RR

Picked up my new GT3 Friday.
Car is awesome. Radio sucks.
I want to keep it as stock as possible, ie I dont want to rip the car apart to just do a radio system,but I do want to change the speakers to MBQuart and add an amp.
Wondering if the stock CDR23 head unit is good enough, or would I have to replace that too.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks.

20C4S

so u mean the sound quality is bad?? how many speakers does the car have?

Sloth

I do not think the GT3 has the door pods for the speakers. If that is the case you are pretty limited unless you want to cut the door panels or swap out for panels with the door pod. You can do a 4" and tweeter in the dash and the rear locations without any cutting. If you have the door pods you can go with a 5.25 or 6.5" also without any cutting. You can use a line level converter for the stock headunit to power an aftermarket amp. Frankly if you are going to that extent, you may as well replace the head unit too as it would sound much cleaner. Take a look at this link for various opinions...

https://rennlist.com/forums/showthre...5&pagenumber=1

Also do a search as this topic has been beaten to death in the past few weeks... albeit for the standard 996.

Enjoy the GT3!

brh986

Friend of mine has a 95 993 with mbquarts running off the stock head. Sounds great. He needs a small sub bad though. Don't hesitate, you need that radio for traffic jams and long borring trips when you can't speed.

FYI my '04 GT3 order guide tells me the car gets door speakers and rear speakers on the "walls" just to the right and left of where your rear seats would be in a non GT3. They look quite small in the diagram for the doors though.

Viken

There are no speakers in the doors. Just the basic 2-way system on the dash and in the rear side panels. This is the same as the non-Hi-fi or Bose option on other 996's.



Rear side panels:

mooty

why radio on GT3,
roll down window and step on the loud pedal.
my hifi on C4S has never been turned on. however, i have increased the volume of the car's exhaust. if you need music, you may not have driven gone fast enough ;o)

brh986

My order guide is wrong then

Viken

I am curious as to where in the order guide did you see this. I am looking at my copy and the only reference made to the radio is on the front cover where it says: "CD Radio with Anti-Theft Coding (Porsche CDR 23)"

VIP MOTORWORKS1

This post has been deleted due to it's blatent disregard of the self promotion rules associated with this community. You can access the rules here: http://www.rennlist.org/charter.htm and https://rennlist.com/nospam.htm .

brh986

I have a diagram in it somewhere that has a cutaway view of the front and rear passenger compartment as well as well as a closeup of the radio, gear shift, and sport and regular gt3 seats. 2.8d and 2.8b are called "loud speaker grills on doors" and "loud speaker covers on doors" respectively. 2.8a and 2.8c represent loudspeaker covers and grills on dash. Hope this helps. Geuss it's wrong though.

Viken

Oh, this sheet?



Some of the details pertain to the ROW model and the part about the speakers in the doors pertain to other 996 models. Not entirely accurate, I guess.

brh986

Yep that's it.

goplay

One thing to consider is that unlike the 996 and Turbo, the stock radio has an integrated amp, and no external amp. Don't know if the radio has pre-amp outputs. Probably a work around if it doesn't and you wanted to use an external amp, but you'd have to use the amplified outputs of the radio (as opposed to pre-amp outs).

How did I find this out? My GT-3 radio failed on the first day and after 2 hours of debugging at the dealer with a replacement radio, they figured out that the replacement radio was from a 996 and wouldn't work due to the amp issue. They replaced the original radio and it actually started working again!

Anyone know if the stock radio has external inputs for things like a CD changer (or what I really want to do, a phatbox)?

Charles

Karl S

The CDR-23 uses a MOST fiber optic based system comm bus, so it can only work with other MOST compatible components. So, a late model Porsche 6 CD changer with MOST will work, but you'll need to get the wiring harness for it, since the GT3 does not come prewired for the CD changer. However, the only way to get a phatbox, ipod, etc to work with the CDR-23 is by using an FM modulator. Maybe some day there will be a MOST compatible phatbox or ipod but until there is FM is the only alternative.

Karl

Tool Pants

I do not know jack about stereo stuff. But I saw a TSB which came out 3 months ago that said there are two versions of the CDR-23, with an external amp and w/o. If it has an internal amp then you do not have 490 HiFi or 680 Bose, and of course no door speakers - which I think means you do not have MOST as there is no external amp for the radio to talk to.

I believe the CDR-23 has connectors for inputs and outputs like the old 210 and 220 radios, but they do not work if you have MOST. So a non-MOST GT3 radio should be like the old radios, meaning than you can hook up the Becker plug for a low-level audio adapter to add an amp to power additional speakers.

Time to see Horst on the Becker board. Jeff