1987 Porsche 911 Stereo Upgrade

To upgrade or not to upgrade?

This is often the dilemma of our clients that own a classic Porsche. You wait until the nice weather finally breaks before pulling your 1987 Porsche 911 out of the garage for a pleasure ride. The sun is shining, there’s a nice breeze in the air and you remember exactly why you fell in love with this car.

But as time passes you start to realize this could be better. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a decent stereo? Ah, but you don’t want to jeopardize the value or integrity of the vehicle. So you suffer through. Here’s the cool thing though – you actually don’t have to.

We recently had the pleasure of working on this 1987 Porsche 911 Carrera which had been equipped with the stock premium audio package. It still had the original radio in the dash, paper cone components in the front doors and rear deck with the original amp under the passenger seat. It was pretty mint! But not functional.

1987 Porsche 911 Stereo upgrade parts list

To do this stereo upgrade, it was important to use speakers that would fit with the original speaker grilles. In the rear this meant going with a set of Kicker KS coaxial speakers which feature a low profile tweeter and low profile magnet. I also wanted to make sure we included a compact, high powered amplifier to drive the new speakers. The more powerful the amplifier, the louder and clearer the speakers will perform. This is key to overcoming engine, wind and road noise. It was also extremely important – to us and to the client – to do this upgrade without modifications. To accomplish it all, we used the following parts and equipment:

• Blaukpunkt Frankfurt RCM 82 DAB
• Alpine KTA-30FW 4-channel amplifier (75 watts x 4 RMS)
• Morel Maximo Ultra 502 MKII 5.25″ Component speakers
• Kicker 51KSC404 – 4″ coaxial speakers
• BHA-BLAU – Speaker harness for vintage Blaupunkt Radio Replacement
• Porsche Blaupunkt BQA 80 amp bypass harness

Installing the new amplifier

Using the amp bypass harness and vintage speaker harness, John was able to install a new amp in the factory location without modifying any of the original speaker wiring or connectors.

He was even able to re-use the original fuse holder and fabricated a nifty platform to mount the amp. How cool is that?

Perfect fit front component speakers

Aftermarket component speakers always have an external crossover network. It’s typically a small box that has an input side and then a woofer and tweeter output. In simple terms, the crossover is taking in a full range signal and then divvying up and directing the appropriate frequency range to the tweeter and to the woofer.

Most factory crossovers are quite simple consisting of a small inline capacitor on the tweeter. In this 1987 Porsche 911 however, they were of considerable size. This worked out in our favor. The factory crossover was installed in the door panel. It was as if these Morel speakers were made for this car. The Morel crossover was almost the same exact size and fit nicely in the exact same location. This wasn’t planned, just a happy coincidence.

Not only did the crossover fit perfectly in the original location, the mounting points for the Morel speakers were spot on. Once again, no modifications were needed which is a beautiful thing!

With the front door speakers mounted, John took it up himself to touch up and freshen up the faded speaker grilles. The front speaker installation came out looking quite sharp.

Rear speakers installed

The Kicker rear speakers fit perfectly under the original grilles. John did have to work his magic here fabricating a new mounting plate. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pics of him in action. Here you can see the outcome of his craft and expertise.

Blaupunkt Frankfurt RCM 82 DAB

With such care to attention to detail in maintaining the integrity of this vehicle, it was only natural to use a retro style radio. And here is the pièce de résistance – the Blaupunkt Frankfurt RCM 82 DAB. Although this radio appears period appropriate, it contains modern features like Bluetooth and even a USB port hidden behind the fake cassette cover. How clever! To see that in action, check out our YouTube short below.

When you use quality equipment, have it professionally installed and tuned, it will deliver the kind of eye popping audio upgrade that leaves you pleasantly surprised. The end result is a classic Porsche look in a classic Porsche vehicle with high fidelity output. You can have the best of both worlds. If you’re interested in an audio upgrade for your classic Porsche, check out our shop for more details, Sounds Incredible Mobile in Brookfield, CT.