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The most "premium" of overpriced stock setups are still cheap penny-apiece paper cones and a huge compromise. There are a few common practices considered to be acceptable shortcuts that really just hamstring your stereo upgrade: 1. Stock wiring -- yeah it's convenient, and might work ok, but you're just upping your chances of shorts and doing your own lets you go to a thicker gauge and not worry about stupid connectors. 2. Not amping your nice new speakers -- pick a set of random, mid-market brand name aftermarket speakers and you're already worlds ahead of the stockers. Trying to run them off your receiver castrates them. They're made to handle 50 or 100 or 150 watts, and your receiver is claiming 25. And that 25 is complete BS...you MIGHT be getting 10 honest watts from a nice unit. You're trying to run 4 speakers from a receiver with a 16 or so gauge power wire that just isn't flowing that much current (and the receiver has to take what it needs for the fancy display, the CD motor, the laser, the DAC, the signal processor, and the preamp...its "amplifiers" have whatever's left). And that doesn't even get into how messy the signal is from the circuitry crammed into the receiver vs. a dedicated unit. 3. Trying to integrate an aftermarket receiver with stock speaker amps. The amps are much crappier than your run-of-the-mill mid-market name brand model, so even if you could get them a clean signal they're not going to do your sound any favors. Then introduce the fact that you're messily amplifying the signal in your receiver, then using some terribly inefficient & messy middle-man to cut that signal back down to preamp level, then re-amplifying it with the crappy stock amps. Don't do it. A very decent aftermarket setup is not terribly expensive or complicated, and does not take magical fabrication skills, so find any of a million guides online and go step by step.
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