- Do you like to jam out in your car but your speakers kinda sound
like they're underwater? (distorted upbeat music)
('Pop Up Up And Down') The Miata only has two little
door speakers and no roof. I can't hear the music. So today, we're gonna install a six set of JL Audio speakers and amp. So, I can finally start to hear the music. We'll talk about how to
pick a set of speakers, how to match an amp to them. And then finally, of
course, how to install 'em. We'll see if all the time, money, and effort it takes is worth it. I have a feeling it's gonna be. I'm Zach and this is Money Pit, it's time to hear the music! (upbeat music) (thunder cracking) - Thanks to Omaze for
sponsoring today's video. All my life I've been searching
for the ultimate off-roader. That's why Omaze brought me
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win this Ram 1500 TRX go to omaze.com/donutmedia. If you use promo code RAM150 you'll get 150 additional entries. That's omaze.com/donutmedia. Good luck. - All right, now before we go slam in new speakers in this
thing all willy nilly, let's get out the old decibello meter and see how loud the
speaker system is now. So we can see how much we've improved, in terms of loudness at the end of this. (inhales) For that, there's only one song that we're legally allowed to use. (distorted upbeat music)
('Pop Up Up And Down') All right, so with my
phone volume maxed out and the head unit volume at 25, we maxed out at 87.8 decibels. Now I'm gonna turn it up and do it again, uh- but I just wanna get this at kind of a medium volume and at max volume. So, let's turn it up. (distorted upbeat music)
('Pop Up Up And Down') Well, not only is that not
very loud, it sounds terrible. Oh, that was awful. Honestly, even if these
things don't get any louder if they just sound better,
that would be a win. But, I think we're gonna
be able to handle both. They're gonna sound a hell of a lot better and more clear with
better bass reproduction, and they're gonna be way louder than that. So (laughs) we can only go up from here. And we'll finally be making
good use of our head unit. You may remember we put
this fancy pioneer head unit in this Miata a while back. But the fact is head units
don't put out that much power. They don't put outta bunch of
power to your door speakers so, if you're just
relying on your head unit to power your speakers, well you're relying on
a pretty weak muscle. That's where an amp comes in. And that should really take these speakers to the next level. It'll power them really
nicely, really cleanly. It'll sound crisp. The sound overall is
gonna sound a lot better than what this head unit can crank out. So, I'm excited. I think this is gonna be a
big benefit to the old Miata. So to fulfill my fantasy
of actually hearing music in the Miata, here's what I got. I got JL Audio's entry
level set of speakers. These are their C1's in
a six and a half inch, which is, what you need for the Miata. And then I also got their
4 Channel 400 watt amp. That is gonna be a nice
match with these speakers. And together they should sound great. JL Audio is probably my favorite
audio equipment company, so I'm really hoping
they don't disappoint. Then of course, to tie it all together, we've got our amp wiring kit. This is an important part of
any amp and speaker install. You need to be able to power your amp, give it a signal from your head unit, and then send the music
signal to your speakers. So, altogether here, I'm
in about 500 dollars. Which, you can do this for a lot cheaper but, I'm hoping this stuff
is gonna sound really good. And honestly, being able
to hear the music at all would just be great in the Miata. A stereo install is really easy
and really pretty standard. It's the same no matter what amp you have, what speakers you have, or
what wiring kit you have. So everything we do here
today you'll be able to use no matter what kind of
amp you got or speakers so on or so forth 'cause
it's all pretty easy. Now, before we go actually
taking anything out of the car the first thing I wanna do is decide where I'm gonna mount my new amp. And then that'll kind of guide me through the
whole installation process in terms of where I
need to route wires and where things need to go. So, it should make things
go a little bit more smoothly as long as I kind of have that guiding light of where
everything is gonna go. Uh- now space is kinda at
a premium in the old Miata, so I think we're gonna
have to move to the trunk. Which is pretty normal. Okay. So I think that I'm gonna be able to mount this amp right cheer. That'll be nice, pretty
well tucked out of the way. Still leave me whatever
trunk space I have. I think that'll be great
with the use of some rivnuts, I'll be able to put some threads in here and just screw this puppy
right to that bulkhead. So, this is where the amps is gonna go. So now, as I work from here on out I'm gonna be working all
my wiring to this spot. The battery happens to be about a foot and a half from
where I'm mounting my amps. So, that makes things pretty easy. Now, we're gonna go pull
out those old speakers. Okay. Here's our old
