Installing speakers? These techniques make a BIG difference!

when installing aftermarket speakers there are a number of small things that we can do that don't take much time but help us to achieve the best possible sound that we can i'm currently working on installing all of this gear into a truck and in this video we are focused on installing our door speakers now if you've watched my videos before you know that here on the channel i have videos where i do full sound treatment to the doors and even fabricate my own rings but the goal in this video is to do more of an everyday upgrade as opposed to an all-out sound quality install you guys have been asking for this so we're focusing on techniques that will get us the most performance benefit and value now a quick side note this video is going to start with showing how to remove the door panels in this f-150 but even if you don't have an f-150 the installation techniques in this video can be applied to any vehicle so stick with me let's get started with pulling off the door panel so that we can remove the oem speaker now removing a door panel that you've never removed before can be a challenge because after all where are all the different fasteners that you need to remove where are the different screws that we need to undo if you're unsure i've got a good solution for you if you're unsure how to get started i definitely recommend this this is the master sheet from show sponsor crutchfield on the crutchfield website you can enter the year make and model of your vehicle and if they've already researched your vehicle you can see all of the research they've done which includes knowing what speaker sizes will fit into the door also with qualifying purchases you get the master sheet here and this tells us what different tools we need for each of the different tasks that is associated with replacing the radio or swapping out speakers you can see they have this for all the different speaker positions this is the front pillar speakers the center dash speaker and in my case here i need to go through this process to remove these door panels if you want to learn more about crutchfield and take advantage of a special offer for car audio fabrication fans check out the link down in the video description i start with removing this sail panel you can use an old blanket or movers blankets to protect your table top and that just ensures that you're not going to scratch any of these panels when you're setting them aside while we remove everything i now have access to remove a seven millimeter screw and what i like to do with each of these screws as i remove them is i have a little organization tray here that's marked with all the different areas of the vehicle i like to keep those screws in each different section i can now remove the outer door pull cover and it's good to know that this cover has a little guiding tab right there now i can remove two more screws from that area there's another cover under the door pull that i can now remove once again this gives me access to two more screws that i can pull out on the bottom edge of the door panel there are two screws that are very easy to access and remove and now with all those fasteners undone i can now work around the outside of the door and i can carefully pull it away from the sheet metal the most challenging part here of removing the door panel is knowing how to properly disconnect this here this is what connects to that little handle that actually allows you to open the door what you have to do is from the back side here you have to pull down on this little tab and it will then release from the back side of the panel so we now obviously have access to our speaker here and removing the speaker is easy enough there's four different bolt locations we're just going to undo each of those and disconnect this little wire harness here so we've got our stock speaker out of the vehicle and now we need to figure out a way that we're going to adapt this mounting plate to our new aftermarket speaker for this project i'm using a jl audio c3 woofer and the other nice thing about crutchfield is with qualifying purchases they will include the speaker adapters that you need now if you've watched my videos in the past you guys know that i'm definitely capable of making these adapter plates on my own by using some really thick acrylic and some different router bits to manufacture those and while making these out of thick acrylic would ultimately result in a much more robust and strong and better mounting solution for our speakers i understand that not everyone has all the routers and router bits needed to accomplish that task and you guys are always asking me for more of an advanced installation using readily available parts so that's what we're focusing more on in this video i definitely have some good tips for you guys here that will make sure we get the most performance that we can with these aftermarket speaker adapters so first off when we line up our speaker on our adapter here we can see that there's several holes that we're not going to be using and we want to make sure that all of those holes are completely sealed up i also like to make sure i always have a good seal between the back side of the speaker and whatever adapter plate we are using anyhow so we're going to be using some speaker gasketing tape around the flange now the next step these are all the different screws and little fasteners that came with the speaker a lot of times what guys will do is they'll take these screws and obviously you go through the speaker hole there and they'll just use the screw into this plastic to hold it in but what you actually want to do is you want to take these little metal mounting tabs that oftentimes come with the speakers and we're going to sandwich the plastic in between them like this this way when the screw goes through it's not only relying on its bite into the plastic but it's also biting into that back side of the metal and sandwiching that little bracket on there it's going to make sure that this speaker holds to the adapter really well to get these to stay on the plate where you want them you can take a pair of needle nose pliers and you can simply kind of squish these down so that they have a nice thin tolerance more like that that way when i slide this onto the bracket it's going to hold itself in place now please please please don't use a power tool to apply these screws just use a hand screwdriver and you're going to carefully line up each of the screws and secure them in place so once we're done we can flip around to the back side here and make sure that our screw landed in each of those metal tabs and everything looks good you can also see we have that nice seal all the way around the outside so this speaker and adapter combo is going to work perfectly i also want to make sure i get a good seal between the back side of this adapter plate and the door panel itself so once again i'm going to use the speaker gasketing tape around the outside simple enough a little something just like this now crutchfield has also provided us with the