Blose improvement for cheap $

[Excido]

Okay, I submit. I purchased the 5x7's to see if I can get them to fit well enough

Also purchased the nd20fb's to replace the tweeters and cross them at 3.3kHz since most of the treble from the 5x7's won't make it up to you.

This is awesome, we're finally getting good weather at the end of the week, so the shipment better make it in time! I'll let you guys know how it goes!

 

[6262MS3]

Cool, let us know how it works out! 3.3k is a bit on the low side for those tweets, but in a low power system they might be ok.

 

[dkswim]

sub

 

[naddie]

Those plate speakers could be half-decent but there are 2 things that would stop me from trying them on my car.

1: Bose systems use 2 ohm mids, a 4 ohm speaker like that would drop the power on an already low-powered system. On a non-bose this probably wouldn't be an issue, but I don't know the impedance of the non-bose mids. Anyone?

2: Our door panel design sucks for a co-axial or plate speaker setup. The speaker grilles angle downwards and pretty much blocks the speaker from the near-side listener. Treble is very directional so you would probably get very little treble from the driver's side.

Another thought for non-bose peoples, with only a 5" speaker in that plate and rated to 100hz the bass from these will be non-existent. Unless you have a sub I would go for something else.

You make some very good observations. I wonder if the ohm rating is stamped on the speaker's magnet housing on the non-Bose. They usually are. If so, I'll post it if I ever decide to tear my front door's trim up. I'm a little chicken s*** to do that right now since the car is brand spankin' new.

 

[Excido]

You make some very good observations. I wonder if the ohm rating is stamped on the speaker's magnet housing on the non-Bose. They usually are. If so, I'll post it if I ever decide to tear my front door's trim up. I'm a little chicken s*** to do that right now since the car is brand spankin' new.

I know that the non-bose speakers (the ones I have) are rated for 4 ohms, 4 x 25W RMS, which is exactly what the plate speakers I bought are.

I think what I'm going to do at a later date is replace the rear door speakers with ones that can go as low as I can get them to, then put a low pass filter at around 200-300Hz and just fade the balance to the back for more bass. Man this will suck for passengers back there

 

[6262MS3]

I think what I'm going to do at a later date is replace the rear door speakers with ones that can go as low as I can get them to, then put a low pass filter at around 200-300Hz and just fade the balance to the back for more bass. Man this will suck for passengers back there

If you go that route it would definitely be worth doing some sound deadening to the doors. Our doors are very reasonant and a major cause of the boomy, muddy bass in our stock systems.

 

[Excido]

If you go that route it would definitely be worth doing some sound deadening to the doors. Our doors are very reasonant and a major cause of the boomy, muddy bass in our stock systems.

Yeah, I noticed that a bit. You can get quite a bit of resonance just by knocking on the door. What are some common (cheap) solutions? I can't do it right now since I'm on co-op and all my power tools are at home, but what are some common solutions? I was thinking of just cutting some blocks of scrap wood to fit inside the door real snug and just use some double sides tape to keep it in place (nothing permanent).

 

[6262MS3]

Hmm, it's more the plastic panel behind the trim panel. This is what the speaker mounts to. The metal of the door as well. Raamat is the best compromise in cost effectiveness, to get cheaper then that you can get spray cans of asphalt undercoating to mass-load the panels a bit (wouldn't work nearly as well, though). The biggest downside to that is if you ever want to put proper deadener on down the road you'd have to scrape that crap off.

 

[Excido]

So I got home today to find my speakers laying on my doorstep! Needless to say I jumped right in and started to install them. The woofers couldn't have fit better. The best part is that they came with the right connector on them! Go figure! So once I got the woofer installed, I went to work on the tweeter. This was the more difficult part. I didn't have an extension cord to solder the tweeter right in, so I had to innovate. I ended up taking a dremel tool and cutting off the connector on the stock tweeter and putting it on my new one. Wasn't too difficult, really. After that I put everything together and gave it a test run, and my initial reaction can probably be best described as such...
(nana)(nana)(nana)(nana)(nana)
The improvement was enormous. No more muddy bass (well, not as muddy as before anyways), and I could actually hear the tweeter! The left right comparison was ridiculous (only had the passenger side done), so I then went out and did the driver side. That's when I realized I only ordered one capacitor (boom07) So tomorrow at work I'll try to find one laying around so I can get the other tweeter in, but at the moment I have both woofers going strong!

So my advice to all of you is GO OUT AND BUY THIS SPEAKER. It's more than worth the money! Now for some pics!

 

[6262MS3]

Nice work! I'm glad it turned out well!

 

[ihadacivicsi]

So I got home today to find my speakers laying on my doorstep! Needless to say I jumped right in and started to install them. The woofers couldn't have fit better. The best part is that they came with the right connector on them! Go figure!

