My Bavsound package arrived yesterday, and since it is a holiday weekend with great weather in NOLA (70's today) I decided to install my stage 1 upgrade.
It took 4 hours yesterday to do the door speakers and 1 hour today to do the front center and two rear deck areas. I wanted to share my thoughts and some pics.
Installation notes: The bavsound install video is fairly comprehensive. One glaring omission: how annoying removing and reinstalling tweeters is in the rear doors with sunshades.
See the first pic below. The sunshade is not easily removable, so I didn't remove it. It's a pain in the ass.
The bracket needs the tweeter to be pushed in a specific way -- it took a while to figure that out.
Also one of the two brackets made it quite hard to remove the tweeter -- I broke one of the HK tweeters removing it.
Aside from that, again, the videos demonstrate things well. Removing the center channel grille is EZPZ.
Each door panel removal / speaker replacement/ panel reinstall took about an hour (thus 4 hours for doors as noted above).
I installed some speakers in my E46 M3 and my own amp; this was much easier. I am a fan of the bavsound toolkit, although it did duplicate some of my other tools.
I don't think this install is hard but you have to be comfortable with prying BMW plastic.
Sound notes: I am quite pleased with the $800/5 hour upgrade. Much richer midbass. No annoying piano resonance issues.
More accurate highs without the harshness of the HK. Completely worth it for anyone who wants more than the HK, but doesn't want to cut or splice.
You can play much louder without distortion or other annoying sound artifacts. Can't recommend it enough.
Pics: first is that annoying tweeter bracket. Others are just random shots of the install.
Center channel:
Rears:
