This project took around 6 hours. However, you can deduct:

1. About 30 minutes pausing to take photographs.
2. About 1 hour of research into multiple threads discussing other installs. If you decide to duplicate my steps, you should be able to complete your door install from this thread.
3. About 1 hour dupicating wiring for the driver side door install. That should save me a comparable amount of time on the driver side door install.

Also, I take the time to crimp all the electrical connections.

Removing Passenger Door Components

Here is an image of my door as it came from the factory. Hopefully when I am done it will look very much the same.



Step 1: Remove the housing around the door handle. Pry out the pin at the bottom of the following image. Then pry out the housing. This takes a minute or two.



Step 2: Remove the interior part of the door. I started prying with a plastic putty knife in the lower right corner of the door. As the connectors released, I worked my way around the edge of the door clockwise. When I had completed the step the inside door panel was removed. Be sure to unconnect the courtesy light in the door panel. The following shows the rear side of the inside door panel leaning against the passenger door.



Step 3: Remove the housing surrounding the upper speaker. I used a flat blade screwdriver and started prying in the lower left corner of the housing. As the clops released. I worked my way around the housing until the housing came off in my hands. I failed to get a picture of the removed housing. I will make sure to take a picture of this part when i remove it from the driver's door. This step in the drivers door is more complicated as the housing contains the controlls for the outside mirrors.

 

The following image shows the factory speaker in the lower left corner of the door. Note that the factory connector is at the top of the speaker. Here is where I got a piece of good news. The wire colors - yellow/brown and yellow/black march the front passenger pinouts in the x9331 image I posted earlier in the thread.



Step 1: Squeeze the pins on the source side of the factory connector and slide it out of the speaker side of the connector. Then use a T25 Torx screwdriver or bit to remove the four screws that hold in the speaker. Oh, you can also deduct the 1/2 hour I lost running to the hardware store to pick up a set of Torx bits.

Step 2: Remove the three Torx bits holding the higher factory midrange speaker. Note that the connector to this speaker is inside the door. Disconnect that connector which contains two blue wires.

When you are finished, your door should look like this image.



Step 3: Plan your wiring.

The Easy Way - I had three components to install from my Polk DB6510 component speaker package - a Bass/Midrange, a Tweeter and a Crossover. I had considered flush mounting the tweeter in the upper left corner of the door, to the left of and slightly above the door panel. When I examined the interior of the door (refer back to the disassembled door photo at the beginning of the passenger speaker install thread), I thought I might be able to pull this off. But I wasn't going to know for sure until after I had cut a 2" diameter hole in my door. I chickened out and decided to follow the path of many before me - mount the tweeter in the upper speaker opening. From that location wiring can be fished out to the left of the opening and through the rubber grommet you can see in the upper photo to the interior of the door. The Polk midrange/bass speaker is a near perfect fit in the lower speaker opening.

There have been a number of discussions relating to placing the crossover behind the arm rest. There is only one switch on the crossover and once it is set, it does not need to be changed. There is plenty of room in the bottom of the door for the crossover. So my plan is to tap into the factory speaker leads - yellow/brown (+) and yellow/black (-), feed the leads to the crossover inside the door, then route lines from the crossover to the midrange/bass and tweeter.

The Hard Way - HK upgrades have tweeters installed in the A Pillar caps. Expect to spend another $100 (in a Cabrio) for the factory HK parts. Then you will need to run leads into the doors to the crossovers. In additon, crossovers could be installed behind the arm rests. With both of these options wiring is a lot more challenging. Note that going the easy way now would not prevent you from going the hard way on the tweeters later either by adding a second set of tweeters or by moving those already installed.

 

The upper factory speaker opening is way too big to directly mount a tweeter. I had some scrap 1/4" oak veneer plywood left over from a project and decided to use it to fashion a tweeter housing adaptor.

Step 1: Use the factory speaker as a template and outline the adaptor. I placed the speaker on the plywood and traced the edge of the speaker onto the plywood.



Step 2: I then used my saber saw to cut along the inside of the line. Keep in mind you need two of these, so you might as well cut two at the same time. I then used the Polk flush and surface mount adaptors to trace concentric holes in the middle of my housing adaptors. I then cut a hole using my saber saw along the inner concentric circle. A 2" hole saw would have worked well here but would have cost me 1/2 hour for another trip to the hardware store. I then followed the instructions in the Polk manual to flush mount the tweeter on the housing adaptor.

I then followed the instructions in the Polk manual and flush mounted the tweeters on my housing adaptors.

 

The leads from the Polk speakers are much longee than those needed for this install.

Step 1: Trim speaker leads and install connectors. I test fit the speakers in their locations decided on speaker line lengths and trimmed the leads to a more appropriate length. I then stripped about 1/4" from the end of each lead and installed crimp on connectors. The leads from the Midrange/Bass speakers are around 8" and from the tweeters are around 18".



Step 2: Factory line tap. The white wire in the above image is a two wire speaker cable. One pair is attached to the input side of the crossover. The crimp connectors on the other ends will be attached to the yellow/brown and yellow/black factory speaker leads.

You will need two of these so you might as well do both at the same time.

 

Step 1: Fish the speaker leads through the slot to the left of the speaker opening.

Step 2: Using the T25 Torx screws you removed, install the tweeter in the upper speaker opening.



Step 3: Snap the speaker housing back into place.

 

Step 1: Use a knife to cut a slot in the rubber grommet to the left of the upper speaker. Fish the tweeter wiring and the line running to the factory speaker wiring through this slot as shown in the following image.



Step 2: Cut off the factory connector at the end of the factory speaker leads as close to the connector as possible. Strip 1/4" of wire from both leads. Then crimp the line to the factory speaker wires to the wires. I connected red to yellow/brown (+) and black to yellow/black (-).

Step 3: Connect the tweeter leads to the crossover. The grey/pink lead is positive and the grey lead is negative.

Step 4: Mount the crossover inside the door bottom. I cut a piece of scrap styrofoam packaging to fit tightly in the bottom of the door. I then velcro'd the crossover to the styrofoam. Being elevated should provide the crossover with some protection from water. The Velcro should keep it from rattling around inside the door.

 

The final step is to mount the Polk midrange/bass in the lower opening. No the holes don't line up. I drilled holes a bit smaller than the self tapping screws that came with my Polk package. I then used the screws to attach the speakers to the plastic housing. Be careful here. You are screwing into plastic that is easy to strip. It would also be easy to punch a hole in your new speakers. The Polks came with a rubber vibration dampler and an adaptor. I used the vibration damper but not the adaptor.



At this point it was late afternoon New Years Eve. I was tired and there were plans for the evening. So I left the inside door panel off and took my MINI for an New Years evening drive to check out my passenger door speakers. I can already tell I'm going to enjoy the results of this install.

 

Step 1: I picked this up on some other threads. Apply masking tape to the door interior surface wherever there is a connector on the other side that will be used to reattach the interior part of the door to the door.



Step 2: Reattach the interior part of the door.

• First, reconnect the wire that goes to the door courtesy light in the panel.
• Second, drop the interior part of the door over the door lock pin. This will help you align the interior door panel connectors to the appropriate locations in the door.
• I used the soft side of my fist to smack the connectors into place. You can probabably do these three steps in about the same amount of time it took to read this.

Step 3: Reattach the housing around the door handle. Make sure you pull out the pin first, although you do not need to take it all the way out. Tabs on the housing will help you properly align this part. Push it into place then push the pin fully in.

You're done with the passenger door. It should look like this. Note the only visible change from the very first photo is that the Polk tweeters are slightly visible through the upper speaker opening. If this bothers you, you could paint the silver portion of the tweeter black.

 

I had the opportunity to spend about an hour in my MINI on New Years Eve with factory speakers in the drivers door and my upgraded speakers in the passenger door. While the Polks have 92dB of sensitivity there is no question it takes less power to drive the factory speakers than the Polks. I had to turn the balance to +5 to get equal sound from the two sides.

There is a noticible difference between the two sides. The Polks are clearer, have superior high frequency response and slightly better bass. But cranking the standard head unit volume sufficiently to make them loud, creates distortion from over-pushing the limited capacity of the factory head unit.

Given this is a convertible, my limited testing to this point indicates that I made the right decision to add the Alpine amplifier to my specifications for this upgrade. of course, this is a preliminary opinion, not having heard the Alpine and the Polks in action together.

