Stereo options for f250 Crew Cab
 

Now that I'm settled into this truck and absolutely love it (can definitely see keeping it a long time), I'm not wanting to add a little flavor to it since I have a bit of a commute back and forth to work.

Now...I'm not a youngster anymore and am not interested in having a sound system capable of shattering windows a 1/4 mile away or having enough bass punch to shatter the ribs of my passengers. But I do love a music and having a nice, balanced stereo. Add to that, I'm also not wanting to spend a small fortune to get one.

Here's what I'm looking at so far:

Head Unit: Pioneer FH-X70BT ($144 local Wally World)
I don't want a DVD/NAV unit. I find them too distracting and am not a fan of smudged up lcd screens. So the Pioneer fits the bill as a solid sounding double din stereo with all the features I want and need.

Speakers: Kicker DS60 6.5" coaxial speakers x 4 ($90 total ebay)
Found these on eBay for roughly $45/pair. The stock front and rears are 6x8" units that just tend to get a bit sloppy. In speakers, round is better for bass roll off. Found some adapter plates for installing 6.5" speakers for $15/pair on eBay that come with the FORD specific wiring adapters for the door speakers so I'm not having to cut the factory harnesses out. With the units being coaxial, it saves me from spending more money on a component kit and spending more time custom mounting tweeters.

Subwoofer: Power Acoustik THIN-10BX ($87 ebay)
One of the most difficult tasks was finding a sub box that would fit behind my rear seats WITHOUT having to cut the carpet from the rear wall. After doing a lot of digging, I found this unit. The box is very shallow (4.5" bottom depth, 2.25" top depth, 26" L and 13.5" H. For the style of music I listen too, a 10" sub is all I need and it reviews quite well.

Amplifier: MB Quart FX1.400 ($90 ebay)
Only going to be using the amp to power my sub. All other speakers will be driven from the head unit itself.

So aside from wiring, I'm only looking at $411 on what should be a solid sounding system. And, with as quiet as this V10 is, I should be able to enjoy it!!!!

Sounds like (no pun) you've done your homework on upgrading your stereo equipment. I have the factory upgrade on my 2008, but I did upgrade my wife's 2007 Lincoln LT. I went with a Pioneer including better speakers. Made a big difference and that was 6 years ago and it still sounds great.

I think you may be disappointed in using the head unit to power the speakers. 14w isn't that much. A 4ch 40w amp would wake them up. I went with Infinity componets 6x8 in the front and stuck the tweeters on the dash. I use 6x8 coaxials in the rear. at 2ohms with a 40w Kenwood they really get loud. :-jammin

Funny, I'm in the middle of upgrading mine too.

My HU is Kenwood 50x4 and it just didn't quite do it for me, so I added a clarion mini amp XC1410, finally found a spot it would fit, on a dash support, velcro and zip ties seems to do OK holding it.

next , a kenwood mini sub KSCsw11 shoved (literally) under the center front seat, which is what im in the middle of wiring up now.

I had earlier added kicker 6x8s in the front with some dynamat

Thus far it sounds decent, but im hoping even better once the sub is added and some tweaking of hpf/lpf settings.

edit: Done, and sounds pretty good for a low budget system.

Ya, I figure I'll try the head unit first. It's rated at 50w/ch (which I know is max rating, not RMS) but that should be enough since I'll be adjusting the settings on the receiver to adjust the crossover frequencies to send the lows to the sub. With a crossover in place, the H/U amp isn't being driven as hard (as well as the main speakers) forcing the subwoofer and it's amp to do the heavy lifting.

Well, I finally got my system all installed and it sounds amazing. After doing some research, I went with the following setup:

Head Unit: EONON D2107 DVD multimedia player with bluetooth ($123 new off eBay). Has a micoSD slot that reads up to 32GB cards (I loaded a 16GB card with over 2000 songs for a solid library) and will read mp3 and video files. It does not do Navigation, but that's what my cell phone is for. The interface is straight forward and a little clunky but responds quickly to touch and looks good. Build quality is as one would expect in this price range, but it does sound really good (although I'm using the preouts to an external amp and not utilizing the internal radio amp). The playback of DVDs looks great on the 6.2" 800x480 screen. The screen does tend to wash out in sunlight a bit and can, at times, be a bit hard to read but I could still make out my userface options. Although it has a built-in steering wheel volume control interface, I was not able to get it to work.

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Amplifier: PIONEER GM-6300F 4 channel amplifer ($60 used off Craigslist). I decided to amplify my stock door speakers to see how well they sounded off an amplifier instead of head unit. The amp is rated at 600 watts (60x4 RMS). It had a selectable crossover unit which I enabled to HPF (High Pass Filter) to only send the mids and highs to the stock speakers. Believe it or not, in this configuration, those OEM door speakers sound pretty dang good and get loud as heck without having any audible distortion.

Subwoofer: Infinity Basslink-T (Got free from my brother who had purchased it a few years ago but wasn't using it as he sold his truck). This unit has a 10" sub with two 10" passive radiators. It has a built-in 250w RMS Class D amplifier. Dimensions (H x W x D): 14-3/8 x 40-3/8 x 6-7/16. To make this amp fit, I had to remove the plastic storage bin on the driver side and the molded black cover on the rear wall. The sub easily slid down and and fit like a glove at that point. For a 10" it delivers amazing bass and I actually had to dial it down a bit on the gain so that it was tolerable. It hits hard for Rock music and handles the low end growl and roll off of Pop and old school Rap.

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Installation: The headunit was a fairly easy install, although I had to do a small amount of modification to get it to line up properly with the opening on my dash bezel. I had to trim some of the internal dash on the right side next to the two mounting screw holes to allow it to slide to the right more as the Metra mounting kit I had bought pushed it too far to the left. Since I was using an amp and not the head unit to power the speakers, I wired the speaker inputs from the wiring adapter harness directly to my amplifer and ran speaker leads back to the rear amp so that I could use the trucks existing speaker wiring. Also, the way the Metra mounting kit works, it seats the head unit back a bit further than stock so it does come in (slight) contact with the defrost vent, but it wasn't an issue overall.

The amplifer was too big to mount behind the seat next to the sub, so I decided to mount it under the rear seat on the driver side. The problem I ran into was my truck has the fold-out cargo rack under the seat and my amp was too tall to install under it. I wanted to keep the rack in place, so I proceeded to modify it a bit. I first had to use a cut-off tool and remove one support bracket that was under the rack that interfered with placing the amp under it. Once that was done, it was still a bit tall, so I found six round spacers that were about 1/2" deep and used them to give additional height to the rack. The amp then fit quite well so I proceeded to run all my wiring and cables to it. The additional height on the rack did not impede with my seat at all and I was able to drop it down and it locked in place just fine. The rack also hides the amp quite well and would be a big PITA for someone to try to steal. For power, I ran 6ga wire from the battery to the rear and used a distribution block to split it to two 12ga leads which I run to each amp. For grounding, I tapped into the seat mounting brackets.

Overall, there is no sign that I'm running any kind of system in my truck aside from the aftermarket head unit. It sounds great and the kids like to watch their movies on the monitor while we're on trips. For no more than I have invested, I am very, very happy.

I had used that Infinity Bass Link T in my 05 crew cab. It fricken rocked!