I recently upgraded my stereo with a new unit and 6x9's in the middle. I couldn't find any new speakers to fit in the dash so i had to keep the factorys in there. not happy about that. My old system was a primium with 6 speakers. I've been told the factory system has some kinda grounded speaker system so new wiring needs to be run. I ran new speaker wiring from the middle and dash and opted out on the hatch speakers. Now i'm wondering if there's either an easier way to get new wires to the back or if the factory wires can be re-used ? Has anyone put larger speakers in the back without having to cut the hatch up ?

 

I up graded the front speakers with 5 1/4" without much problems. New 6x9's in the center and a set of 2 12" subs in the back, so I left the small rear deck speakers alone.

 

I found there's not enough depth for speakers with deep dishes in the hatch, so they end up sticking out and taking up cargo space, plus I don't want to weaken the hatch door by cutting its inner skeleton. 6 x 9 speakers suck in the Aerostar, no matter where you put them, as soon as the van is on the road, the sound drowns.

dash speakers can't be any larger than 5.25" and in that size they suck anyway even if you find any with 3 screw mountings, (triangular). A total wasted effort. For my van, I'm thinking 8" or 10" round speakers mounted where the 6 x 9 normally go, and 6½" 3-way at the doors. I've had 3 Aerostar and it's always the same result. Time for serious improvement.

I rewired each rear and dash speaker completely. I think it was a wasted effort to rewire the dash speakers, since I never want to hear them, the sound sucks.

 

With the amps that we added to the system and the speakers, no problem with hearing them. Can hear my wife turning off the hiway a 1/2 a mile away, it is her van.

 

I have plenty volume/power with my Kenwood head unit, what I don't have is high-fidelity sound because the speakers cannot reproduce it, so as soon as I'm on the highway at 70mph, the sound is drowned, and as I increase the power to compensate, the speakers start to sound bad and shrilling, bass evaporates. Definitely no high-fidelity there.

 

Don't worry about hatch speakers. Unless you have seats in the back facing rearward, the hatch speakers are essentially worthless.

On replacing the dash speakers, I believe I wrote an article that should be in the stickies. You can in fact put larger than stock speakers in the dash. The hardest part is getting the screws in, since you have to drill new holes. Other than that its pretty straightforward.

On mine I installed much larger ones onto the dash panel because the PO ruined the panel anyway. I am running dual 6" speakers in my dash.

If you really want speakers in the back, cut holes in the sides of the cargo panels, and mount them there. You can run much larger speakers, get better sound quality, and the wiring is not so difficult to run. I guarantee your head unit cannot output enough to power them though, so unless you are willing to spend some serious money on amps, you aren't going to gain anything.

 

Well with the amps, the new head unit and speakers, the van sounds great at all speeds.

 

Bertha, do you have the factory premium stereo or aftermarket ? do you have all 6 speakers ? Kahn, why wouldn't tha hatch speakers help if you faded the stereo like 3/4 of the way to the rear ? How would you wire up the rear speakers ? in paralle with the 6x9's in the middle or what ?

 

Because they are too far away, and this creates two problems. Firstly if you try to run 6 speakers off a unit designed to run 4, then you basically have to overwhelm 2 of the channels. If you hook them in series, you don't have enough wattage to overcome the combined resitance of the speakers. If you hook them in parallel, the drivers were never meant to run that kind of amperage and will overheat.

Basically if you run speakers in series you half the volume. If you run in parallel you double the volume, but you also double the wattage by halving the resistance.

Better outboard amps can handle this, they have larger drivers. But a head unit does not have the room or the cooling for that kind of duty. It will work fine at lower volumes, but the units will still not last nearly as long as they should. And even though you get more sound, the quality of the sound actually decreases because the drivers max out more easily at higher power levels.

The second problem is sound delay. You can't really perceive it, and yet you can. Basically because the speakers are farther away, it takes a few milliseconds longer to reach your ears. Your ears don't just determine the distance a sound is away from you by volume, the sound delay is calculated by your brain to 3d position the sound source. Because of this delay, your ears will actually perceive the sound to be coming from further back than the actual position, even thought he back speakers will be quieter to your perception. This is not the way music was meant to be heard, it should sound like it is surrounding you, not behind you.

Trust me, you don't need the hatch speakers anyway. My system focuses all the sound up front where the passengers actually are. My system is probably way over the top by your standards. I have 6 channels (with expansion for two more), and a 12" sub driven by 3 amps (one for the 4 front channels, located in the dash and front doors), one for the rear channel (located on the middle), and one for the sub. The amp that drives my sub is capable of driving a second sub too. Mine does 1200 watts rms and can do 2100 watts peak. All this in an Aerostar van.

 

Even if you can perfectly phase align the audio signals coming out of each speaker, the interior has enough obstructions to distort the phase so that you lose all the imaging. So you can forget about phase accuracy inside a car of any sort. The only thing you can hope for is to balance out the resonance characteristics of the interior and compensate for road noise with a good equalizer, preferably a separate one for each speaker.

This is why I don't bother with fancy audio systems in my cars anymore.