R56 owners would be likely to upgrade the rear 6x9 speakers to improve bass response as the bass on this setup is still weak. Cabrio owners don't have that option as the rear speakers are about the same diameter as the fronts. So the Sound Ordinance powered sub option in this install also appears to be a good choice.

 

Step 1: I pulled the pin then removed the door handle housing. Then I started in the lower right corner of the door and removed by prying out the connecors clockwise as I did in the passenger door removal.

Step 2: This is the part I was worried about, removing the housing around the upper speaker. Based on thread comments, this step has caused the greatest amount of problems in other installs. Why? Because the mirror control for the outside mirrors is in this housing.

• I masked the visible portion of the mirror control before I did anything to try to avoid losing parts if they went flying.

• I began prying directly opposite the mirror control. The housing came mostly off except in the mirror control area. When I wiggled the part a bit, the housing came off with no flying parts.

This is an image of the inside of the housing showing where the exterior part of the mirror control mates with the internal part.



This image is of the wired interior part of the control. There is some slack in the wire so it can be pulled out a bit. I'm hoping when ot comes time to reinstall this housing, I can press this part into place then push the housing into place.



Let me tell you, I am breathing a big sigh of relief at this point as all the parts appear to be where they should be.

 

See passenger door speaker uninstall for details.

Step 1: The large speaker was removed by disconnecting the factory connector and unscrewing the 4 T25 Torx screws holding it in place.

Step 2: The smaller speaker was removed by unscrewing the three Torx screws and unhooking the factory connector.

It was encouraging to see that the wire colors feeding the large speaker were the same colors as the X9331 pinouts posted earlier in this thread. The positive lead is black/brown, and the negative lead is black violet.

 

Refer to the passenger door install for more details.

Step 1: Use a knife to cut a slot into the rubber grommet to the left of the lower speaker. Fish the tweeter wires through the slot to the right of the upper speaker opening then down to and through the rubber grommet. Fish the lead to the factory speaker wires through the rubber grommet.

Step 2: Use the three Torx screws removed from the upper speaker opening to attach the tweeter to the upper speaker opening.

The following image shows the tweeter installed and wire runs. The crimp connectors on the speaker wire lead to the factory speaker wires is set to be attached. At the bottom of the image the factory wire lead and the tweeter leads are waiting to be attached to the crossover.

 

See the passenger side installation for details.

Step 1: Crimp the leads from the crossover to the factory speaker leads. I went red to black/brown and black to black/violet.

Step 2: Attach factory speaker in and tweeter to crossover.

Step 3: Velcro the crossover to a styrofoam block and place in the bottom of the door.

Step 4: Drill holes for and mount the Polk midrange/bass in the lower speaker opening.



Step 5: Test the speakers. Across a range of FM stations there are good highs from the tweeter and good midrange from the lower speakers. Bass is still a bit limited as would be expected with these round front door speakers. Sound is much crisper than with the factory speakers.

I can see why many stop here as this $125 speaker upgrade makes a big difference.

 

This step is a major PITA. Take a good look at the inside of the housing. You will notice four plastic tabs inside the recepticle for the mirror control. These pieces will attempt to escape. Don't ask me how I know.

One almost made it down the inside of my door. Another I found hiding under a chair in my family room. You need all four as they support the mechanism that allows you to rotate your mirrors. If you lose one, your mirrors will not move in one of the desired directions. In my case it was up.



You will also notice a small slot on the far left of the mirror control housing. If you look closely you will also see one in the front. There is a third opposite the second that is not obvious from this photo. You will also see two metal strips. They allow this component containing your mirror controls to be snapped out of the speaker housing.

If you look closely at the electronic side of this connection, you will see a slanted tab just above the wires. There are three of these. They are designed to lock into the slots on the other side of the housing.



The best way to deal with this setup is to keep the control side of the connector in the housing. Pull the electronic side as far out as the wire allows it to go. Do your contortionist thing to try to get the housing into a position where you can mate the electronic side with the control side. Then snap the electric side into the control side. It will take a bunch of fiddling. Meanwhile the little plastic tabs in the control side will be making their escape attempt.

So be calm. Mutter some incantations. And work with the two poieces until you hear the very satisfying clicks that happen when the tabs lock into the slot. When the parts have clicked into place, walk away until you are again calm. The next part is also very fiddley.