speaker an Alpine Type-E. And these are decent speakers, even if this one is a little bit beat up. But, we're replacing it with
somethin' a little bit better. So these speaker wires run through the cabin and back to behind the head unit. But, our speaker signal now is gonna be coming from the amp, not from the head unit. So we would have to intersect these wires behind the head unit and
then wire them to the trunk. Which would maybe save a little time. But then we're using this old, crappy, potentially corroded wire that's been in here since '94. So we're gonna completely
rewire the speaker wire which, does take a little bit of time, but is worth it. It's gonna give you the best results. (low tempo jazz music) So, you do wanna get an
Oxygen-Free Copper wiring kit which is the best at transmitting
signal without any loss. But you also wanna make sure
that comes with speaker wire if you're gonna need speaker wire. And you're usually gonna need
at least some speaker wire. Otherwise we've got our remote power wire. This is gonna go from the head unit to tell the amp to turn on, when I turn the key on in the car. And these are our RCAs and this is what's gonna
take the musical signal from the head unit and
send it back to the amp. These will be wired together from the head unit back to the amp. This will go from the amp to the speakers. This will go from the battery to the amp. And then there's our ground wire, that'll go from the amp to the chassis. So, these are all the things
that we're gonna need to do to get our new amp up and running. It's honestly pretty easy
and it's pretty standard. This is what it takes to install any amp. And it's not that tricky. Uh- just maybe a little scary 'cause, wiring stuff is a little weird. But, it's no big deal. I promise. So with that said, it's time to go chop up some speaker wire. Okay. So I'm basically just
gonna kinda roughly mock this up to the area where we know
we're gonna install our amp. And uh- I'll leave these a
little bit longer than I need 'em and I'll trim them to size
once everything is in place. But, you obviously don't
wanna go too short. You always gotta kinda
plan for the zigzags you might have to take when you're finally installing your wire. So, we'll have to come up and in a little and we'll go through
our little door grommet and then into the door. So, this is a little bit
longer than I'm gonna need it but I'm gonna leave that
length there and trim it later. So, cool. Now I'm gonna cut that
speaker wire at the amp end and do the same thing for the other side. (upbeat music) - Okay, really that's
about all the wire we got. So, I'm not even gonna trim that for now. It's a couple of feet too
long, but that's just fine. So now I'm gonna pop this door panel off get this speaker out
and put the speaker wire into both doors to get
ready for our new speakies. (upbeat music) So now I just clip those wires and the ends are kind of exposed. Now they're just speaker wires, so it's really not that big of a deal. But it is good practice, you know, when you're
doing any sort of wiring or clipping of wires, that you don't leave any copper exposed that can touch other
wires or touch the ground. And sometimes it's kinda tricky
to cover stuff like that up in a way that doesn't look terrible. And for that, I have one of my favorite things for wiring stuff. It's Liquid Electrical Tape. I'm just gonna dab a little bit of this on the ends of the wires I cut, just to seal 'em up, just
cause it's good practice. Okay. Now it's time for, I guess what's probably gonna be my least favorite part of this. It's really never that easy. And for such a silly thing,
it can be frustrating. And that's just getting the speaker wire from the cabin and into the door. It means we gotta go through
this little grommet guy and the inside of it's pretty
obstructed by the dash. I do not intend to take
the dash out today. What I'm gonna try to
do is jam a welding rod through this grommet, from
the inside of the door, to the inside of the cabin, and then hook my speaker
wire on to that welding rod and then pull it through into the door. That's our speaker wire
through the grommet. Now we just gotta do that
same dang thing over here. (upbeat music) All right. So now we're basically
ready for some new speakers. But before we go slamming 'em in, let's go look at 'em and talk about 'em. All right. So like I said, we've got this pair of JL Audio component speakers in a six and a half inch
size to go in the Miata. But, how did I land on these? And then, how do you choose
an amp to go with them? Well the truth is when it
comes to buying speakers you can spend about as
little money as you want and about as much money as you want. And anything in between. There's cheap stuff, there's
super expensive stuff, and there's stuff that falls
somewhere in the middle. And these fall somewhere in the middle at a 120 bucks a pair. Reviews are a great thing
to check obviously to determine whether or not the
speakers you're looking at actually do sound good. But for the most part, most aftermarket speaker companies are capable of making a
