Replacing factory speakers - write-up (front doors)

[Duake]

I had written in another thread in the old forums about replacing my factory speakers, but since there's an actual forum dedicated to them, I decided to just put it in here.

I have an S70 GLT that has the 8 speaker system. The dash and front doors are 4 ohms, which going into the radio, may mean that there's an internal crossover going into those channels. The doors are just midranges and the dash are tweeters. The rear doors and rear deck are both 8 ohms and coaxial and wired, factory-wise, parallel to get a 4 ohm load into the receiver. Going off of this information, I had some options running in my head as to what to do.

After putting in my speakers today, I'm going with an 8 driver system with the front and rear channels going into 2 ohms to a 5-ch amp so I can add my subwoofer later on if I want. All I've done so far is changing out the front door drivers with the ones from my Quantum Audio components and wired them into the factory wiring for now.

The goal for the front is to add the tweeter from the component to the spot behind the sideview mirror on door and to buy a 3" midrange for the dash. Taking the factory speakers out isn't really too tough as long as you know what to do. After the first door, it was really simple and took about a quarter of the time.

Walkthrough:
Once you take the door off, which is pretty easy (take out the screw in the handle and the trim around the handle and pop the door off), the speaker is held in a bracket. The bracket is held on by 2 pop in things (red) and another screw with the same size Torx head as the door. When you get it off the door, disconnect the wire adapter and there you go. Make sure to carefully take off the foam padding around the speaker. You can reuse it on the new driver.

The driver is held in by plastic "arms" that are twisted to lock in place. I tried to not break them to twist it off, and I got lucky I didn't. I figured out I could just bend the arms with a mini flathead to get it out of the way because any other way is damn near impossible. I bent them in toward the middle a little bit so they cleared the notches they are in. You can do it without breaking them, but I did to one, so just be careful. The drivers are also GLUED to the bracket. Carefully pry it off where you can from the speaker. Just enough to hear it come off. Once you get it loose, go ahead and twist it to get it off the bracket.

You'll now have a perfectly useful mount for your 6 1/2" speaker. All I did was align the holes of my driver with places on the bracket I could screw it in at. I marked the spots with a sharpie and then drilled holes so the screws would go in better. Once you screw it in, you're good to go. Either use some speaker wire adapters or make your own to use with the factory wiring if you going that route. Just put the bracket in the same way you took it off. Pop in the, for lack of a better term, "pop-ins" and then screw the bottom back in. Make sure its tight otherwise it'll vibrate.

As you can see its relatively simple to replace the door speakers in the front. I'll do more write-ups when I do the other speakers as well. Hope this helps any of you out there!

Duake

[davidhperry]

Where did you buy your replacement speakers?