We’ve had hundreds of Macans through over the years, and without fail we find that the base audio package is severely lacking, and brings down enjoyment of what is otherwise a brilliant car. On the other hand, we also understand that it can be hard to justify spending thousands just on car audio when all you need is just a bit more punch and clarity. This is why we’ve developed our “Stage 1” upgrade for the current model Macan, which gives a huge upgrade at a fraction of the cost of the BOSE or Burmeister factory options.
The Before:
The Macan is equipped with 7.5” bass drivers and 4” midrange in each door, and a 1” tweeter at each corner of the dashboard. There’s no centre speaker in the base audio package, and the rear doors have the same 7.4” bass driver and tweeter, with no midrange. There’s no factory amplifier in the vehicle, but the bass drivers run on their own separate channels out of the OEM head unit. This means our starting point is a 6 channel, 10 speaker system.
The Components:
We have prioritised bang-for-buck quality and straightforward fitment with our speaker choices, with minimum compromise on audio quality. The front bass drivers have been replaced with 8” Audison Prima woofers, which have a frequency response all the way down to 35Hz. Our mid-range has been swapped out with the Audison 4” Prima drivers, which are one of the cleanest 4” speakers we’ve ever used. The tweeters are the Audison 1” Prima tweeter, which has an excellent off-axis response, which means we’ll get tons of highs both playing off the glass and the sides of the tweeters. Staying brand-consistent means that the components are already designed to work together tonally, which means our final tune is simpler.
Size matters for a setup like this, so we’ve gone for the ETON Micro 250.4. It gives a ton of power relative to it’s size, and gives us as much tunability as we need. The low(er) powered channels 1&2 will be wired to our mids and tweeters, and the high power channels 3&4 are our bass channels.
We’re leaving the rear speakers as they are on this one. While all speakers would benefit from an upgrade, the rear speakers in nearly all audio systems are just for surround fill. This means that the detail and quality from the rears is far less important than the fronts, and in our testing the OEM speakers are fine for this purpose.
The Install:
The first thing we did was fabricate our speaker adaptors for the 8” bass drivers. Thanks to the Porshe speaker already having a larger-than-necessary enclosure, we were able to trace the footprint onto some marine plywood and manufacture some plates. We then primed the plates with a waterproof sealer and painted them black so that nothing aftermarket is visible through the OEM speaker grille. We’ve replaced the original speaker bolts with longer, countersunk ones for a fully flush look, and removed the original speaker plug to give us a serviceable connection to the door wiring.
The midranges (no photos sorry) fit neatly onto the back of the door panel with minimal modification, but we did seal up the corners of the speaker to ensure it wouldn’t vibrate or rattle. The tweeters were a direct fit into the orignal locations, and the original spring clamps held our new tweeter tightly into the dashboard while still keeping enough clearance for the factory grille to clip back on over the top. The crossovers were wrapped tightly in foam to prevent rattles, and securely fastened into the sub-dash.
The amp presented an interesting challenge, as there’s next to no cavities in the Macan dashboard that we could hide the amp while still providing us access to tune it. Our solution was to custom-fabricate a mounting plate that we could hide in behind the OEM screen. Our only permanent modification to the car was the two holes that we drilled through the sub-dash to pass these bolts through, and once the screen goes in it’s impossible to see. The hole behind the screen gives us access to the ETON tuning controls without needing to remove the entire dashboard.
Lastly, we sourced a harness to connect directly to the radio wiring and split off our speaker wires in and out. By doing everything at the radio with a plug-in harness, we were able to build the loom outside the vehicle then just drop it in.
Our real-time analyser displaying the frequency response in the vehicle, with the spike on the left representing our bass-biased tune.
The Tune:
Usually, the aim for us is to produce a flat frequency response graph, where on our test noise all frequencies are equally represented. As this car doesn’t have a subwoofer, we’ve slightly upped the lower frequencies in order to give a punchy (yet still accurate) sounding system. In our testing this did result in slightly boomy bass on certain tracks, but the OEM bass control in the head unit gives enough adjustability that this can be changed per-song if necessary.
The Next Step:
This is a fantastic entry-level upgrade that would keep nearly any driver happy for years to come. That being said, there’s also still plenty of room to move for an audiophile. Adding a digital signal processor (DSP) would give a massive step up in quality, as it would allow de-equalisation of the PCM outputs, as well as time correction and per-channel EQ curves. Adding a subwoofer in the back would move some of the very bottom-end away from the front speakers and give true thumping sub-bass. Replacing and amplifying the rears would give even better surround-sound, and improve the quality for any rear passengers. Adding sound deadening in the door and door panel would help reduce resonance and further improve the quality of the sound.
Final Thoughts:
We’re thrilled with how this system came out, and will be recommending this package as our go-to for anyone looking for “just a bit more” out of their Macan audio system. It’s completely reversible and won’t affect the Porsche factory warranty, which is absolutely crucial to us. The soundstage is excellent for a non-DSP system, but we still have options to further improve on this setup and achieve absolute audio perfection.