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| A DIYer's Guide to door Speaker Installation |
The following is a general step-by-step guide to installing door speakers, which are typically the easiest to get to and the speakers you’ll most likely change first. Although I focus on door speakers here, the procedure is generally the same for speakers in other locations. Keep in mind that, depending on the vehicle you’re installing the speakers in, you may come across different situations and challenges. If you think you’re not up to the task or if you get in over your head, seek out a professional installer or someone with installation experience.
Getting to the factory speaker
You first have to take the existing door speaker out to install the new one, and just getting to it can be one of the most difficult parts of the entire job. Years ago, carmakers used removable grilles and it was simple to just pop them off to get to stock speakers. But now most cars have speaker grilles integrated into the door or other interior panels where speakers are located. Consequently, you usually have to remove the entire panel to get to the speaker.
Various door panels are secured in different ways. Some use special fasteners that you’ll need a special tool to remove, and others use plugs, bolts, and screws — or some combination thereof. The most important thing is to take your time and figure out the right way — and there’s usually only one right way — to remove a door panel. Sometimes this entails just figuring out which direction the panel has to go to be removed.
You can check Internet forums for information about a given vehicle or ask someone who has worked on one.
Disconnecting the factory speaker
Most speakers are held in by screws, so detaching the speaker is usually just a matter of unscrewing the speaker and disconnecting it from the factory wiring. Speakers are usually attached to factory speaker wire with connectors. If you’re using the factory speaker wire, you’ll need to cut off the factory connectors because these connectors probably won’t mate up to the after- market speakers.
Wiring up the new speaker
After you cut off the factory speaker connectors, chances are you won’t have enough length to connect it to the new speaker. So you’ll have to add a pig¬tail, a short length of speaker wire, to act as a bridge between the factory speaker wire and the new speaker. You’ll need to strip part of the insulation off of the factory-speaker wire to get to the bare wire, and then do the same thing to both ends of your speaker-wire pigtail.
Splice together the bare-wire end of the factory speaker wire and the bare wire of one end of the speaker-wire pigtail. Then secure the connections with crimp connectors, which clamp down on a wire connection, More experienced do-it- yourselfers can also solder the two wires together. If you do use crimp connectors, cover the connection with heat-shrink tubing or electrical tape to protect the connection.
Connecting the new speaker
After you’ve done the wiring, it’s simply a matter of attaching the other end of the pigtail to the speaker’s terminals, which are the ear-like tabs that the speaker wire connects to. Professional installers will often solder the bare speaker wire directly to the speaker terminal to ensure a rock-solid connection. But you can also use special speaker-terminal connectors that slide over a speaker’s terminal. These are available at a car audio specialty retailer or can be ordered online.
The mail order and online retailer Crutchfield (www.crutchfield.com) offers speaker wiring harnesses for some of the speakers the company sells. The harness mates to the factory speaker connectors and then to the new speaker.
Accentuating the positive, and the negative
When making the connections to the speaker terminals, make sure to connect the positive lead to the positive terminal of the speaker and the negative lead to the negative terminal. They are usually marked. Otherwise, the speaker is wired out of phase, meaning that it will move out when it’s supposed to move in and vice versa. And if the other speakers in the car are wired in phase, the outputs from the speakers cancel each other out. The result is reduced volume and poor sound.
Running Wires
If you’re not using the factory speaker wire, you’ll have to run the wire from either your head unit or amplifier. This requires a little more time and a lot more patience.
The two most important aspects of running wires in a vehicle is to make sure they are well protected and well hidden.
Much of running wires is common sense, and you never want to approach it with an out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude. For example, you need to be aware of where wires may come in contact with moving parts in a vehicle. If a speaker wire gets pinched and grounds to the metal chassis of a car, it could cause a short circuit that may damage the speaker or the amplifier — or both. So be extra careful when running wires under seats or other such moving parts of a vehicle.
You can usually run wires under carpet and behind removable body panels to hide them. By removing a vehicle’s door sills and seats, you can access under ¬carpet areas. Removing a car’s back seat to run wires, if you have an amplifier installed in the trunk, is usually pretty straightforward.
When you lift a vehicle’s carpeting, you’ll usually see other factory wiring.
You can run speaker wiring with the factory wiring and even in the same wire loom or sheath. Getting speaker wiring into doors can be tricky, but you can follow the same path as the factory wiring through looms and grommets (small holes lined with rubber) in the door jamb.
Most speaker wire is 16-gauge (a measure of the diameter), which is fine for most applications. But if the distance from the amplifier to the speaker is unusually long, such as in a large van, you may want to use a slightly thicker 14-gauge wire.
After a speaker is installed and wired up, you’ll want to double-check your connections before putting everything back together. You may even want to fire up the system to make sure everything is working properly. Then put the door panel or other body panels back in the same manner that you removed them.
Before you replace a door or body panel, check to make sure there’s nothing blocking the speaker’s cone so the sound comes through loud and clear. Some manufacturers put material over speaker grilles so that they aren’t as noticeable and to make the vehicle’s interior more aesthetically appealing. But this can impede the sound. If this is the case with your vehicle, carefully remove the material between the speaker and the grille.
Securely crossing over
Most component speaker systems and even some coaxial speakers come with passive crossovers that route the appropriate frequencies to the appropriate speakers. Mounting and securing the passive crossovers is just as important as doing the same with their companion speakers. But vehicles don’t have an allotted space for passive crossovers the way they do for speakers.
You can mount passive crossovers inside a door with speakers if there’s room and if you won’t need to make adjustments to them. But many passive crossovers allow for tweaking the crossover points and tweeter level, so it’s wise to install them in a location that’s easy to get to, such as next to an amplifier in a car’s trunk.
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