speaker that sounds great. So a lot of it really comes
down to personal preference and how much you wanna spend. But, then the question is, once you've chosen a speaker
that you like and can afford, well, how do you pick
an amp to go with it? It seems kinda confusing. And like there might be math involved. But it's actually usually not that tricky. In fact, all you gotta do is either check the description on the website you're looking at 'em on, or if you have access to the
boxes, take a look at them. So let's look at this box right now and see if these speakers
are matched to my amp. So, specs here, we've got our continuous
power handling at 50 watts, and then the recommended amp power. Which says 10 to 75 watts per channel RMS. So that's what we're looking for. An amp that can deliver 10
to 75 watts per channel RMS at 4 ohms. These speakers are 4 ohms speakers. So the resistance in
your circuit will dictate uh- how much power is pulled from the amp. So you wanna make sure
that your ohms match what your we're actually playing with. Uh- so let's check our amp and see how it matches up. We've got our power ratings here 400 watt, 4 Channel, Class D amplifier. It says 100 watts at four channels, but that's at 2 ohms,
we're rockin' at 4 ohms. At 4 ohms, 75 watts per channel. So, you can see that's a perfect match to these speakers at the upper limit of their power handling capabilities. Which means, they're gonna be as loud as they're designed to be and they should sound crispy clear. And I also think it's pretty obvious that, you know, companies
like JL build their amp to go with the speakers that they make. So, there's no secret there. If you match your sets between the same company,
the same manufacturer, there's usually gonna be a great option of things that'll play together nicely. Like what we've got here,
with our speakers and amp. So now that we know
we've got a good match, time to put 'em in. Okay, with our speaker
wires, wired into the doors, now it's time to put some terminal ends on the ends of these wires. I've got these brass
little johnny's right here. I'm gonna crimp a couple of
the female spade connectors of different sizes to match the speaker onto my wire with a little heat shrink. And then it's time to put
the speaker in for real. (upbeat music) All right, both of our
speakers are in the doors and fully wired up. Ready for the door panels to go back on. But, before I do that kind of
stuff we're gonna keep wiring. Now it's time to pull out the head unit. So, the back of the head
unit there's generally two things that you need to do. You need to install your RCA
cables into one of these spots. We'll talk a little bit
more about that in a sec. And you need to wire
your remote signal wire. Now that's the wire that takes 12 volts from your head unit when it turns on. When you turn the key on, takes 12 volts from
here and shoots it back, to the amp to tell it to turn on. 'Cause the amp is always
gonna have its big fat wires to the battery and to the
chassis always powered up. But you don't want it always on. You want it to turn on with the ignition. So that's what the remote wire does. Now, head unit harness stuff
is pretty well standardized. Your remote wire is always
gonna be a blue wire. Now there might be a couple blue wires and you might be confused so you can easily test with a multimeter switched to volts DC and you can check with the key
off and then with the key on. With the key off we want 0 volts, with the key on you want 12. So we'll just do the second half. There's my remote wire, I think. And we test it with the 'ol volt meter. So we've got a whopping 10.8 volts. Turn the key off, and you'll see that it
goes down to 0 volts. So that's a quick and easy way to check for your remote wire. The only thing we have left
to do is the RCAs up here. You've got your subwoofer out. You've got your rear
speakers, your front speakers, some video stuff like a reverse camera. Uh- so obviously we're gonna go ahead and hook up to the front
right and front left RCAs. And it's as easy as that. So I'm gonna get the wires
routed from the trunk up through here under the carpet and into the backside
of the head unit area. Often times when you're doing
a stereo install like this and you're running your RCAs you're also gonna be
running your main power wire from the engine bay back to the amp. And if you are doing
that, it's a good idea to not run your RCAs with
your big fat power wire, or else the amount of power
that the amp is pulling can interfere with the
audio signal and your RCAs and you can get some
nasty sounding uh- signal. So, always separate the
RCAs and the power wire. But this little guy,
this little remote wire that's gonna be just fine. (upbeat music) 'Kay. That's back in. Now it's time to mess around
in the trunk a little bit. All right, so to make
this a little bit easier I'm just gonna transfer
the pattern of these four mounting holes on
the amp to this cardboard. And then I can do a much
better job of holding the cardboard in place or heck I can even tape it in place to transfer