It seems simple. Just press the housing back into place. You need to start joining the housing to your door from the mirror control side. But the mirror control mechanism will not want to go back into the hole designed for it. If you press too hard, the metal tabs will release and the whole mirror control mechanism will attempt to escape from the speaker housing. Just press it back in place. Keep working it, working it, working it. Suddenly, it will slip into place. Smile. Push in the remaining tabs and your speaker housing is re-installed.

Then test your mirrors. In my case, the mirrors wouldn't go up because one little plastic part was still hiding under my chair. I now have the part sitting next to my notebook as I type. My housing is now fully reinstalled. I just need to loop back to the beginning of this post and run through the steps one more time, this time with the fourth tab in place. This will be my third loop through this series of instructions. Hopefully this time I'll get it right.

 

Yes, third time's the charm. The mirrors now work properly. But I did need to foil another tab escape attempt.

Finally, reinstall the door panels and the door opener housing following the instructions in the passenger door posts. When I finished my door looked like a factory door.

 

wow man, this is an incredible thread. Thank you so much for all of your time and effort posting your venture. I have a hatchback S but all of the front door stuff looks the same so this gives me more confidence if I ever decide to give replacing the speakers a shot. Can't wait to see your results. I'm considering just adding the SO sub to my hifi system as I'm not that unhappy with the sound, but I would love to eventually replace all the speakers...

 

nice job - for the mirror control I found it best to unplug the wiring harness from the back of the connector first then reattach the ring with the mirror control already mounted on it and finally attach the wiring after half of the ring is placed back over the new speaker....if that makes any sense.

 

Attn MODS: this needs to be a sticky!

 

TooLazyforaLogin,

I also considered the option of unplugging the electrical side before snapping it back into place. That step certainly might have reduced the number of escape attempts by little black tabs. But I also have a history of becoming impatient with electrical connectors I can't seem to release. So I decided to try to mate the electrical and control sides first without unplugging the electrical side.

But thanks for sharing experience I don't have.

Brohammer,

There is nothing about a convertible door that I'm aware of that would make a door speaker install any different on a hatchback. One of the reasons I started this thread is to pull together information from a variety of other threads to trace through an install, adding photos where I thought they would be helpful. I haven't invented a single thing so far. Rather, I've compiled the efforts of the many that went before me and I reall appreciate their efforts.

As for gaining courage, that's all it really takes. The steps I've outlined so far will work for a variety of speaker brands and should work across most if not all 2nd generation MINIs.

 

I've had the opportunity to experience my Polk Audio components for four days driven by nothing more than the factory standard audio head unit. The quality is there. But with more power, the Polks should really come alive. Adding an amplifier means tapping into the X9331. I thought it would be worthwhile to take a quick look at the X9331 to insure the wiring layout hadn't changed in 2011. The first step was to expose the connector.

EuroTrash01 posted a nice series of steps for a front/rear speaker swap in the speaker swap thread. The first four steps are the same in a harness modification, so I'll repeat them here along with a few photos to illustrate what EuroTrash was talking about. Here's the photo of the panel area before I went to work.



The x9331 is hidden behind two panels. The lower panel just below the hood release begins in the x9331 area and extends along the drivers door sill. The upper panel is a small triangular piece just above the hood release.

Step 1: Pull off roughly two feet of door gasket. This gasket sits on a steel rail below the gasket. You remove the gasket by pulling straight up. You can remove all of the front part of the gasket if you wish. I'll talk about how to replace it a bit later. The purpose of this step is to expose the edges of the two panels hiding the x9331.



Step 2: Remove a portion of the lower panel. You do this by getting your fingers under the edge of the panel closest to the door area and pulling the panel toward the center of the car. You will hear a popping noise as the Christmas tree connectors release. You are going to want to keep the panel away from the area containing the x9331 by wedging something between the lower panel and the door sill. The lower panel is the black shadow at the very top center of the image. I used some scrap pieces of lumber to hold it in the position shown.



Step 3: Remove the upper panel. This is a small triangular panel. Put your fingers under the edge near the door sill. But this time, pull the panel straight back toward the back of your MINI. Again you will hear pops as Christmas tree connectors release. In this image the panel is on its back showing its connectors.



I didn't see the x9331 at first for two reasons.

1. The black x15 connector piggy backs on the x9331 and is visible.
2. The x9331 is partially tucked away in a slot behind the kick panel just above the hood release and hidden behind a wiring run.

