There is a good chance, if the car you are buying is >25 that the stereo (such as it was) is dead. I didn't buy an old 911 for the radio, I like to hear that flat-6 do its thing. But sometimes it is nice to have options.
In my case, all 4 speakers were blown and the old Alpine head unit was in pretty rough shape. I wanted to spend a minimum amount getting something "passable" in place, and I did not want to make any mods to the car. No new holes.
Old door speaker, meet new door speaker
Enter Crutchfield. I have had good luck in the past, & I trusted their "fit" suggestions and ordered:
* For the front doors: Infinity Reference REF-5032cfx
* For the rear deck: Infinity Kappa 463XF
* For the head unit I chose a Kenwood KDC-BT278U
I wanted the head unit to be bluetooth compatible, be able to play a CD and integrate with my smartphone for hands-free calls and turn by turn directions etc. My preference while driving is to let the phone stream music so I don't have to worry about it.
I just wanted the speakers to fit. Both of these models fit the stock mounting holes, locations and factory speaker covers.
I looked for (and have failed - so far) to find a sub-woofer that will fit under the passenger seat. That will take care of not needing extra amplifiers etc. to run the 4 speakers in the car and asking them to do things they are not good at. I'll update this when I find one that fits.
The last tweak was to order a cel phone mount from Rennline. It is designed for older 911's and mounts nicely while requiring no modifications. Super handy to just stick your phone to it when you climb in and it is up where you need it to follow your favorite navigation app. Only downside is I hit it sometimes when shifting and knock the phone down.
Installation tips:
"It's just audio, what could go wrong?" - my friend Dutch.
Tools:
low profile ratcheting screwdriver is a life saver when removing rear deck speakers. Awls align holes beneath other materials (carpet, vinyl, etc) and the plastic prybars help you remove old speaker grills so you can get to the screws.
I pulled out the old radio only to find pre-amp outs to a power amp (RCA cables are a dead giveaway, usually). I found the power amp under the passenger-side footwell board. Dashboards are pretty crowded to begin with, so there is a lot of stuff to sift through. But don't be discouraged. You have an antenna wire, a ground connection, an always hot + connection (to keep your time & presets) and a switched + connection to turn off the radio when the car is off. Then you have 8 speaker leads, + & - for each of the 4 speakers. It's really not as bad as it looks. The old stereo also had a power antenna lead (to raise a power antenna when you turn on the radio) and a dimmer wire to dim the radio display with the dash. But all of these things are labelled and you can connect them or not depending on your desired end state and comfort zone. Bentley has the wiring diagrams you need. I've attached a standard car audio color code guide here that should come in handy.
The fronts were very easy; for the rears I pulled the rear seatback out in an abundance of caution because the speakers would not lift out. I was afraid there was some connection beneath. Well, there wasn't. They were just stuck from 3 decades of sun and pressure!
I used twist-connectors for the head at first to make sure there weren't any issues, and then soldered the connections and protected them with shrink tubing when I was ready to "commit", adjusting the lengths as needed so the radio would fit into the dash. You want enough wire so the radio will come out, but not so much that you are cramming it all in there.
Temp hookup to make sure things work as expected. Those caps just twist on.
It worked :)
Commitment!
soldered and shrink tubed
And finally taped into a harness. All this to make it easy to get in and out, and to protect the connections from stress and getting caught on things. The RCAs are the subwoofer outs, you can see the Antenna wire and the mini-DIN for the hands-free microphone.
This may not match what you have exactly, but it should be close.
Once the head unit was wired up and working I realized the front speakers didn't work. The culprit was the cross over network used to split the signal for the two speakers in the door. It is important to roll off low frequencies to your tweeter since it cannot reproduce them and could get damaged. Porsche calls their crossover a "Diplexer", which may just be an odd translation error? It is part # 911 645 575 00 and while it is available, pricing is all over the place (I saw $60-$300 ea) It is part #7 in the diagram and of course it is screwed in from the back side so if you want to unscrew it you need to take the door panel completely off.
The reality in my case is I installed coax speakers in the door so I just bypassed my dead cross over. This meant it was about 30 min for the first door while I got my bearings, and 15 min for the second.
Step 1 is to remove the lower parcel shelf which is held on with phillips head screws. If the center of the mount is not broken, there is a keyway that fits on to a piece of rubber that mounts to the bottom of the grab handle so it will not just fall out.
Step 2 is to remove the top door trim, a single screw up front for the cover, 2 screws beneath the cover holding it on in front (arrows in pic) and then on the driver's side you have the mirror control harness to disconnect as well. In the rear there is a trim plug covering one more phillips head screw. Then the upper trim lifts off.
Next, l removed the top bolts holding the grab handle to the door frame:
The two lower bolts are recessed inside the base of the handle. The lock actuator arm just sits in a hole in the release handle, just lift it out so you can get to the screws.
Once the grab handle is loose and the lower tray is off, you should have enough room to work. What is going on is that the wiring from the radio runs to the crossover along the bottom of the panel. Then the leads for the woofer & tweeter run from the crossover to the speakers. There is a rather large connector (notated by arrow roughly) that you can disconnect and then just re-terminate the ends to fit the speakers you have chosen. I pulled the tweeter out just to get oriented around which wires were which inside the door. There is no reason to remove it though. Just feel for the connector, disconnect it and pull that wire out the woofer opening.
Re-terminate the ends, and make sure you keep track of your phase. All of the speakers should be in phase with each other. It's easy to tell if they are out. Just listen. Any time a single speaker sounds better than both combined (both Front or both Left etc.) you have a phase issue. The sound should always get louder and fuller as you add speakers. The convention to help with this seems to be that the terminals are two different sizes. Worst case, find the speaker or speakers with the phase issue and just reverse their connections.
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