Mobile Electronics Australia

In Part One of our Full System Installation tutorial we covered many of the pre-installation checks and preparation. We now take you through replacing the speakers now with Part Two.

With the amplifiers mounted and wired it is time to move on to replacing the speakers. While the owner of this car had paid a fairly steep premium at the factory for the McIntosh audio system this didn’t mean that the speakers were what I’d call adequate. All totaled the OEM system featured no less than 13 driver elements around the car, but the resulting sound quality was really only average for tonality and dynamics. McIntosh, it seems, attempted to improve matters with a ‘more is more’ approach, whereas I prefer a ‘less is more’ approach while using higher grade components.

For my upgrade I chose to team Pioneer’s $399RRP TS-D1720C 6.5-inch 2-way components with their matching $269RRP TS-D1602R 6-inch coaxial set. Now, normally I’d suggest that a total system budget of around $5000 should see a solid quarter of this spent on the main speakers, but in this case I decided not to. This is for a few reasons. First of all, the main priority for this project was to enhance the car’s multi-media and connectivity attributed, and therefore more dollars ($3500 to be precise) were tipped towards the source unit to accommodate things like A/V, navigation, Bluetooth and so on.

Secondly, I’ve always felt that Pioneer’s very affordably priced TS-D speakers are some of the most under-rated speakers on sale today. Put simply, these speakers offer outstanding sound quality for the price, and are certainly more than adequate for the needs of the car’s owner. What’s more, both the component and coaxial sets feature beautiful big 25mm silk dome tweeters and Kevlar midrange cones – both being the exotic types of materials and construction used in speakers costing two and three times the price. Even the passive filter networks are of very high standards. I was very confident that this simple speaker choice would make mince meat out of the supposedly ‘high-end’ McIntosh OEM speakers. Only one way to find out, and that’s to get stuck in.

Step 1: Removing the front door trim & speakers

Front door trims of most cars like the Liberty are typically held on with a combination of screws and clips. The screws are usually found beneath the inner door handles, inner door opener, or around the armrest area, whereas the clips will normally be located around the circumference of the door itself. You can purchase specific trim removal tools from companies like Snap-on, but often the careful use of a flat head screwdriver will assist in removing the smaller trim panels like power window switches and also get the main trim clips started. I found some schematics via Google that gave clues to where the trim was held in place – making its safe removal much easier.

The Liberty’s McIntosh sound system featured a 4-way front stage consisting of a 6-inch midbass driver, 3-inch cone midrange, and dual 19mm tweeters in each front door. While a 4-way kit may sound impressive, the actual quality of each raw driver wasn’t that impressive once removed. Each driver features a bespoke mounting bracket which is held in place by Phillips head screws. A few minutes with the cordless drill frees them from the inner door skin. Note that the Liberty already featured a reasonable amount of sound deadening from standard, which saved us having to do it ourselves.

Step 2: Mounting the mid range

One of the nice aspects of the Pioneer TS-D1702C’s kit is that even though they’re a full 6.5-inch speaker that they come with neat adaptor rings to allow straight fitment into most 6-inch OEM speaker positions. I had to check for clearance issues between the speaker and the inside of the door trim, which did require the space rings to be thinned down slightly, but the new Pioneer midrange drivers slotted very nicely into the OEM speaker mounts with little fuss. Unless you really want to get fancy there’s virtually no need not to retain the OEM mount as it is often well made and is designed to fit into the position perfectly. It also often houses a rain shield at its rear but given the larger magnets on many aftermarket speakers this may need to be cut away with a jigsaw.

Step 3: Mounting the tweeters

Any quality speaker set with offer various mounting options for the tweeter, and the TS-D1702C set is no exception. In this project the owner demanded a stealth appearance, and we were afforded the choice of two stock tweeter positions. The Liberty has tweeter positions in the sail panels as well as in the upper forward section of each door. We chose the latter as it was the only space that would accept the much larger Pioneer silk dome tweeters.

Using a hole saw and cordless drill I cut into the OEM tweeter mounting plate, creating a perfectly sized hole for each tweeter to slip into. To retain them in place I used the supplied surface mounting brackets, and while the overall diameter of the new tweeters was larger they sat perfectly behind the stock grilles.

Step 4: Mounting the crossovers

The passive crossover networks supplied with the TS-D1702C kit use high quality internal components but are still quite compact and allow easy fitment into the tight confines of vehicle doors. To aid in this I removed the clear cover panels, which slimmed down their height considerably. Note that you can only do this when the crossover is sure to be free from moisture, as with this example where they were mounted high up and on the inside of the inner door skin near the tweeters.

Double sided tape is used to secure these in place properly, and then two small self tapping screws ensure they won’t rattle around the doors. The connections are clearly marked and I used a combination of the OEM speaker wires and Pioneer’s supplied speaker wires to connect everything accordingly. You can see the wiring colours leading to each door and these correspond with the loom at the amplifier’s position under the passenger’s seat. If you car’s speakers are powered front the head unit the wire colour will correspond there instead.

Step 4: Removing the rear door trim and speakers

When it comes to removing the rear door trim the same applies to that of the front, and normally the same panels that conceal screws on each front door will correspond with those on the rear. While the first door trim you approach will take up to half an hour to remove the good news is that every subsequent trim comes off in no time at all. Just remember to place all the screws and clips safely in one spot for safe keeping. Likewise, the rear door speaker will be easily removed with a few Phillips head screws. In this case it was a 6-inch coaxial speaker.

Step 5: Adapting the rear speakers

Part of doing a proper job when replacing the speakers is to seal the front of each speaker to the inside of the door trims. This is done to ensure that 100% of the sound emanates into the cabin instead of bouncing around inside the door trims causing unwanted vibration that could to the sound. The OEM speakers featured a dual density foam sealing gasket that mated to the inside of the trim, so I carefully cut this off the OEM speakers with a hack saw and double-side taped it to the new Pioneer TS-D1602R coaxial.

The comparison image clearly shows the much larger silk dome tweeters employed by the Pioneer set, and if you look closely you’ll also see the large bar core choke and Mylar capacitors used for the in-built passive filter network. Large, high quality tweeters deserve equally high quality crossover components, and this is another example of how well made the TS-D1602C are.

Step 6: Mounting the rear speakers

I tend to utilize the factory speaker wires in most sound upgrades I do these days. This is primarily because there’s no real merit in the time and expense of upgrading it when there’s no tangible sound quality improvement – at least not that I’ve heard. Using the OEM speaker you can check the polarity of the OEM coloured wires and connect a pair of spade terminals. Once done the new speaker secures into place as if it was a factory component.

Leave the door trims off until for now, as there may invariably be a small wiring or phase issue to be resolved once the source unit is in place and the initial test of playback is done. There’s nothing worse than getting right to the end of a major installation task and having to take off trim panels all over again. I’ll see you in the next chapter when we mount and wire up the sexy new AVIC-F920BT double DIN A/V source unit and get the system fired up at last!

Read on for Part Three!