I get pretty bad distortion at gain levels of 1/2 and higher. Is this coming from the gain amplifier (is that what it'* called?) or from the speakers themselves? I know nothing about audio, but i want to fix this while keeping stock appearance.

Combination of old speakers, weird amp, and too loud for the gain.

The 6x9'* in my ETR Speakered 93 SE (no gain) sound better then the ones in the 92 SSE with gain did IMO.

I personally never turn my gains over half way. If u get them too high u can damage ur amp

yeah me neither. i figured the gain was probably useless from the beginning. what size/type of spekers can i replace my rear ones with?

any 6x9 will work but a compenet system will work to but with some modifcation?

The gains are actually for matching the voltage of the RCAs on the amp to the voltage of the RCAs on the deck

ooohhhh....stil not sure what that means though.

Are deck and head unit the same thing?

Gains are meant to compensate.

Say you have 2 decks, both with RCA preouts. One has 2.2v RMS ones, and the other has 8v RMS ones.

If you have 8v going into an amp, you don't have to boost it'* level. But if you run the same amp, but input 2.2v you're amp will still think it'* using 8v. Therefore you use a Gain, which is like a "booster" per se. It makes the 2.2v act like 8v etc.

It is NOT a volume control. The factory gain control is just a bass boost really though. The woofer section of the 6x9s are powered seperately from the tweeters, and the gain adjusts how loud they are to each other.