Schooled by the master!

 

Master? No. I have a fair grasp on things but I'm not even close to any kind of master or expert.

I really didn't mean to rant, but I just hate seeing people settle for mediocre or worse just because it's cheapest, easiest, or what everyone else does. It's really not that hard to get great sound without spending big money. Hell, just on the highs in my Jimmy there's only about $300 or so. That includes the sound deadening, the custom baffles, the components, the Sundown amp, and all the wiring. I got the amp used, the components on a clearance sale, and the sound deadening on a christmas sale that Second Skin was having. I built the baffles myself and did the rest of the installation myself. It's not perfect, but I've yet to have a negative comment on it. It gets more than loud enough for everyone I've played it for, you can feel the midbass in your chest on most music, the sound stage sounds a little wider than the truck is and the imaging right now is dead center in the dash. It's lower than I want it to be and the stage could be wider but it blows most people away. Similar results could be done for less and most anyone would be more than impressed.

There I go ranting on again. I'll end my rant by asking, do you listen to music just to listen to it, or do you want to really enjoy it?

 

@altoncustomtech

I enjoyed reading these rants. I'm new to setting up a sound system in a vehicle. I've wired systems in the past, but I've never actually built my own system from the ground up. Everyone I know takes the cheap, easy way to their stereo system. Pretty much to them it's just about how loud they can make it and how fast they can blow their speakers out. I was talking to a guy the other day who was kind of proud that he blew out his back window with a 15" sub. I however, want to do a system purely for the music. I thank you for your rant. I've found it very imformative.

 

Phase 1:

I finally got around to replacing my dead rear door speakers in my 2000 4X4 4dr Blazer LT. The new Polk Audio db651s 6" Coaxial sound great but then again, they should when you consider what they replaced was DOA when I bought the vehicle a month ago. A really nice upgrade!

Phase 2:

I'm going to replace the front door speakers next with a pair of either Polk Audio db651 or Polk Audio db651s like the rear doors. The "shallow mount" db651s fit the rear doors absolutely perfect but I'm hoping the db651 (not "shallow mount") will work in the front doors without any mods. I want to use the db651 because it has a little better Bass response of 35Hz compared to the 50Hz of the db651s. I ordered both pair and will send back the db651s if the db651 don't fit.

If anyone has any experience installing either the db651 or the "shallow mount" db651s in your "2nd Gen" Blazers, I would love to hear about your installation experience.

Phase 3:

If I find it necessary, I will either replace the stock dash tweeters with either a pair of Polk Audio db461 4X6 Coaxial or a pair of Polk Audio db1001 1" tweeters if the 4X6 db461 don't fit.

Thanks for all the advice and help.

 

I think 3 of the 5 guys wanted to take your money. I had a set of 4x6s in the dash of my 1st gen s10. I ended up pulling the midrange speakers out of the dash and leaving the tweets. i put them into the doors beside a pair of 6.5" woofers and it made it sound waaaay better.

 

Hey, Lefty! I don't think you'll have any trouble installing Polk db651 speakers in your front doors. Their top mounding depth is only 1-5/8". I just finished installing a pair of Kenwood KFC-G1620 coax speakers in the front doors of my wife's Jimmy. The mounting depth of the Kenwoods is 2-1/8", and those fit in there, so you should be fine.

I also put a pair of Polk Dxi460 speakers in the dash when I installed the Kenwoods in the front doors. I think the Dxi460's are essentially the same as the db461 speakers (not the db461p). Specs, drivers, etc are identical, but the Dxi's are marine rated and the cosmetics are altered slightly. They fit. It's really, really snug, but they DO fit, and the Polks sound great together with the Kenwoods!

No rear door speakers in the truck yet. Like yours, one of my back door speakers was dead, but I want 8-ohm units to keep the impedance close to the original 9.5-ohm Delco units, and I couldn't find an 8-ohm replacement locally. I have ordered a pair of Visaton 3017 BG17 speakers from Parts Express. Their design is very similar to the Delcos - full range 6.5's with with fabric surrounds and paper whizzer cones for the treble range, but their sound quality should be a little better.

I thought about ordering a pair of 8-ohm coax for the back (there are a few available online), either that or 8-ohm mid-bass drivers, but I decided to keep the back as close to OEM as possible. Not looking for a truck that goes boom, just one with an audio setup that sounds decent.

The Visatons appear to have decent overall response (80Hz - 20KHz), fairly high efficiency at 93 dB, and an impedance that will work well with the factory electronics, so everything should sound pretty good. The back speakers will hopefully arrive in time to get them installed this weekend, and I'll post about how the project turns out.

 

This is a great thread, as I too am about to put a 'decent' system in my Blazer. Being a musician, I can tell you that music sounds better in the car 90% of the time! You can never get a live performance mixed well unless you're in a big room with good monitors and someone that knows how to mix it.

Any love for other brands of speakers? All I seem to read about on here are Polk.

 

You see a lot of Polk on here because they're pretty plug and play friendly and priced fairly good as well. Budget and personal tastes play such a huge part in what people use that it's really not fair to judge what's good or not by what's popular.

It's unfortunate that people's choices are only as good as their best educated guess and in most cases that education isn't much more than what the salesman said or because that person knows somebody's buddy who's using that sub or speaker and impressing people or because they see that it's the popular item amongst some peer group of theirs. Most of the time people simply either don't know what "good" sound really is (they've never been exposed to it) or they don't care.

I was exposed to what SQ really was years ago at competitions and have been trying to achieve that in my vehicles ever since. It's utterly incredible to hear music played back so faithfully that it sounds like you're right there with the group during the recording. Perfect imaging, perfect sound stage, tonal balance and flat response is how it's done and it is possible to do in a vehicle, but not without some real work, money and dedication. I am still working on learning how to read T/S params and tech specs and know how good that driver really is and what it's optimal use would be. Still learning how placement, axis orientation, and other installation issues affect the given response. Still learning what the good and bad compromises are for different goals. There's such an incredible amount to learn its really almost overwhelming. I would love to learn it all someday though realistically I know I'll only ever scratch the surface.

I think a person can achieve a great balance of budget and installation friendliness in comparison to quality of sound. It's not going to happen by throwing a bunch of coaxial speakers in the factory locations and calling it done, but a person doesn't have to spend thousands on high end equipment and custom dash & door fiberglass work either.

As to your question, the list of brands is as long as a person cares to make it, again because it has so much to do with personal preference. In general Alpine, Polk, Infinity, JBL, Image Dynamics (questionable now that original owner is gone), Rockford, JL Audio, Diamond Audio, Hertz, Arc Audio, Zapco, Phoenix Gold & SoundStream & Precision Power (higher end units), Rainbow, Morel, Memphis, Focal, DLS, Dynaudio, Boston Acoustics and a few others make speakers that are pretty much a sure thing in most cases. A few brands you may not have heard of, Incriminator Audio, Crescendo Audio and Sundown Audio have introduced some component sets are are gaining notoriety quickly among the car audio enthusiast circles.

In the end it still comes down to two things in my opinion. First is the most important thing, that only you know what sounds good to you. The main goal is that you're happy with the results. Second is that it all comes down to the installation. The cheapest speakers in a most ideal installation have the potential to outperform in every way the most expensive speakers in the least ideal installation.

 

Update. I have finally replaced all six speakers in my Jimmy’s audio system, and the system sounds great. Certainly not competition grade, but very musical and light years ahead of the way the OEM speakers EVER sounded. Imaging is superb with coax units installed in both the dash and front doors, and the phantom center channel is rock solid.

Tech notes:
It took a fair amount of field engineering and fabrication to make all the aftermarket drivers fit the factory locations, so it was slow going, but the project was definitely worth the effort. (See my earlier post for a list of the speakers I used.)

Fitting the Visaton (German brand) 6.5” full range 8-ohm home audio speakers into the Jimmy’s back doors gave me the biggest headache. Not exactly plug-n-play. In fact, my initial assessment was that I couldn’t use them at all. Apparently just like everything else in the mobile audio world, speaker sizes are often somewhat exaggerated, so my 6.5” home audio speakers were too big to fit the rear door speaker cutouts. Besides not fitting the openings, their mounting hole spacing is different from the OEM arrangement. Sort of like a 4x114.3 lug nut pattern vs. a 4x100.

After spending half a day trying to come up with the best way to make the Visaton speakers work back there, I finally decided on a pair of adapter rings. There are spacer rings available for automotive speakers that are too deep to fit some OEM locations, so I decided to score a pair of 1/2” spacers and hog them out to fit the Visaton speakers. This I did. Then, I mounted the spacers to the plastic speaker enclosures inside the doors and attached the speakers to the spacers.

Everything turned out great. The back door trim panels cleared the Visatons, despite the extra 1/2” thickness introduced by the adapter rings, and the installation looks OEM. But the quality of the drivers and the sound are much better.

Cheers!

 

Ok , so just to be clear here , when installing components in the front, is flush mounting the tweeters in the factory dash grills a good idea or no? I have a 2000 blazer LT.