300TE speaker upgrade – Part 1 – rears

I wasn’t very happy with the sound from my 300TE.   The front passengers speaker rattled badly and the sound wasn’t the best.    As I’m taking the car on a road trip in January, I wanted better sound.    I’ve already put the Becker 1402 back in, so all I needed was some decent speakers.

In researching what was possible, options were not extensive for the S124.   The front speakers are both an unusual size (12cm) and an unusual mounting system.   The rears are are a more common 10cm size, but mounted in the door handles.   I personally don’t think much of the speaker setup in the car.   There is room for some larger speakers in the front, and the door handle speakers are just silly.   It would have been possible to come up with a much better way to mount door speakers in a much larger size.  Certainly in 1990, the W126 in some markets (Not Australia) already had much better door mounted speakers.

Given these idiosyncrasies, I there were not a lot of options for the car.   I found a German car audio store that was selling a kit for the S124 that included the four speakers and adaptors for the Becker plugs.   I bought this, and also the correct speakers for my 560SEC to combine shipping.  These were the Crunch speakers pictured above.

I started from the rear.   The rear speaker grilles are very fragile, and its likely ham fisted speaker installers have damaged them over the years.   There is a screw on the underside, and then the grille lifts up.   Unfortunately some owners have put screws in the top which is highly unsightly.

My car wasn’t that bad, but the clips on the top of the drivers side rear were broken off, so some kind of glue was holding them in.   Removal of the cover revealed a decent looking Alpine speaker.   I prefer to have all four speakers in a car the same make and model family, so I still changed them.

The new Crunch speakers went in quite easily.   I didn’t need to use the adaptors, as the Alpines had normal speaker plugs.    It was fairly trivial to plug them in and put the grilles back on.   The first part of my 300TE speaker upgrade only took about 30 minutes to do.     I thought I had photographed the new speakers in place, but looks like I didn’t.

At this stage, its hard to determine the impact as the rears are less important than the fronts.