The Boxster now has a new Alpine head unit and rear speaker kit installed and working, but not without the obligatory drama. The installer told me that the head unit I provided them was dead! I picked up the car last night and decided to double check their prognosis. Lo and behold, they hadn’t actually followed the manual’s troubleshooting guide because that pointed out the problem (the internal amplifier was off) and the unit was fine. Then I determined that the unit wasn’t remembering anything when the car was turned off. So I brought it back this morning, explained all this and they spent 15 minutes fixing everything. Yay!
PS I wanted to call out Crutchfield again. I called them about the dead unit and they told me they would swap it out for a new one, no problem, and send the new one immediately so I wouldn’t have to wait. I cancelled the return but they have been such a pleasure to work with that I wanted to note this. I will definitely be buying from them in the future.