Please help. I have a 2000 M Roadster (E36/7) with the HK system. The speakers are blown and I was told that there is no speakers made that will fit in the rear factory locations. I heard that there is an enclosure out there that can adapt the car to fit an 8" sub and 4" rears. What can I do, I don't want a sub in the trunk.

Try roadstersound.com for a custom-made enclosure for the M Roadster. I made my own and used a JL Audio 6w0 6.5 inch subwoofer with the stock amp. Significant improvement in bass over stock HK sub. Buy some decent 4' coaxial speakers to replace the 4's behind the seat.

If you are daring and want the ultimate acoustic definition, go with components in the rear deck. 5.25" woofers will fit with very minor cutting of sheet metal. 4 inchers will fit without modification but won't match the performance of 5.25" drivers, IMHO.

I also have a 2000 M Roadster and am in the process of updating the stereo. There are a ton of links either on the Z3 forum or in this forum if you want to see what others have done. I have found them to be missing on things that I was looking for in my stereo so here a few things I found.

You probably know your basic set-up for the "upgraded" HK stereo. There are two amps in the trunk, two speakers in the door panel (a 1" tweeter and a 2" mid-range - kind of a joke as a mid-range), 5.25" speakers in the kick panels, 3" or 4" fills behind the seats and a 6"/6.5"? sub in the rear (earlier Roadsters have two smaller subs in the enclosure mounted one in front of the other) between the roll bars and everything sucks.

Depending on your budget and your ability to work on your car you can do a variety of things.

Probably the easiest and one of the best speaker set-ups around is this one by Rainbow of Germany: http://iqcaraudio.com/bmw/bmw_E36.htm . Note, this is listed as being for the E36 sedan but will work for the Roadster front speakers (i.e. kick panels and doors - one tweeter will replace the two that you have now). I have a set of Rainbow drop ins in my Mercedes and they are awesome speakers. The price is a bit high but these are plug and play. Plug and play is quite nice as I picked up a set of Rockford Fosgate 5.25" components and they are smaller then the BMW 5.25" - enough that there is a free air gap surrounding the entire speaker so they are worthless to me. I will be selling them soon.

The sub is a dual voice coil. I didn't know what that meant but I found out and definitely makes a difference. A dual voice coil basically runs two channels (L and R) through the same speaker. Not something one would normally do but with the restricted space of the Roadster not a bad compromise by BMW in designing the stereo. I am looking at this one by Elemental Designs as a drop in replacement using the stock enclosure: http://edesignaudio.com/product.php?cid=15&pid=32&tab=Specs&cur=USD . The other choices are make your own sub enclosure (someone has posted his project on this forum), go with either of the roadstersound.com enclosures (6.5' or 8") or locate a powered Sunfire sub. The Sunfire was available a while back for around $600. I am not sure if it is available anymore but you might ask to see if someone has one if that is what you decide to do.

You probably also want to update the amps. The HK amps have very high levels of distortion but offer one very nice feature - they are quite small. I have two McIntosh amps that I am going to use in my Mercedes as they just take up too much room in the trunk of the Roadster. Instead I am going to use a Zapco C2K Competition 4 channel amp for the Roadster. Heat is an issue in our trunks so look for an amp that is resistant to overheating.

The head unit is up to you. I would replace it last after you upgraded the speakers and amps.

I am still undecided on the headunit for mine. I have a brand new Rockford Fosgate RFX-8250 which is basically a rebadged Denon unit (the Denon is only sold in Japan and retails for about $1,500 - the RF is much less but out of production) that I might use. However, I am thinking about going with a Nakamichi and using the RF unit in the Mercedes. The RF has a silver face and the Naks are black. Are you going to run an Ipod or cd changer off of your headunit? If so that will affect your choice.

For speakers for the Roadster, I picked up a brand new set of RS Audio Pro 6.5" components ( http://cgi.ebay.com/RS-Audio-Pro-165-2-way-component-system_W0QQitemZ5854136211QQcategoryZ32819QQcmdZVi ewItem ). I will need to cut the kick panels a bit to fit these but I think they will provide the sound that I want. I paid far less for them then the retail, they are difficult to find in the U.S. but are great speakers. I bought them off of Craigslist from a kid that was short on cash.

Good luck and the search engine is your friend. (P.S. If you want to have really decent sound, plan on a lot of rewiring. One reason the plug and play option is not so bad.)

I think the fellow mentioning mounting component speakers in the rear deck is meaning that for a standard E36 not a Roadster. I have no idea where you could cut into in the rear to mount speakers in a roadster as he mentions. You could put larger fills directly behind the seats but since they are just firing directly into the seat you would be doing a lot of work for little return. On mine, I am just deleting the rear fills period, something many others have ended up doing.

The M Roadster shares many things in common with the E36 M3 but there are some big differences too so be aware when you are looking around. Many things on a non-M3 E36 will not work on an M Roadster, but now I am veering off into performance parts and that should be for a different forum, lol.