All,

Over lunch today I took my Miata MX5 and my Empeg player down to Street Sounds Plus, a local custom car stereo place near work here in Thousand Oaks, California.

In general the guys thought the Empeg was a cool toy. Not surprisingly, the first they've seen.

Anyway, it's Friday now, they're gonna think on it and I'll go talk with them on Monday, and I thought I'd collect some advice here.

The Miata is a two-door, two-seat convertible. Not a quailty audio experience and, further, not much room for toys. My existing audio is stock OEM tape player with OEM speakers (I've been waiting for an mp3 car player). Existing speakers are a 4-inch in each door next to your ankles and two small (I'm guessing, 2-inch by 3-inch) left and right speakers in each headrest.

My plan is to replace the OEM head unit with the Empeg. I'm not looking to play music for the car in the next lane. I just want to get some reasonable sounds out of my Empeg player.

After talking a bit these stereo guys, Street Sounds Plus, are probably going to suggest driving the Empeg into a Crossfire CFA404S Amplifier ($300 US installed) tucked into my trunk and upgrading the door speakers with Focal Ligne Zephir 130E2's ($275 US installed). I'm a bit skeptical about the placement in my tiny car of the tweeters that come with those speakers.

http://www.crossfirecaraudio.com
http://www.focal.tm.fr
http://www.clearwateraudio.com/

They were a little baffled about what to do with the headrest speakers. Clearwater makes a Miata speaker upgrade, I may just grab that and be done with it.

Do the components seem reasonable? They had better and worse but these seemed middle of the road.

Am I going to regret skipping the bass? The sundry bass solutions on http://www.miata.net generally leave something to be desired.

Thanks for any thoughts. =)

yours, Dean