I hate seeing where people have chopped holes for speakers in kick panels, rear shelf etc.




My radio console was a mess - It was black vinyl with an old cassette player. A couple of months ago, it took ages to put in a black stereo - behind the speaker cloth are two small speakers for L and R. It sounds nice, but not very loud. Today I made a couple of boxes trimmed in interior red - to fit under front seats. Still small speakers, just midrange and bass but should improve the sound.

 

Michael, Congratulations. That's a most impressive interior in your car.
To be fair, there are convenient ready made holes in the steel behind the kick panels and rear shelf. I can't judge as my Mk2's never had any audio.

 

I just refurbished the interior on my S-type and made 2 sets of kick-panels and rear parcel-shelf. As said before, car already has speaker-holes in metal-panels). One set prepared for speakers and one without holes to the future owners choise (I will mount speakers and a new retro DAB/BT-radio)

 

Factory original. Those are not wires. They are lighting reflections.

 

Ah - I didnt know rear speakers were on option.They look nice

 

That's interesting. Mine has been retrimmed over the holes in the kick panel (in fact, there is a clapped out speaker mounted on the body behind the previous holes). I have also seen pics of speakers mounted in the inner console panela. Glen Ruck posted a pic of very discrete parcel shelf speaker grills - I didn't know they came with that!! I just don't want to hack out trim holes and install awful looking Pioneer etc speakers. I will see how mine sound once the car comes back from Jaguar Hospital!

 

I commend you on being able to fabricate those speaker boxes under your seats, but that is not a good way to get quality sound. Speakers need to be pointed to your ears. The only speakers that are not directional would be low frequencies via a subwoofer only getting low HZ frequencies. It is not hard to put quality speakers into the Jaguar and not see any of them at all. All you need to do is use a quality speaker cloth or carpets made for speakers like the Porsche carpets for audio to cover any speakers. I did that on my rear deck which has a pair of Focal separates (6 1/2 woofer and separate tweeter). I used the same Focal separates and mounted them in custom speaker boxes that look like they came with the car by using Porsche speaker carpet to match the car's carpets. I went further with two 7" long throw JL Audio sub woofers in a hidden enclosure in the passenger footwell.

 

I like the use of the special carpet, really neat.

 

Yes the Porsche speaker carpet is great and comes in so many colors; you can see that they hide the speakers yet blend in so well to the rest of the interior that if you did not know about the speakers you would not even know they were there. A really good audio system should have great speaker placement so the music is recreated naturally, have the ability to recreate the full spectrum of the frequencies cleanly, and ideally hidden so that virtually everything is not seen. I still listen occasionally to the radio so I still have that radio/head unit but today with a digital audio player (DAP) you could even eliminate the factory radio/head unit and just replace that section with nice wood to match the Jaguar wood as today's DAP units will send the signal wirelessly to your amplifiers or you can just have a wired USB that plugs it into the system which is easy to tuck away and hide.