About a month ago I picked up a used 2010 135i with 48k miles on it and have been getting to know the car, its features and capabilities ever since. Being my first BMW I have been both amazed and intrigued by how easy this car is to work on and how friendly it is to someone like me who loves to tinker and modify his car.
While I have tons of other ideas as to how I want to “tastefully” upgrade my little coupe, one of the first changes I need to make is to the oem base Stereo that was equipped in my car.
Being an old school car audio fanatic, a former installer and IASCA competitor I have no stranger to installing both simple and complicated audio systems. While I could go any number or routes to upgrade the system in the 135; some research has shown me there are more than a few capable pre-configured upgrades available, surprisingly inexpensive and built specifically for our cars.
While there are brands and lines designed for our cars that I am sure are better, I picked up a set of MB Quart QM200.3 BMW speakers to start with. I may or may not keep them and I may or may not use all of the drivers in the set, but they offer a “plug-in-play” that is unprecedented in car audio of yore.
Through out this thread I will go through the motions of installing the components in my car and as I go offer some wisdom and additional information that might be useful to others who are contemplating doing a similar install. While I know others have documented their work in the past, I hope that what follows will be easy enough for beginners to follow, and useful enough for pros to garner some information.
In the next few post I will high-light my steps as well as profile some additional information that I found through testing and research. One of the things I found lacking in my research were the actual specs of both the MB Quart and the oem speakers. I have some equipment that I will use to do some comparisons that hopefully will be useful.
...stay tuned.