Audio Advice Needed

[DriverOne]

Even just putting carpeting behind your plastic panels helps. Add something to the roof, and you'll be amazed at the difference. Rubberizing the interior panels is a good idea, like Dare said.

[Basement_Modder]

Coming from somebody whose putting a $900+ system in his ford escape, I feel I can give some input.

First off, your sound stage should be built from the front, not the rear. The suggestion I saw above to leave the stock front woofers but replace the rears is NOT advisable. In fact, in a proper system, rear speakers are a luxury, not a necessity. Put some new speakers up front (either in the dash or in the doors, not both. Doors will probably sound better.) Get a component set for these. If you go with the factory locations, something like these would work. Mount your tweeters either facing you at ±2 feet of ear level, or facing the windshield to use it as an echo surface. For your rears, you can either mount some quality 2/3-way coaxials, or you can find small 6" or so free-air subwoofers to put on the rear deck. This would eliminate the need for an expensive and/ or large subwoofer, and would fill your bass nicely.

For soundproofing, it is important to note that dynamat/ peel n seal type things are ONLY for reverberation, and should be used on no more than 25% of a panel's surface area. Real sound deadening is done with acoustic foam, which can be substituted with beadfoam from walmart on the cheap, which still helps a good amount.

I would also recommend that you get an amp for your speakers. A 4-way with a bridged rear channel for open-air subs, or a 4-way for all 4 corners to compliment a powered sub. The Rockford Fosgate R400-4D Is a sub-$200 D-class 4 channel that gets 50 watts RMS to each channel at 4-ohms, and is perfect for most aftermarket speakers. Also, if your stereo only has one RCA preout (which it does), you will need an EQ. The Clarion 7-channel EQ (google it) costs about $50 and can be an AMAZING upgrade to your aftermarket HU. When your HU is off, push & hold the volume knob in until the setup menu pops up, then set the preouts to "Rear SP". Then connect these preouts to the EQ, and the EQ to your 4 channel amp and subwoofers via the labelled outputs.

Hope this helps.