bmwking

lol my pleasure, happy to help motivate

nice work! always nice to have that revelation and it works!

when using a DD1 on a 4 channel amp you want to hook the positive lead to the positive of channel 1 and the negative to the negative terminal of channel 2, effectively bridging the 2 channels to the DD1, that way you won't have a disparity between them, itll allow you to set them both equally to your max clean volume. as far as the other equipment you're running (maestro, dsr1) I don't have any experience with those, hopefully someone who does can chime in

i've found when setting at the amp it makes it easier to put the DD1 leads in the speaker outputs and actually tighten the output terminals down to hold the leads in place. just my $0.02 that frees up your hands to adjust gain and volume on the HU without losing your output

haha sorry guys, was totally comparing 4 10s to 4 8s, my bad! yeah 4 8s wins. i shouldnt comment when i havent had my coffee yet

if you have the height to fit the 10s, go with them. 2 10s will have 50% more cone area than 4 8s, which will allow you to get more spl. recommended ported box is 1.5cu ft per zv5 10 so id think youll be good. if you need more space, look into a seat raising bracket or making your own.

if you don't want to settle for a shallow double din, the mod to the vents behind the headunit isnt terribly difficult. as long as you have a dremel and some aluminum duct tape you can do the mod in about an hour or less. I had an e39 528iT for several years and did plenty of research into fitting a double din but ultimately went with a higher end single din because i had no use for carplay. all that being said, any of those headunits you listed will work out wonderfully. they also all have 3 sets of 4 volt RCA outputs should you want to add any external amps later on. it's all about aesthetics and features and price for you then. myself, i prefer physical volume buttons as opposed to an all touch interface. everyone is different tho

yeah "taking it apart" is gonna involve a sawzall and sledgehammer at this point. if all else fails, take a box cutter to the magnet boot and cut your losses that way

as someone who has built a frankenwoofer, i can say you will likely end up spending more on the frankenwoofer compared to prebuilt, it's a fun hobby but not cheap. especially considering that almost everyone does something wrong their first time, like not having the right type or number of spiders in the stack. when getting into the power territory you're looking at, you're not going to be able to cobble it together with off the shelf parts, it's going to require custom everything except for basket and soft parts, basically the most expensive bits, the motor and coil are going to have to be custom made, you need a solid electrical engineering degree to figure out the proper motor strength to handle that much juice, it's a LOT more than just making your own mag stacks. I don't want to discourage you from the idea, plenty of people tried to do it to me and i went ahead anyway, and the 10" sub i made takes a solid 2k rms easily. but i also know that at some point i will have to rebuild it, reliability won't be the same as an off the shelf, pre built by pros, sub.

i ran 2 different styles of wheels before, but i put one style on each side of the car. that made more sense than looking like i was on a payment plan

there are very few head units that can go max volume without clipping. if you go full send regardless of how you tune your amps you will clip your subs to death. repeatedly. either take the answer to your question or go about doing it the way you were already planning on but didnt get the reply to validate. but dont come back and say you weren't helped/warned wait, that might be too harsh. basically first you need to find the clipping point of your headunit output, from there you need to find the clipping point of your amps at max clean volume. if you have no way of doing this, ie no oscope or dd1, then you will need to use the video above. without those 3 options, you will never accurately know if youre clipping or not

if that's what you were feeding the mesos then im not sure you'll hear much difference

and for the love of god, go SLOWLY when using expanding foam. Follow the directions and take your time. too much too fast will warp your sheet metal and make it bulge and ripple in spots, potentially separating factory seams. Ask me how i know!

how much power are you feeding them? are you accurately tuning below clipping? box built to spec? if everything is equal, I doubt you'll notice much of a difference

This and some painters tape https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01A18X642/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_fj95EbGTV43TT