Once you have located the x9331, you will want to free it from its slot. Wiggle the x9331 and press up toward the roof of the car. It will come free. There should be sufficient slack in its cables to pull it out where you can see it. I owe a credit to the following image showing the x9331 connected to someone on this board. But I'm not sure in what thread it was found.

 

Earlier in this thread I posted the following image of the x9331 pinouts.



Because there were changes to the audio system in 2011, I wanted to verify that the pin assignments were still the same. So I separated the male and female portion of the x9331. The following image looks at the connector from the bottom, rather than the front as in the previous image. If you compare the wire colors at the bottom of the above image to the top of the following image, you will see the wire colors are the same (brown/orange, yellow/orange, blue/brown, large white, and small brown) in order. So far, so good.



The following image looks at the x9331 connector from the top. The order is large brown, yellow/brown, yellow/black, black/brown and black/violet.



Notice however, that MINI appears to have substituted a black/red for the black/brown in the first image in the fifth pin position from the right. I noticed this when I did my soor speaker install but failed to point it out.

Conclusion: The x9331 itself and its pinouts appear to be unmodified in the 2011 from what was found in previous years. That means I can move forward with building my wiring harness, using the wiring diagrams I posted much earlier in the thread. It also means that for those of you that don't want to build your own harness, the Newministuff.com harnesses that target the x9331 shoud also work.

I won't know the answers to either approach for sure until I build and test my harness. For example, it is still possible MINI did the front/rear speaker swap in 2011. I promised to explain how to put it all back together. Rejoin the male/female x9331 connectors and position it back where you found it. Then repeat the removal steps in the opposite order. First, push the triangular upper panel back in place by positioning it and pushing straight back toward the front of your mini. You should hear the connectors snap back in place. Then remove your wedge holding your lower panel. Take a quick look at the locations of the Christmas tree connectors. Starting from the rear of the door you are going to wack the visible side of these connector locations with the soft part of your fist to reseat the panel. The last step is to reinstall the foor seal. If it came away at the end near the kickplate, slide the end back under the kickplate end then push the seal straight down and toward the front of the MINI. You are done.

 

Earlier in this thread I posted the part numbers of the BMW parts used in this harness. In summary, I ordered a male and female X9331 connector and 12 male and 12 female pins for the two connectors. I chose to order from ECS tuning. the parts took about 10 days to arrive.

I also ordered four male (274-224) and female (274-234) four pin Molex connectors from Radio Shack's online store. They came with the pins. I also ordered a male (274-226) and female (274-236) six pin Molex connector.

I picked up #14 wire from the auto store in four colors. I also had ordered some #16 four lead speaker wire designed to be pulled through walls in a house. So all may parts were in place, I had checked out the 2011 X9331 pinouts, so it was time to build the harness.

The following image shows a typical Molex Connector. This happens to be the Radio Shack six pin female connector. I have drawan lines to the portions of a pin that you need to work on for a good pin/wire connection. There is a wire crimp area, an insulation crimp area, and a solder area. I din't have a Molex crimper. I found out quickly that I didn't want to use the crimp section of an inexpensive set of wire strippers. Rather, I used a set of needle nose pliers to do my crimping.



Step 1: Attach pins to both ends of the wire. Don't start doing this until you have read the following sections.
1. Strip about 1/4" from both ends of the wire. Twist the bare edge so all the small wires are together.
2. Lay one end of the wire in the connector with the insulation pushed right up against but not in the wire crimp area. A portion will extend into the solder area. Gradually bend one wire crimp tab over the wire. You want a curve not a right angle. When you have it in place, pinch it hard with your pliers.
3. Work from the other side and do the same with the opposing tab. Clamp it hard when you get it in place. The insulation crimp area is there to provide strain relief. Follow the previous two steps with the two insulation crimp tabs.
4. If you are going to solder, melt a small amount of solder in the solder area. I didn't. but if I had it to do over again, I may have taken the time to solder these connectors as two of my earli.est wires pulled loose in later steps, causing me to have to unclamp the crimp tabs and do it over again.Step

 

Step 2: Build the pass-through wires.

The harness needs to pass through four wires from the female X9331 to the male x9331. These are the non-speaker wires running through the connector. If you skip this step, your MINI will not start. It is extremely important that you use adequately sized wire for these pass throughs, especially the large white wire and the large brown wire identified in the X9331 pinout map.



