Hey guys,
In my 90 Mitsu van there is a stand alone speaker located under the dash main body in its own housing. It crackles like crazy at times so I took it apart today to see why. Well it was more than I though it was inside. There was a small circuit board and some insulation inside the housing like maybe it was a small subwoofer. The speaker appears to be a 4" speaker that is also marked 4 ohm. The material around the edge is all broken down,and completely failed. I was wondering if you guys can point me to a place to just buy a speaker like this. Is there a standard to the bolt pattern of speakers?
Thanks,
Chris
A lot of older vehicles had a center channel sub like that - my Supra had one. Speaker screw patterns are pretty universal, any decent speaker set you buy will come with a couple sets of adapter rings too. Almost all vehicle speakers are 4-ohm, though these days Infinity (and maybe some other brands) has 2-ohm speakers out there that sound really awesome and reduce the load on your wiring/amp/head unit.
I would just replace it with another 4" speaker (minus the circuit board, which is probably there to filter high frequencies out for the sub), or remove it completely. If you ever plan on going to an aftermarket head unit, you might as well just gut it - at that point you'd need an external amp to drive the thing, which is totally not worth it for a single dinky little 4" midbass driver.
Celicas like mine had a tiny sub in the dash. Probably about the same size.
The foam surrounds can be replaced, but it's a bit of work and probably not worth it for a 4" "subwoofer".
I can not get the parts express site to load for some reason, but they would have a cheap 4" woofer that you could replace it with.
Okay- this is a little expensive, but probably an upgrade.
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=295-378
This is cheap.
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=292-404
And probably would work just fine.
I'd go with the second one. I'd also replace the crossover network, but I'm OCD.
Or, you could do what I'd do and remove it all together. The only center channel speakers I've ever liked in cars were full range speakers. My Astra has one in the dash, and it really helps with imaging. It would be awesome if I could add in a DTS processor.
Dropping the impedance load actually overworks the amp. If the amp can handle it without overheating, you do get more power out of the amp. I wouldn't worry about it so much with a newer head unit, but with something on the older side, you may not have enough heat sink to shed the extra heat. When I run lower impedance speakers on a head unit, I pull it apart and replace the white goop thermal compound with AS5 and add heat sinks to anything that generates a significant amount of heat. I used to have failures until I started doing this.
fast_eddie_72 wrote:
Okay- this is a little expensive, but probably an upgrade.
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=295-378
This is cheap.
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=292-404
And probably would work just fine.
$27 is not a lot of $$ for a quality speaker. I wouldn't use the cheap one.
These are very good http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=290-212
Zomby Woof wrote:
$27 is not a lot of $$ for a quality speaker. I wouldn't use the cheap one.
These are very good http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=290-212
I don't disagree at all. In fact, for a quality driver, $27 seems like a steel. I guess I made assumptions based on the situation. If you just want to get rid of the broken sound from the crumbling surround, the cheap speaker will do that. If you want to upgrade to something a lot better, there are a lot of options. That driver that ZW linked to looks really nice!
In reply to Raze:
Lot of listings on your local craigslist for 4" woofers?
Raze
SuperDork
6/3/12 11:02 p.m.
fast_eddie_72 wrote:
In reply to Raze:
Lot of listings on your local craigslist for 4" woofers?
I edit my original statement to: JUNKYARD 