speaker wire harness this will plug into the factory harness this way we don't have to cut this and if we do need to return back to the oem speaker it's very easy to do so but this does have some extra wiring on it that i don't need the part number for this particular harness is used in a lot of different vehicles that's why it has this extra wiring that i don't need so i just want to get it out of the way these little loopback connections on the inside here i'm just going to d-pin those inside two pins and pull out those wires this is what that little d-pinning tool looks like i have a whole collection of them for the different harnesses so i pulled these out of the plug here and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to trim this wire off and switch that over to the outside plug and i can then just cut this and solder in a new speaker wire that's going to connect to the speaker actually scratch that i don't need to solder anything to these wires because check this out obviously this original plug plugged into the oem speaker right here i've got my new aftermarket plug plugged into it right now with my wire leads extended and these are nice and long so the issue here is i need to get this connection to the back side of the speaker and obviously there's no holes in close proximity here that i can go through the sheet metal so i'm going to have to make a hole in my speaker adapter that these are going to come through from the front side and then connect to the back of the speaker and i'll of course seal up that hole as well but what's nice is these leads are in fact long enough to actually reach to the back side of the speaker so i don't need to extend these wires so now i can strip each of the wires and i'm using some of the crimp on connections that came with the speakers in order to crimp on to the positive and negative side of the wiring next i of course want to protect that connection with some heat shrinks so i put that over and shrink it down and then finally i want to tidy up this wiring using some tessa tape so here's our final speaker harnesses ready to be plugged into the vehicle and connected to the back side of the speaker here's the hole that i mentioned needing to add so i'm going to put my speaker wires carefully through that and then i'm going to seal it up with some strip caulk this is just a really pliable butyl rubber that i can put in there that's going to stay in place throughout the life of the vehicle and this just completely seals up that hole on the back side now before we mount the speaker into the door here i do need to do some sound treatment around the speaker hole normally i would spend the time to sound treat the whole door and get all those materials but on this build we're focused on sticking to a budget so we're going to do what matters most and that's this area directly around the speaker so i'm basically limiting myself to one very small sheet of material just to do around here and to do a little bit on the inside cavity there just to prevent resonance on that outside skin so here's my piece of cld constraint layer dampener that i'm going to apply i've carefully cut it out and you can see that i have some nice cut out holes of course for where the speaker is going to mount in position i'm gonna get this backing paper peeled off the back and stick it on and then use the wooden roller to secure everything down so we've got that sound treatment material completely around where the speaker mounts and i want to reiterate i'm intentionally not using much of this material i'm trying to make the most use of it and an example of that being i added this little leftover square that was cut out from the inside here i added that down here because i know that this area since it's flat it doesn't have a ton of strength and this is where the resonance is most likely going to occur in the panel so i added it there and then you can also see that darker square on the inside this square over here is a piece of the factory sound treatment material that's another flat area and it's right behind the speaker so i added the other piece of that black square there now we want to make sure that we have some sort of seal between the front of the speaker and the speaker grille on the door panel and the reason for that is we don't want the sound waves bouncing around inside the door panel we want the sound to be guided through the speaker grille so to do that we're going to use one of these foam speaker gaskets these have adhesive on the back side that will peel away and stick to the front side of our speaker so we're gonna carefully use those oem fasteners to secure our full new assembly back into the vehicle when i reinstall everything i like to hand tighten all of the screws just to have a good feel for it so that we don't strip anything out so now i can plug our new speaker harness into the oem harness and there is one last thing here that we need to do if you think about before this plug plugged into the speaker that was rigidly mounted and now this kind of just floats out there and i've seen this happen to tons of people where this will vibrate on the inside of the door panel or it will vibrate against this part of the door and in order to avoid this what we can do is we can take some of this this is just some closed cell foam i've just cut a little piece of it and i'm just going to wrap it loosely around here and i'll just use a couple of pieces of tessa tape in order to secure it in position we don't need to use a ton of tape just enough to keep it wrapped around this so that it stays here once we reassemble the door panel but by using this foam this no longer can vibrate against anything and cause noise when we're done it looks something like this almost like a little candy of speaker goodness wrapped up on inside there we're not going to have to worry about that creating any noise and now we have our completely installed speaker so all we need to do now is reapply the door panel now if you guys want to learn more about how i installed the a pillar tweeter speakers and some of my tips there along with how i built this amplifier rack and wired it check out the playlist here on the channel next time you're doing a car audio install and you want to know what speakers will fit and what parts you need to install those speakers definitely check out show sponsor crutchfield you guys can learn more about them and take advantage of a special offer for car audio fabrication fans at the link on screen or down in the video description a big thanks to them along with anthony mike mo jerry marcos william and the rest of the patreon membership team a big thanks to all those guys for making these videos possible and as always thank you for tuning in and watching

Channel: CarAudioFabrication

Views: 1,504,710

Keywords: car audio fabrication, car audio, caraudiofabrication, speaker install, component speaker, coaxial speaker, speaker upgrade, bass speaker, door speaker, subwoofer, tweeter, midbass, midrange, how to, car stereo

Id: jPNy_Adb2vU

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 19 2022