Audio advice needed

[tsitalon1]

Hey guys,

I have 15 irons in the fire and one of them is upgrading the audio in the GVR4...

Money is fairly tight, so I'm not looking for a competition sound system or anything. My goals are simply a conservatively powered nice balanced system with some punchy bass, nothing boomy.

I replaced my front door speakers with some Polk DB651s Slim-Mount 6.5's from here:
click

Unfortunately, it appears I lost some midrange...I wasn't aware that the dash speakers run in parrellel to the doors so maybe impedence may be hurting me as I believe my new Polks are 4ohm.

I'm running an older (5-7 year old) JVC head unit with BT streaming an phone that works well.

What do you guys suggest to regain my midrange/bass?

What is the "normal" rear deck replacement speakers? I'm thinking 6.5" woofers

Would an amp be neccessary for my goals? If so, would a decent 300W alpine like this work:
click

Currently the car has plenty of treble and some midrange, but it's absoluetely lacking midrange and bass.

 

[gvr4ever]

I've been running 4 ohm speakers (door and smaller ones up front) for a really long time off of an Alpine deck. If it has closer to a 2ohm load wired together, I haven't busted anything in many years. I also don't play music overly loud either. Many amps can run lower ohms, within reason.

For bass, you will need a sub. Just get a deck with RCA out, and sub controls. Some even have crossovers in them now. If you're not in to shacking your truck lid and pissing off the world, just get clearance drivers from partsexpress or madisound. If you don't need high power high SPL, this guy sounds pretty good. click Sounds better then any big box store sub I've heard.

 

[tsitalon1]

Thanks so much, good to know the impedence isn't causing my loss of low end/midrange. Though I could of sworn the el cheapo 5.25's that the previous owner put in had much better midrange.

Thanks for the link to the sub, but I think I failed to note my aversion to speaker boxes taking up trunk space.

Kinda looking at either replacing the rear deck speakers with 6.5" woofers or maybe find a way to insert a 8" woofer between the two factory rear deck speakers..

Anyone have experience with these options?

 

[gvr4ever]

If you can build a custom box, you could use a shallow sub. Mount it facing down from the rear deck. It would be way more work, but it would help save your truck space. Another option I thought of was mounting a small sub in the opening from behind the rear seat arm rest. click It would take a lot of custom work and that driver can't play very loud or take a lot of power, but it plays low for it's size.

Unless you need your truck space most of the time, you could just it up so it can be easily removed. I mounted a sub box and amp to a 1/2" sheet of MDF and cut it to the length of the trunk and used the spare tire tie down to secure it in place. If I needed all my trunk space for a weekend, it wouldn't be too hard to remove.

 

[kartorium]

I run some Elemental Design woofers in the stock locations in the rear deck. IIRC they are between 7 and 8 inch woofers. They are just right for me, they get down low if I want them too, but more provide that smooth tight clean bass that I like. It required trimming quite a bit of the stock hole out, then I had to ditch the stock trunk springs. This is the biggest problem with putting decent sized woofers in the rear deck, the damn stock trunk springs get in the way. I put in some gas struts to keep the trunk from slamming on my head. I was able to get these woofers to fit under the stock speaker grills, however, the throw is so burly on them that I had to trim the underside of the grills to keep the woofer surround from rubbing and vibrating.

Those run off a kenwood amp. Front speakers (kenwood excelons) are 4" and 6.5" and are just powered by an older excelon deck. This setup is decently cheap and has been more than enough for me. The only thing I wanna do now is swap the deck for something that has a usb input.

 

[RayH]

If there's no crossover you may be getting cancellation in the frequencies that overlap between the two speakers. This may sound crazy but you might try reversing the polarity of the new speakers just to see if there's a difference. There's always the possibility that the polarity is labeled incorrectly.