Guys,

Here's what I ended up doing:

Speaker: Sony 3-way ES1655G
Amp: Kenwood KAC-829
Keep the stock headunit

It was somewhat painfull to install the speakers, but they fit O.K. You will need to cut much of the baskets though. I also used a foam basket from Crutchfield, but cut a large square-shaped hole on the side for the wires as well as "breathing". Currently the amp is attached to the trunk floor with velcro, but at some point I may need to enhance that setup. So far, the velcro is holding up. Sound quality and quantity are vastly improved. However the amp is an overkill for any 61/2" speaker. On the plus side, I can only crank the headunit volume by 4-5 ticks, which means I don't feed much distortion into the amp. I rewired the speakers, and had to cut into the wires right out of the harness for the speaker-level line wires. I used the under-the-door scheme to route all the wires. Power on the right side, all signals on the left. FYI.

 

How many watts per channel is the amp? I assume it's plenty for top down driving right?

 

100w rms * 2 into 4 ohms. Peak power handling is twice that. It is satisfactory top down, but bottleneck is the speaker, and not the amp. It is not even getting warm!

 

why bother keeping the stock head? I'd rather run RCA patches to the amp for more clarity.