The exhaust on the 2002 was a bit of a hackjob when I bought the car. The center resonator had been removed and a straight pipe welded in. The rear muffler lasted all of two spirited drives before entropy had the final word and a hole appeared in the body. After a twisty road run I found a 4 foot trail of flowing blonde "hair" trailing out of the muffler as the fiberglass blew out.

Old stock and beat vs new and shiny!

Admittedly the sound wasn't all that bad. With no resonator and a hole it had a nice *waaaa* under throttle.

I've installed a Stahl header and the fit with the old parts wasn't that great. Time for an upgrade...

I looked at the options available that fit my prerequisite of... inexpensive. Ha, that keeps it simple.
Cheapest I could find, even when compared to a local muffler shop,  was of course ANSA.

ANSA has two options:
A. the quieter, basic stock version that is a center resonator and rear muffler with side exit
B. the louder, twin pipe center exit Sport version that has center resonator and rear muffler.

Since mine is a weekend fun car I didn't care too much about the loudness as much as I would if I planned to daily drive it with the family etc. I was, however, concerned about the noise level of the Sport version based on several reviews of it being just too loud.

I was close to purchasing the slightly more expensive (by $100) IE Motorsport exhaust which has great reviews. I chose to roll the dice on the ANSA for the least cash outlay. I can always upgrade later if it is truly not to my liking.

After reading that the ANSA "Sport" middle resonator contributed to the loudness so I bought the STOCK version resonator center with the SPORT version rear center exit muffler. I figured this may add a little bit of sound dampening over the full sport system.

Installation was straight-forward. The old exhaust was taken out (had to cut it as it had all been welded together) and the new two piece ANSA Sport was set in place and hung on the stock hardware. With only one pair of hands it was a little fiddly trying to tighten it all up while keeping it from hitting the larger rear swaybar I installed. I used brand new plastic hanger clips and brand new rubber BMW hangers.

ANSA Sport rear, stock middle on the '74 2002

It all went in ok but its not a perfect setup due to the placement of the rear muffler hook on the ANSA. It is offset to the right hand side of the muffler so all the weight hangs on one side. This causes it to want to rotate the muffler on its axis so it settled out a little crooked. More fiddling needed.

Center exits look nice... my rear apron does not!

Fit looks good, but I may try to bring it up slightly higher

So how does it sound? Yes it is louder. A deep humm at idle. Conservative Classics lovers may want to pass. If you are ok with some noise and a louder "vroom" matches the look and feel of your car then I'd say its ok. I'll report back as I add some freeway runs and live with it for a bit. Right now I have a manual transmission leak I need to address.,. more work...
Here is a sound clip, it doesn't capture the deep bass tones though, I'll work on an outside shot in the future.