all the way down to 35 hz where they start to lose a little steam. They actually still hit 20hz but not quite as hard. I was surprised at the output and this is plenty low enough for almost all music aside from some very bass heavy rap or EDM music that likes to hit ultra low. Sorry for the novel but I wanted to be in depth to answer as many questions here as I could. If I missed anything or you need clarification just ask me.

Here is the amp all wired up and installed.

Thanks for taking to time to document this. My '09 has SPP and will get some sort of HiFi upgrade at some point so I will subscribe to your thread. Eddie

Oh I can't believe I forgot to add this my car is a 2010 Boxster base with the SPP package for reference. This applies to all 987.2 (2009-2012) cayman and boxster regardless of model so long as it has the SPP package. EDIT: The bose package is fed by an optical cable instead of analog input and also has a diagnostic line connected to it as well as a microphone input to adjust the acoustics based on external noise and whether or not the top is up or down. It also has a dedicated subwoofer output as well so this will NOT apply to the bose package, although the speaker sizes stay the same.

Hi burrsg101, If I wanted to replace the PCM 3.0 in my 2011 Boxster with SPP and just keep the original ASK amp and speakers would you feed the amp with pre-amp outputs on the new receiver or speaker level? Thanks

I would say that really depends on what head unit you are going to put in. Most head units I've come in contact with will generally only put out 1-2 volts peak from the RCA low level outputs which would leave you with a very quiet output. If the head unit you're going to use is closer to 4-5v for its low level then I would say to buy some adapters to run those RCA into bare wires that can mesh with the stock wiring. Otherwise if it's like most head units I would wire it into the speaker level high outputs.

I'll join the others and thank you for this detailed post. You've answered one of my key questions which was the output level from the PCM unit to the amp. I've been trying to figure out why the aftermarket wiring kits seem to take the speaker level output from the headunit and send it to the amp. I've had a constant background noise in the system since installing my kenwood headunit to the stock amp even when turning the gain almost all the way down on the headunit. I'm going to go back and take the line level outputs from the headunit and see if that takes care of the problem.

Does anyone have a good guide on how to access the ASK amp under the passenger seat? Do I need to fully remove the seat or is there a way to do it with seat in place? I've been searching the internet high/low and can't find a good answer to this other than some reference to a latch on the side of the seat(?)

(first thank you a million OP.. after days of researching how to replace my (going) bad ASK amp and going to shops and learning about all these aspects, your story really brought everything together) My goal is to keep the PCM 3.0 and OEM speakers (for now), but replace the ASK amp (which is in my frunk, not under my seat.. maybe because of a lack of cdchanger?) My questions are mainly about the crossovers using OEM speakers/aftermarket amp... Now back to the questions. "There are factory crossovers for the bridge between mids and tweeters, and the factory ASK mid range has a little capacitor built into the side of it that is 100 microfarad which effectively is a low order high pass that starts to cut at 400 hz with this 4 ohm speaker. The amp controls the low pass crossover for the 8" woofers and the little 4" center dash speaker is a full range. The rears if equipped are full range as well." 1) factory crossovers built into the ASK amp? or can these be used with the aftermarket amp? 2) the factory mid range capacitor... do i need to mimic this if I want to use OEM mid-range speakers with the aftermarket amp (vs. the aftermarket mids you used) 3) using the OEM woofers/tweeters, what high/low pass freqs. would you recommend? just a rough estimate is fine, i will fine tune and play with it Thanks all!

I have to second this question. @burrsg101 how easy was it to redirect the wires into the frunk? My new (planned) setup for my 2011 987.2 SPP is: 2 - Power Acoustik 1200W 4-channel amps (I'm adding an under the passenger seat thin sub, and also DIY custom added two 3.5 inch speakers in each of the rear head cubbies (4 total) on the back) so I'll be using all 8 channels probably. 2 - 3-way crossovers to help me divide out the above channels: -Amp 1 (in FRUNK): 1) Left Front Tweeter (Dash) [ + maybe parallel w Center Tweeter (Dash) ] Xover with Left Door Mid-range 2) Right Front Tweeter (Dash) Xover with Right Door Mid-range 3) Left Door Woofer 4) Right Door Woofer -Amp 2 (also in FRUNK or under seat?): 1) Underseat Sub 2) Left Rear Speakers (2 in parallel) Xover for mid/high 3) Right Rear Speakers (2 in parallel) Xover for mid/high 4) MAYBE: Center Tweeter (Dash) Xover for high Pictures to come!!!

Old post, but most seem to be even older when Googling on the ASK amp Porsche P/N 987.645.331.01, which is what we have in our 2008 Boxster S RS60 (987.1). I'm curious..... Did Porsche relocate the AMP from the front trunk (aka FRUNK) to under the passenger seat in 2009? Are you positive the ASK amp powers ALL 7 speakers? I ask because our amp has apparently failed, yet the tweeters still output sound like a bad sixties AM radio. Again, this may be a 987.1 to 987.2 design change. Thanks, Pete

So, the rear speakers input channel are not used by the amp if i don’t have rear speakers? The wiring is made but useless? I want to connect an amp sibwoofer with a high level input

