What I learned improving my audio... Boxster with Bose

This is just a after action post about what I learned and what fits when attempting to improve the audio in my Boxster . 2005 Boxster base with Bose . I bought the car with the factory speakers and amp, but an aftermarket head unit. It sounded okay at low volume but broke up at medium/high volume. I sent the Bose factory amp out to be "rebuilt" without improvement. I decided to replace the speakers. After removing the door and dash speakers and searching through Crutchfield I found the following reasonably priced speakers fit. Door woofer - Focal ISU components system. The 8" woofers fit into the factory enclosures, but you have to cut out the back of them. The screw holes line right up. Door midrange - Focal ICU 100 two way speakers. These fit the factory screw locations and fit in the door, but I ended up not using them because I couldn't figure out how to feed the speaker wire to the door. Dash tweeter - Kicker KS 3/4" tweeter in the corners. They drop right in. I wrapped a little sound insulation around them. Dash center - Focal ISU 1 1/4" (I think) component speaker tweeters that come with the woofers. I put both tweeters in the center speaker hole and they just fit. Its a little weird, but I was trying to make it work with what I had. The factory center speaker is 2" or maybe 2 1/2" and I could not find a speaker that would fit. I tried powering all the speakers through the factory amp, but I had the same problem of the sound breaking up at medium/high volume. I ended up powering the woofers with the factory bose amp , but powering the dash and center tweeters directly off the 4 channels available from the head unit. It seemed a little unorthodox, but I decided to try it before buying a $$$$$ amp and doing a complete Bose -ectomy. This set up eliminating the medium/high volume break up and the sound was good enough for me. My car came with the expensive converters required to get the aftermarket head unit to talk to the Bose amp . If you are starting from 100% factory then I would not buy the converters and not try to keep the Bose amp . My set up sounds surprisingly good at lower speeds with the top down, but freeway speeds you can tell was song is playing but most of the detail is washed out. Its going to take a powerful amp If you want good sound quality on the freeway with the top down. I have the factory rear speaker enclosure, but I could never get sound out of it and you can get the seat a bit further back without it and I need every mm of legroom. You could build a really killer system with a second amp powering the additional three speakers back there, but I was just going for "good enough" without spending a fortune. Anyhow, I hope this is helpful to someone out there. Cheers, Scott

What are you going to do with the rear subwoofer shelf?

I removed the rear speakers shelf. Update- I ended up putting the Focal ICU 100 speakers in the door as I had no midrange. (I just poked holes in the rubber blocks in the door jams and ran speaker wire through them. A bit hacky, but it works.). I removed the center tweeters. i still run the factory amp to the woofers via the sub outputs on the stereo head, but the other speakers are running on the direct speaker outputs from the stereo head. I had to spend some time with the levels and crossovers in the stereo head, but it sounds pretty good now.