190Evan

Im looking for a more sporty exhaust but I haven't been able to find one. I have a 1993 2.3 and don't want to just straight pipe. (not that I could the whole exhaust is welded together]

vanir

Basically you want to increase the guage and put a hiflo cat on. Any exhaust centre can do this for you, the trick is finding non-genuine muffler combinations that sound okay because of course the stock ones will be too small. The big restrictive area though is the stock cats (the underfloor one mostly), a sports cat is almost as good as no cats and that's definitely worth a couple of horsepower on these engines, but make sure the type you get is legal in your state.
A bigger guage is what will improve the actual note, won't really give noticeable performance increase on its own, might seem a little freer right up the rev range. And you may have to muck around with a few universal mufflers to get the right sound. They're not expensive though, not like genuine Merc ones.

The first thing I did when I bought mine was up the guage on a cat back with a universal muffler for a nicer sound. It was when I replaced that with bigger downpipes onwards, deleted precats, put a hiflo underfloor sports cat on, then I noticed a difference. Fabbed headers are going to be expensive, but the exhaust system itself is so cheap to redo I can muck around with that many times as I want. Going to try a different tail muffler soon, mine makes a bit of a drone midrange.