GLAD TO HAVE FOUND YOUR POST - Last year I purchased a 2010 Boxster Base with the CDR30 Head Unit & Factory Option 490, the Sound Package Plus. I discovered Porsche originally offered a Rear Speaker Kit (PN: PNA 986 KIT) that is not longer available however I found a clone offered by Euro Motorspeed that mirrors the original Porsche Kit, same mounting, same (2) Pioneer 3.5" 60W max 2-way speakers for each open storage bin, etc. The rub though, the kit (which I purchased) is made specifically for a 986 /987 and not the 987v2. Although the Rear Deck Storage Compartment configuration has not changed, I find myself getting muddled-down with conflicting wiring information. As you alluded to in your post, lots of missing information regarding the 987v2 Audio Set-up, i.e., Is there an Amplifier, What are the outputs to the (7) Sound Package Plus Speakers and Where's the AMP Located. The last correspondence I received from Euro Motorspeed; "Splice in Kit Speaker Wires to the Wiring Harness at the rear of the CDR30, L/R +- Lines". In reading your very detailed post, that seems to be in conflict, did you have a CDR30. I've also focused on your recommendation about adding the Power Acoustik CA4-1600D, I thought perhaps that would eliminate the need to splice-in to the existing L/R outputs coming off the ASK AMP (Per your post). So I started researching that Class D Amp and see it's no longer available, really liked all the things you cited as to why you selected it, especially the size, limited heat and price. I am lacking knowledge in this space so I always defer to someone like you who has the knowledge foundation. In closing, perhaps you can share some technical tips. I do believe if I did nothing with adding a new AMP, at a minimum I would splice the new speaker lines with the ASK AMP Terminal "A" Output Lines. White - Left mid/tweeter + White with black stripe - Left mid/tweeter - Grey - Right mid/tweeter + Grey with black stripe - Right mid/tweeter - I'd like to pursue adding a Class D Amp with similar specs you cited, then I would update the door speakers at some future point, one step at a time. Would you recommend the Power Acoustik RZ4-1220D 1200W Class D 4 Channel Amplifier. If I went that route could you recommend how the shelf speakers would be incorporated. Lastly, I suspect you pulled the battery cable when you did the amp changeout. I'll look for the radio's security code in the morning, new territory for me. Again, thank you for your detailed post..............

Glad I found this post, this is the only thing I've seen that seems to have the correct details for the 987.2 I used it to help replace the door mids and dash tweeters on my 987.2 One correction: the high pass on the dash tweeters isn't in the wiring, there's a 5.4uF cap directly attached to each tweeter (~7kHz high pass). So if you replace the tweeters you should make sure they either have a high pass filter or add one.

The latest AllDataDIY for the 987.2 series has much improved diagrams for the ASK amplifier: Then as to where the speakers all are connected: NOTE: If you have a Boxster - the wiring and speakers called "Left-Rear Wide Band" and "Right Rear Wide Band" don't exist. They're for the Cayman. If you buy the Suncoast kit to add the extra speakers behind the headrests in the storage compartment - it comes with wiring that you can add to the connector on the ASK amp and power them from there. I decided I wanted control over the output of those speakers and I added an additonal amp that is fed off the left and right audio line (RCA) level outputs on the replacement headunit I installed. And I left the ASK amp in place and connected to all the speakers. This works quite well - I'm able to balance the system out and make it useable with the top down up to speeds of about 50MPH, and combined with these speakers the factory speakers, if they're in good condition (the surrounds on the low range door speakers rot out) it can provide surprisingly good sound, especially considering the size of the cockpit. As far as I could tell - most of the upgrade amp installations basically abandon the dash speakers completely and rely on 2-way (mid/tweeter combo) speakers in the mid-range position on the doors to make up for it. Unfortunately - that will not make for a great stereo "image" - the tweeters are too directly aimed out into the car at mid-hip height. The two tweeters in the dash, and the center full range speaker do make a difference in "imaging" (placing the stereo image in space also called "spacial imaging"). YMMV - if you're in NJ area and want to hear how it sounds - ping me. We can probably make that happen. The big surprise to me was the quality of the bass frequencies from the door speakers once I replaced the ones with blown surrounds with ones with good surrounds. They really are quite good. I have a pair of replacement surrounds to rebuild the old low frequency speakers when I get bored enough in the winter. It's a messy but fairly simple job, a perfect distraction on a cold winter day. The new surrounds are made of a very thin rubber membrane instead of the foam that rots eventually. If I rebuild them they should last about forever.

Seeing that the Boxster and Cayman ASK Amps are different (different PN and connector keying) I question whether simply adding wires to the loom connector will provide the requisite signals to the Suncoast speakers. Does anybody have any firsthand experience with this installation?

I should elaborate. My interpretation of Don's post was to connect the supplied wires to pins 6, 7 & 16, 17 of the Boxster ASK amp. If that was his intention then my incredulity stands.

so optical cable is only on the bose package correct ..

so the bose package is the only one needing the optical cable correct ... got a quote and they are telling me i need it and i said i do not but i'm not right cable is 690$aus

If you have ASK/SPP - no fiber. None. Anywhere. .1 or .2.

Well, to be clear, PCM 3.0 on a 987.2 (without Bose ) has fiber to the PCM head unit. I know because I messed up reconnecting it when I installed the Mr12Volt system and things didn't work right. But there's no fiber from the PCM to the ASK amp or speakers. If you're just replacing the amp and speakers you shouldn't need to do anything with the fiber, but if you're replacing the head unit then I don't know because that is connected to the MOST fiber loop.

Anyone happen to have a part number or link for a wiring connector to plug directly in to the factory 987.2 SPP amp loom. Hoping to build an adapter to go from Factory Loom>Opposite gender Modular Connector>Solder/heat shrink connection>Aftermarket Amp Modular Loom Basically want to build loom to allow a aftermarket amp to be installed and revert back to stock without cutting wires.

Wonderful idea. Please DO document the work, including where to find the bits and pieces. Thanks! BTW - Porsche does sell "repair connectors" - which are pig-tailed versions of connectors that might get damaged. Unfortunately - that wouldn't be the end you need, it would be the part plugging into the amp. IMHO, best bet - open the amp up and look for identifying marks, take measurements, try AI to find the connector, it's the sort of thing AI is sometimes very good at (since it basically consumes entire parts diagrams/lists..)