I highly recommend you put that back on; that's a water shield. Else next time it rains you'll find water dripping into the interior.

what are you expecting a new head unit to do? They have no more power than the factory one.

 

I went ahead and upgraded the head unit, and I would like to say that it did make a major difference. With my Shaker 500 I would turn it up, and my new speakers would get loud but not much low or mid coming from them.

After upgrading to a JVC-NT300 GPS unit, I will admit at first it sounded like garbage!! Waaaaay too much bass and a lot of crackling. I had to play with the built in equalizer for a few hours before I dialed it in. Now I get a good amount of bass, and the mids sound so much better. I feel like the shaker 500 was "tuned" for slow bumping rap music, rock sounded terrible. Rock sounds soooo good now in my car, I forgot how much I loved it.

 

well of course it did. There's no EQ and the pre-out voltage wasn't right for the subwoofer amps.

it wasn't tuned for anything specific, it was tuned to be neutral for most all kinds of music. When you changed the speakers you threw out that tuning. now that you swapped in a new head unit, you could tweak it into something you like.

 

I upgraded my Shaker 500 system in my 05 GT by replacing the headunit with a Kenwood DDX470 touchscreen. Then I added a 10" RE Audio SEX10D4 subwoofer running at 800 watts by a Hifonics BRX1100.1 Mono amp in a 1.1 cf^3 ported box. It sounds extremely well even with the stock door and rear deck speakers. However I believe the rear deck speakers are giving out so a new speaker upgrade is in order soon.

 

Gotta love those Hifonics amps. I've got a 1200.1 brutus and it's been rock solid for 5 years now. One day I'd like to get another 12", wire them both down to 1 ohm and really let it loose.

 

It's my first system and first amp and I have no complaints about it so far. I'm running a 10" at 800W rms at 2ohm and might actually exhange the RE I got for the next series up and get a 2ohm Sub this time and wire it down to 1ohm. The one I'm looking at is good for 1200 rms I believe.

 

Are you using the bass remote from the amp? I just wedged mine between the seat and tranny hump. There's so much difference in mp3s, cds and radio stations that being able to adjust the bass level without scrolling through a ton of menus on the hu is so much easier, and safer.

 

Thats exactly how I have mine. I put mine in the same spot. Did you set your gain properly on your amp and have the bass **** set in the middle when doing so?

 

I adjusted the gain to the loudest level I was comfortable with (~65%) with the remote set to "11".