Weirdly, the passenger side went right in. The driver side put up a fight where it has to line up against the little tiny window. Ended up having to do the entire R&R process on that side a second time, and one of those safety clips is pretty sorry looking now, but it holds. For removal,
a long pick with a 90 degree end on it was just the thing for sliding the clips out of the trim.
My hot glue work also came undone on the crossover while I was wrestling it into position, and rather than taking the wiring apart, I taped it down with some Gorilla Tape. It's not going anywhere. The rest of the extra wiring is all held down by a lot of
this particular Tesa tape. I should have taken a picture of that, I was kind of proud of how clean it was. No rattles yet.
If anything comes apart or stops working inside those a-pillars, I am trading the car in.
One thing that I noticed while putting it all together - the
wiring harness adapters I used for the door speakers were backwards. For example, the (+) red/yellow wire from the car ended up going to the (-) terminal on the speaker, because the spade connectors are sized differently. I reversed the wiring on the tweeters to match. So brown --> red, red --> black.
Here's the important part though.
The sound improvement is really, really incredible for the money.
@GTIfan99 you're absolutely right. The bass hits harder, it's more crisp, and the highs are easier to distinguish without sounding tinny and piercing. I really like them a lot - wow am I glad you posted this thread.
The B&O setup in my wife's Q5 is still more impressive, but I wasn't expecting to match that with a $150-ish upgrade. This is exactly what I wanted, and I really appreciate your having posted the review and the moral support.