you can't see much through the grill. but then i have stock black speakers too. if you have something flashy it might show more. i doubt it'd be that noticeable. you can probably take off the stock grill if you really wanted to but i think you'd hafta modify a lot to make it look nice with the aftermarket grills. think about how the back seat of our cars is constructed. the panel covering the speaker comes off and the speaker is bolted to the frame of the car. aftermarket speaker grills are usually made for surface mounting like on the rear deck of a car. you would either need to mount the speaker to the ;anel (not a good idea) or find a way to spearately mount the grill on the panel. that particular panel is very curvy (as is the stock grill) so it would probably be difficult to mount an aftermarket grill without modification.

-marc