It was a direct swap out, the only thing that changed were the mids. At first the evils did not sound as good as the carbons, but keep in mind the carbons have about 4 years of play time so they were in their sweet point. The more play time I got on the evils the better they started to sound. With that being said, I recently swapped the carbons back in and could not really tell the difference with my ear. Is one better than the other? I would say they are on a level playing field in the proper install.
As you can tell my doors are pretty well dampened and sound dead so if there was a significant sound difference I would have noticed it right away. Also keep in mind the SSA amp was used for this test because I wanted to see if I could hear a difference using this amp.
I am currently beating the evil mids pretty damn hard and loving them as much as I did the carbons.