Alright, maybe I didn't say it clear enough. The cold air that people tend to get for the V6 can actually hurt performance. Typically they have a metal tube, and that tube gets warmed up by the motor, essentially negating any positive gains by drawing in "cold air"
The air silencer is a little rubber piece in the fender where the air filter is. You can pull it out in approximately 7 seconds. If you really want some "performance" drill a bunch of holes in the stock filter box and put the KNN drop in as I said earlier.
I have pace setter long tubes, fitted to a custom H pipe and one Mac muffler and one flowmaster. The cats melted from running rich so I knocked them out, otherwise I would have left them in to try to stay quieter and retain back pressure, because the long tubes kill the bottom end performance. My car also has an enormous cam and a half liter of displacement over yours so it sounds a lot different than yours would with a similar setup.
Trust me, keep it as quiet as possible.
If I were in your shoes, I would be looking for a set of split port heads and intakes and saving up for gaskets to throw all of that on and enjoy the performance of a stock 99+ v6.