In all cases, when building a wire for this harness, there will be a male pin on one end of the wire and a female pin on the other.

The following image shows the parts for the pass-through wires.



No, I didn't drive around to every store in the City of Madison and attempt to match the wire colors in the x9331 harness. I used four readily available colors at the parts store. I eyeballed the large brown and white wires in the X9331 and figure those wires are either #14 or #16 wires. So I used #14 wires for my pass throughs. Before I hook this harness to my MINI, I'm going to put a set of digital calipers on the large wires in the X9331. If the diameters are less than or equal to my #14's I'm going to hook it up. Note that outside diameter is not a totally reliable way to measure the diameter of the copper in a wire as insulation thicknesses can vary. But in this case they should be close.

Note that X9331 pins have larger diameter pins than my Molex connectors, presumably to deal with the higher current running through the large brown and white wires. The pin diameter difference is not an issue on the pass-throughs as I'm using X9331 connectors on both ends of these wires. I followed the steps in Step 1 and build my pass through wires.

 

Step 3: Build the wires going to the Molex connectors

The remaining eight pins in the X9331 are the speaker leads. I don't want to pass those leads directly from the male to the female side of the X9331. So I'm going to divert those 8 lines into Molex connectors. Fom the female (head unit) side of the x9331, I'm going to want to have the option of sending those speaker signals to the input side of my Alpine Amplifier. Once amplified, I want to return the Alpine outputs to the male side of the X9331 where they will be routed through factory cables to my speakers.

In my install, I have no current plans to use the factory rear speakers as they are not 6x9s (It is a convertible) and I'm going to rely on my powered Sub for bass. The signals to my powered sub will go directly from the Alpine using the preamp outs from the Alpine. So I would really only need to build a four pin Molex out and a four pin Molex in using the full spectrum front speaker signals from the X9331.

In this case, I decided to hedge my bets for two reasons:

1. There is a small possibility that MINI did the speaker swap in 2011 and the full spectrum signals are now coming from my rear speaker leads. I won't know till I hook up the powered sub.
2. There is also a small possibility that in my rear seat delete project, I may want to use the rear speaker leads for a purpose yet unknown.

So I'm going to build output and input Molex connectors for all 8 speaker leads, a total of 16 wires. Eight of these sixteen wires will have a male X9331 connector on one end and a female Molex connector on the other. the other eight leads will have a female X9331 connector on one end and a male Molex connector on the other. Here is an image of the parts for the 8 wires with the female X9331 connector. Notice the difference in diameter between the X9331 pins and the Molex pins. That is not an issue here because speaker wires carry very little current.



The wires are #16 speaker wires, a diameter larger than the factory speaker wiring. At the same time, they are smaller in diameter than my pass through wires making it eash to tell them apart. Take your time in this section. Because you will be repeating these steps as many as 16 times it would be really easy to zone out and mismatch your connectors. Again in all cases you will have an X9331 connector of either sex on one side, and a Molex connector of the opposite sex on another.

 

Step 4: Build the Pass through Portion of the Harness

This step takes only a few seconds if you do it right. You could spend a lot of time correcting your mistakes if you do it wrong.

Keep in mind that the X9331 male connector your purchased will mate with the female x9331 connector on your MINI. And the female x9331 connector your purchased will mate with the male X9331 connector on your MINI.

What I did is scroll back up this thread to the labeled diagram of the female X9331 connector posted in Step 2. With that image in front of me on the computer, I laid my purchased female x9331 connextor in fromt of me. when you do this check the grooves on the connector against the image to make sure you don't have it upside down. Also, make sure you are looking at the connection end, not the wire end.

Once you have your female connector properly oriented, it is a relatively simple matter to push the pass through wires into the appropriate pin positions on your conector. I matched my white wire to large white, my black wire to large brown, my red to small brown, and my blue to brown/white. Push the wires in from the back side of the connector. When you hear the click, they are properly seated.

Then take your male X9331 connector and lay it at the other end of the harness. Double check its orientation. If you are not sure of orientation, test fit it in the female connector. Once you are sure of correct orientation. push the male pins on your pass throuh wires into the same positions at the back of your male X9331 as they are on the female connector. When you finish, your harness should look like this.