Hey, good to know that those cheapo speakers work great. They must have been intended for Mazda/Ford cars because they came with the right connector. Since the speaker has a woofer and tweeter, is there not some sort of simple crossover, eg capacitor, on them?

 

[Excido]

Hey, good to know that those cheapo speakers work great. They must have been intended for Mazda/Ford cars because they came with the right connector. Since the speaker has a woofer and tweeter, is there not some sort of simple crossover, eg capacitor, on them?

Yes, there is a crossover on them. It's not bad surprisingly. At a glance it looks like a 2nd order Butterworth to the tweeter, and the woofer is full range. I think at a later point and time I will mod the woofer with a 2nd or first order filter as well. Since I have the tweeter crossed a bit low at 3.3kHz I did notice a bit of distortion sneaking in to the tweeter at around 20-22 (didn't go any louder), but even then it still beats the snot out of the stock speakers. There's more quality treble from the plate speaker than I expected, so the next time I make a buy at PE I'll get some smaller caps and raise the crossover to 3.5-3.8kHz.

 

[naddie]

So Excido - besides those speakers, what are your parts list? Your inductors and capacitors must be different since you have the Sport (non-Bose) speakers, right? Our speakers are 4 ohms, while their Bose models are 2 ohms, so I would think the value of the caps and inductors must change as well to keep the crossover at a good frequency.

 

[Excido]

The only other parts other than the speakers themselves were the capacitors (12uF). No inductors, but I may change that later on for the woofer.

Putting in 4 ohm speakers to replace the Bose speakers won't be any different than what I did since they're the same speakers, but you'll probably want to use an 11uF capacitor to crossover a bit higher at around 3.6kHz. Also note that the sensitivities of the tweeters and woofers I bought differ by at least 3-5dB, so you'll need to turn the treble down and the bass up. Mine is set at -2dB for the treble and +3db for the bass.

To touch on the 2 and 4 ohm differences, this shouldn't effect how loud the system goes quite as much as you think. The thing with Bose is that they tend to use wildly cheap components in their systems. Cheap components tend to be very insensitive. I'm assuming they use a 2 ohm load to make up for the difference in sensitivity, so that the amplifier can provide more power. The 4 ohm loads should perform pretty much the same as far as loudness is concerned. And as far as amplifiers are concerned, I'd be pretty sure they use the same amp in both systems to save on costs. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Hope that clears up things a bit for you.

 

[naddie]

The fact that both the 2008.5 Bose and non-Bose share the same 34-35 volume level problem, it's safe to say that the amp is shared between the both models. I really have no idea what's the diff between the two. Some say the Bose HU is a line level output and goes through a seperate amp. If that's the case, the the 34-35 issue lies in the HU itself, not the amp (which is getting a little OT).

I might be getting these cheap speakers after all. I'm not sure how much better spending more money on Infinity Kappas or Reference would be.

 

[Breezy]

I finally got my speakers upgraded and after one day I have to say it was a substantial improvement. It's much easier to listen to music at lower volumes and higher volumes now since the sound is so much cleaner! IMO that's the sign of a truly nice sound system. Thanks to 6262MS3 for the work he did and shared!

I do have a couple of questions though ..

Would it be a good idea to also put crossovers on the mids in the rear doors too? Also is the subwoofer in the amp unit under the passenger seat?

BTW, this ought to be in the How To section of the website.

Thanks again!!!!

 

[6262MS3]

Glad you're happy with it! I thought about doing the rear mids but I have things mostly faded to the fronts to reduce midbass muddiness, so it would be a waste of effort for me. The sub is under the passenger seat. I like those dayton tweets enough (esp with how well they fit the factory holes) that I'm going to keep them in my full blown system.

 

[dpstrand]

I went ahead and bought some of these tweeters and some inductors and caps, I'm going to do this on my 2009 non-bose. I'll post results either this weekend or next after I'm finished.

 

[dpstrand]

Is there another capacitor hiding somewhere along the wiring up to the tweeter? I just removed my stock tweeters and they only have a 1 uF capacitor on them. For the 4 ohm speaker that would put the high pass frequency at 40 kHz, which obviously doesn't make sense.

 

[Mazda_Thr3]

I want to wait until Mazda replaces or fixes the 2008.5 MP3/CD issues first otherwise they may say I invalidated my warantee if they find this mod and I won't get fixed. You know... that 34-35 volume level issue.

sorry to revive thsi but are you talking about how it dies out around 23ish and muffles, then gets really loud around 35 again? mine does this too. my gf has the non MP3 stereo and when she has hers on 8, it sounds like mine on 19 or 20.