Toyota GR86, 86, FR-S and Subaru BRZ Forum & Owners Community - FT86CLUB

TL;DR - This kit is perfect for someone who is looking for a stereo system that provides accurate sound reproduction while keeping the car feeling mostly stock, all while making minimal compromises.

When I bought my BRZ, I loved mostly everything about the car except for one thing: the stereo. I wouldn't consider myself an audiophile, but I did want a good listening experience, so I started looking around. Lots of people here mentioned OEM Audio in threads, but for the steep price and the lack of buzz revolving this kit, I was pretty skeptical. After a lot of debate, I ended up buying this kit, and the result is pretty damn awesome. By now, a few more reviews have propped up, but I'm writing this to educate anyone who might be going through the same thing I did. Here goes.

Prelude

In the past, I've installed many kits into mine and my friends' cars. I'm not an expert by any means, but I do know how to get the right parts and install stuff. Generally you can get a decent experience for ~$300, a good one for ~$500, and a really good one for ~$1000. So when I saw the OEM Audio kit retailing for $1200, my thoughts were placing this kit between "this must be really good" and "this is a total ripoff."

When I was shopping for a kit, I had two extremely hard requirements:

1. Keep the stock look.
2. Make sure the kit takes up as little space as possible.

Since I wanted to keep the stock look, that means I didn't want to do any additional staging. No floor speakers, no shitty fabricating into the A-pillars, and nothing that glows LED lights into my face. Also, for me, the BRZ has pretty much no space to stow anything. Since there was no space to begin with, real-estate in the BRZ, is much more costly than in my old MS3, for example. This means I'd have to go with installing a stealth box for the sub and throwing an amplifier under my trunk floor.

After a ton of shopping around, I looked at some options, but kept going back to the OEM Audio kit. I watched the install video and liked how painless the install was. You didn't have to cut anything to make room for the equipment, the amplifier was on the subwoofer box, and the wiring was nice and tidy. Still, you can easily do all of this stuff by yourself, but I've done a bunch of installs before—the entire process is exciting for the first 15 minutes, and eventually you're just trying to get it done. Sure, I could pay someone to install it for me if I wanted it done "right", but that would just add to the total price.

After a couple of months, I said "fuck it" and bought the regular 400+ kit (not the Reference kit), knowing that if I wasn't happy with it I could probably negotiate a refund. I had actually bought it from FT86 Speed Factory, but it looks like it came directly from OEM Audio. I got it in two days with the free, standard shipping. Not bad!

What's in the box

In the box, you'll find:

2x tweeters
Some wires/fuses/etc
The subwoofer box with subwoofer and the amplifier mounted to it
Some paperwork, documentation, stickers, etc

http://i.imgur.com/ffroXKn.jpg?1?9228

Dat packaging, yo.

The packaging was neat and there were some empty boxes in there to provide padding during shipment to keep everything in one place. Overall, good stuff.

Installation

Okay, I'm not going to lie, I got a little excited about installing this kit. I've been going without a good system for months now (first world problems) and I wanted to get it over with. I started at 9AM and was finished by around 10:15AM, so the total process took around 1.25 hours. Awesome! For most people, you might want to plan 4 hours around this just in case. Plan more if you've never done anything like this before. Oh, and make sure you have a panel tool. Try searching Amazon, they're like $10-15 for a nice kit that you'll hold onto for years.

The process was extremely straightforward: you pop off some panels, run some cables from the battery to the trunk while bypassing the factory amplifier, pop in the tweeters, and you screw in the sub box. Knowing that the likelihood of these cables coming apart are extremely slim, I can say that this alone was worth money to me. In the past, something would occasionally happen to my stereo, I don't think I'll be experiencing anything like that with this kit. It's really plug-and-play.

http://i.imgur.com/yE5H9kQ.jpg

The new tweeters. Left = OEM Audio's, Right = stock. There were some small dots on these tweeters, not sure what they were but it was probably nothing.

Footprint

My best guess is that the sub box itself weighs about 30 pounds (I didn't weigh it on a scale or anything, sorry). It's placed onto the passenger side so that you can get a litle bit of "balancing" between your's and the sub's added weight. I didn't notice a difference driving around with it in there, so you shouldn't have any issues with it yourself.

Sound Quality

The overall quality is superb. Before, the engine would be roaring so loudly >70MPH that you couldn't even listen to your music without missing a lot of details. Now, I can play it very loudly while hearing everything, including some bass (finally!). One important thing to note is that the included amplifier is tuned already, so make sure to set your EQ to flat first and then adjust to your liking.

Initially, I was surprised about this kit not offering a speaker upgrade without the reference upgrade, but the stock speakers are actually pretty good. They just weren't being used efficiently as they are now. It's like night and day, really.

Bass: If you're looking for some bass that will set off car alarms or blow some random person's hair around, this isn't the kit for you. I'd relate the experience to a set of really good monitor speakers or headphones. You get an accurate representation of the sound without any overkill. It's there, just not in your face. The kit doesn't feel like it's overcompensating on anything.

Brightness: Due to the exceptional quality of the tweeters and the stock speakers, you can tell that the speakers can't keep up 100% with the tweeters in the high-range. This causes the sound to be just a little bright. On a scale of 1-10 with 5 being ideal brightness, I'd rate this as a 6.5. Reducing the high-range of the EQ just a couple levels remedied this issue. I wonder if the referece upgrade would balance this out, as in that kit you get upgraded speakers as well.

Value

I'll admit this kit is pretty damn expensive compared to buying the parts yourself. In the box, you get a subwoofer box with an 8" subwoofer, an amplifier, two tweeters and some wires. To most people, it may appear as a ripoff, but after the install I felt like it was completely worth it. When you install a system yourself, you spend money on the parts as well as the time installing and fiddling post-install to get it to sound the way you like it. The time can add up, depending on your skill-level, and you may never be completely satisfied with the result.

For a nearly perfect sounding result out of the box in less than 2 hours, all while meeting my requirements listed above, I can definitely say that this was worth every penny to me.

Conclusion

Overall, I'd rate this entire kit a 9.0/10. For the simplicity of the kit, you get a ton. It's not overkill, and the trunk remains functional post-install, so that's a huge win for this car. Go buy it if you're on the fence about it.

I hope this helps someone out there!