This might be long. Let me apologize in advance...

Curious if anybody out there in empeg land has installed their empeg in a mid-nineties VW Golf or Jetta.
I have a 1995 Golf and a co-worker of mine has a 1997 Jetta. Both had basic stock sound systems from the factory.
We both now have Mk2 empegs, the same amps (Kenwood KAC748's), the same rear speakers (Cerwin Vega HED 1652E's), slightly different front speakers (I have Rockford Fosgates, his are Polks), and the same factory tweeters.

Thats the background.

The problem is in my car it sounds like all the bass is being stripped out of the music. I get pretty much only highs, and a little bit of midtones.
Really bad sound quality.
Any monkeying with the EQ doesnt seem to help. If I take my same empeg, and put it in his Jetta, it sounds great. And thats with the EQ's at a flat setting. In my car with a flat setting the quality is verging on unacceptable.
I'm wondering if the 1995 vintage volkswagens maybe had some kind of filter, or something weird in the wiring for the stock sound system that I should bypass. (we recycled some of the speaker wire runs)
In both installs we used the same exact wiring technique. Heres the info on that.
So I'm at a total loss.

We spent about an hour last night going back and forth between the two cars, comparing different settings, and the verdict was that for some reason my car sounds like total shite.
I've searched around the web for potential solutions but came up with nothing.
We've checked and double checked the polarity of our hookups and our amp gain settings are identical.
If I set the fader all the way to the front, I get zero bass.
When I set the fader all the way to the rear, I get a little bass but still not what I was getting with the stock system. And I think thats mostly because their just bassier speakers by nature. (and the rear speakers are the only ones in the system that are direct wired to the amp). Again mostly highs.
Could it be something with the amp? Too much voltage, not enough voltage? Does that have nothing whatsoever to do with this, and I'm only exposing my ignorance.

Anybody else have any other ideas of something to look for, or something from their own install?
If youre still with me, congratulations and thanks for listening.

Z~