I went with the Crunch DSX120, in a kit for the S124 that included adaptors for the Becker plugs.    The picture above shows the underside of the speaker and the mounting clips.    For some reason the speaker connections are hiding under the magnet and I had to bend them back to put the supplied adaptors on.     The supplied adaptors were pretty poor quality.   The positive terminal fit ok, but the negative terminal was too large and needed adjustment with pliers to make them work.

However, to mount the new speakers, first had to remove the old.   The grilles are easy to remove once you know how.   The thin strip to the side of the grille just clips into place.   It can be removed with a trim removal tool or even a flathead screwdriver.   Once removed, there are two screws that hold down the inside of the grille, with the outside held down by two plastic tabs and the A pillar trim.

Once I had the trim off, I was confronted with some small speakers that had been poorly mounted in the holes.   At least they had not cut the hole any larger.    No wonder they rattled and sounded terrible.

The previous installer had soldered them to the Becker wires, which seemed a lot of work when fitting the wrong sized speakers.    As nothing was cut, it was a simple matter of just clipping the new speakers into the factory speaker holes.   They fit perfectly.

I tested the speakers before I refitted the grilles.  They sounded a lot better.  No more rattling and buzzing from the passengers side.   The extra size also added more depth.

Once tested, I put the grilles back on and my 300TE speaker upgrade was complete.   I am pretty happy with how it sounds with the original Becker.  Unlike in the 560SEC I am not running a modern amplifier.   Given the size of the rear speakers, I don’t think its necessary.   This has been a quick and simple upgrade that sounds a lot better.   And now with the factory grilles installed, it is invisible.

Doing the front speaker upgrade was also the impetus for me to refurbish my instrument cluster, as I could push it out from the speaker hole.

The post 300TE speaker upgrade – Part 2 – fronts appeared first on Classic Jalopy.

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.

The post 300TE speaker upgrade – Part 1 – rears appeared first on Classic Jalopy.

Changing the rears in the second generation W126 is a bit more of a fiddly job.   For starters the factory grilles are now very brittle.   Not only are they over 35 years old, but the Australian sun is not kind to plastics.   It is quite common for them to break when removed.   The best way to ensure this does not happen is to remove the seats first.    The grilles have to slide towards the front of the car, and the top of the rear seat is in the way of that.

Despite having owned three 560SEC’s in my life, I had never removed the rear seat.  I assumed it was like the C107 or W111 coupe, where getting the rear seat out is like wrestling with a gorilla.   However, that is not the case in the SEC.   The left and right sections are removed separately, making it quite easy to get them out.   As with the saloon, the bottom cushion is removed by pressing the red tabs, and then the backrest lifts off ‘hooks’.   It took me a matter of minutes to get the seats out.

While they were out, it was a good opportunity to clean them and apply leather conditioner.   While I regularly clean and condition the seats in the car, it was amazing how much better a job I could do having them out.   It was almost worth doing this job just to force me to remove the seats and clean them.

Once the seats were out, the speaker grilles could be removed.   They slide towards the front of the car.  It is vital to be very gentle with them.  There are various hooks that are easily broken off.   The hardest one to get out is actually the front one.   Normally what happens is that it also pulls out its receptacle from the parcel shelf.

Once I got the grilles out, I was shocked to find that the car still had the original factory speakers.   Still with the original MB part number on them, made in West Germany.   They sounded better than the more modern Pioneers I removed from the front.    It seems incredible that somebody would go to the trouble of rewiring the car for the speakers, fit new front speakers, fit a new head unit and leave the old rear speakers alone.   As the car had been rewired to remove the fader, the becker plus were no longer there.

The series 1 W126 had the same size speakers front and rear.  To fit larger speakers in the series 2 cars, the factory came up with these angled brackets to fit a 16.5cm speaker.   The brackets are held in with two screws towards the front of the car.  Once those are out, the unit pulls towards the front of the car and can be lifted out.

The factory speakers are glued to that bracket.  Given their age, its fairly easy to pry them off the brackets with a screwdriver.    Instead of gluing my new W126 rear speakers on, I used double sided tape.

The Crunch speakers fit perfectly in the brackets.   The speaker is actually deeper than the bracket, but that is ok, as there is a hole in the rear parcel shelf for them to protrude through.

Once mounted, the Crunch speakers are slightly taller than the old factory ones were.  They still fit into the hole in the parcel shelf and the factory cover still fits on there quite well.

In the picture above, you’ll see the square hole in the parcel sheft to the front of the speaker.  A receptacle for one of the hooks in the speaker grille goes in there.   In both cases for me, the receptacle came off with the grille.   It is much easier to fit the grille if you remove the receptacle from the grille and put it back where it goes.    I found this out when doing the second speaker.

But before I put the grilles on I tested the quality of the sound, and I was happy with it.   Its not perfect, but its a huge improvement on what I had before.   I feel like I have a system that looks like a factory setup, but sounds better.  I also have much nicer and cleaner rear seats.    I’ll have a long road trip to decide how good this system really is.

In testing the setup, It also sounds heaps better if the EQ function on the iPhone is disabled.

The post W126 rear speakers appeared first on Classic Jalopy.

I am also doing a similar project on my 300TE.   On that car, one of the front speakers is damaged and makes a rattling sound.    The W124 speakers are harder to find than for the W126.  The front speakers on a W124 use an odd mounting system, and the rears have minimal clearance.    There was an audio store in Germany that sold a kit for the S124, and also carried speakers that should fit into the second generation W126.  It made sense to buy them all at once, as shipping from Germany is very expensive these days.

Based on that, I ordered four sets.    I prefer to keep all four speakers from the same manufacturer (and ideally the same range) in a car.

The speakers for the W126 were 10x15cm for the front and 16.5cm at the rear.   The factory front speaker in the W126 is actually a small round speaker in an oval housing.  These can be replaced by oval speakers.    They also came with adaptors for the Becker plug system.

When I removed the grilles in the 560SEC, I found a set of old Pioneer 4×6″ speakers in there.   They looked like they were about 20 years old or so.   The Becker plugs were long gone, so it was quite easy to use the standard speaker plugs for the new crunch speakers.    On comparing them, the Crunch speakers had a far larger magnet, and it was quite a tight fit to get that magnet through the speaker opening.    The speakers don’t sit quite flush due to the large magnet size, but there is just enough room to install the speaker and cover it with the factory grille.

The new speakers sound a lot better.  It’s never going to be perfect as I’m playing music through an FM transmitter, but they do make a big difference.  On the 560SEC, I am using a Becker 1402, coupled with the factory line out module to use an external amplifier.

Next step is the rears, which are far more fiddly to install on the W126.

The post W126 front speakers appeared first on Classic Jalopy.