No worries guys - appreciate the attention however it goes. The sordid history of the audio in this car is long and perhaps a little boring. The 300C has a "premium Boston" audio system which consisted of a 6 cd changer head unit married digitally to a supposed 300W amplifier. The head unit powered up but the digital amp did not. What they mean by digital amp is that all the amplification and speaker distribution / bass management is handled by the amp. The steering wheel controls and head unit send CAN bus commands and the amplifier modifies the volume / balance / fader etc. The Boston system has 6 speakers: 3 spread across the dashboard (tweeters really at 3.5"), two big 6x9" door bins, two 6x9" full range speakers in the rear and one 8" subwoofer. I have no idea what it should sound like as I couldn't get the amp to work. A replacement is north of $300. When I pulled apart the dashboard to investigate is was clear somebody particularly stupid had been in there fiddling with things. There is no way to add external amplification to the system other than taking the speaker level outputs from the digital amp and somebody had a crack at that with a roll of scotch tape and a pile of RCA plugs. This genius wired speaker wire for power, intercepting the power wire going to the front cigar lighter (see picture below). Said power wire was then run out of the back of the centre console and through to under the passenger front seat. The front seat was jammed on said power wire and took some work to get it out. I decided to bin the entire factory setup as the factory amp was fried. I had an old Sony head unit of reasonable quality lying around - it has great Bluetooth and line level outputs for the front, rear and subwoofer. Rear deck speakers were replaced with some Kicker units bought on sale, the factory sub was disconnected and some kind folk had sold Cash Converts a Sony sub in an enclosure and a nice Kicker sub amp for the front door bins. A JVC 4 channel amp was purchased on sale from Ebay for less than half retail. I only recently got around to listening to it since I have been concentrating on waiting for the engine to blow up. When I turned it on properly it sounded AWFUL with an annoying buzzing noise that sounded like dead speakers. If I put the fader 100% rear it sounds great - the big 6x9s are powered off the front half of that JVC amp and the subwoofer is powered by bridging the two channels on the back half of that amp and it worked beautifully. The culprit was the 3 dashboard speakers which all had cooked foam surrounds. I have tossed the centre one and don't plan to hook it up. The two outers I am waiting on a couple of 3.5" Kickers from a local audio place. I know I will also have to replace the door bins as they are not the right ohm range for the Kicker sub amp powering the front. edit: you can clearly see where the master electrician has shorted the wire going to the cigar lighter plug and melted the insulation. He was lucky the car didn't catch on fire.