the location of the holes. 'Kay, now we'll put that in place. That's way easier. (upbeat music) All right, so to put some threads in the holes that we just marked, we're gonna drill out and
install these rivnuts. And we've used this on the show before, and we'll use them on the show
again, 'cause they're great. I'm going with an M4 size in terms of the hardware that
we'll ultimately be using. But for right now, I
need to drill a hole that the body of this puppy
just barely slips into. And then I can deform it in place and then it'll be locked there forever giving me some threads
to mount my amp with. (upbeat music) All right, the amp is (knocks) mounted. And it doesn't look too
bad if I do say so myself. So, now we can go ahead and plug our RCAs and our remote wire into the amp. Uh- we can also plug our
speaker wires into the amp. And then all we gotta do is get our big ground and our big power into the amp. And this thing should
be making some music. I'm also gonna clean up
what I got going on here. Uh- this has been a bit
of a mess since forever. And I don't like it. Uh- not to mention that the factory ground on the battery is just the
tiniest little thing ever. You know, we're adding
things that are gonna be pulling more power that
are gonna be taxing the whole electrical system more. So, I wanna clean this up
add a fatter ground and just make this a little bit more usable. (upbeat music) Ten snips. Good for more than just ten. (upbeat music) Okay. So I'm about to crimp
this big fat ring terminal onto our factory positive wires here, so this can go under our
new battery terminal. Now these are big, bad things,
and they're hard to crimp unless you have hydraulic crimpers. I'll show you how nice of a crimp we get. (upbeat music) 'Kay. That's loaded in real nice. Let's jam our wires in. (upbeat music) (Zack screams) (laughs) I knew I was
gonna do that some point. (upbeat music) All right. So our ground
is effectively beefed up. Uh- I beefed up the cable that goes from the battery to the chassis. And then I added another cable uh- that just goes from the chassis here to the chassis down here where
it's a little more solid. So our ground is sorted out. Now it's time to actually
start wiring up the amp. I'm gonna wire power
from the amp around here to where the junction will be. And, then I'm gonna round the amp to somewhere nice on that chassis. You know, with all of these
loose strands of copper, it can get frayed and bent and you end up, you know, with a stray wire potentially touching the ground terminal. What we can do to avoid that is use what's called a wire ferrule and it just slips over the tip bunches them all up into one. And it's just thin tins, so
you can crimp this into place. That makes uh- in and out
a lot easier on the amp. You don't fray your cable
and it looks good too. (upbeat music) So, ultimately I may trim a little bit more of that power wire off just to get my fitment
a little bit better, but with any of this kinda stuff leave it long until you
know you're ready to trim. So I'll leave this a little long. I might clean it up later. Also might not. Uh- so, let's keep going. (upbeat music) All right, so power and ground
are plugged into the amp. Now I'm gonna ahead and
plug in the remote wire and the speaker wires and that'll complete all
the stuff we need to do on this side of the amp. (upbeat music) And with that, this amplifier should work. So on an amp, you're gonna have control over how much power it really uses. You can use too big of an amp on speakers that are too small. All you gotta do really
is turn the amp way down. So, with that said, we
kind of have control over how loud our music is at different volumes with the use of an amp. Because I can turn it up and down. So, the fact is our volume at 25 and at max is kind of up to me, ultimately limited by
the power of the amp. Now let's play this thing
at 25 and then at max volume and just see what kinda decibels we get. I'm sure we've improved some ('Pop Up Up And Down') Okay. So the first time around we had 87.8 decibels at 25 clicks a volume. Now we've got 97 decibels. Heck, that's almost 10
decibels of increase, not bad. Now let's see what it
sounds like at full volume. And now keep in mind the only boon here, isn't just the decibels. It's also the clarity in how this sounds. If you remember the first
time around at max volume. (distorted upbeat music)
('Pop Up Up And Down') I couldn't really imagine
anything that sounded worse. It sounded awful. So, hopefully here at max
volume, it will be louder and much clearer, much more crisp, much more listen-toable. You know? Let's find out. ('Pop Up Up And Down') All right, we came up to 104.8 decibels and that's a pickup of about 5 decibels. I think we were just over a hundred uh- the first time around. And things sound a lot better. Now you may notice, and also you may not, it's kinda tough to
tell this sort of thing through video and then
through your speakers. But these speakers are
still being tasked with uh- some low notes, especially
in this bop of a song. There's some low notes that these speakers just aren't equipped to handle. They're not big enough. They're not woofers. This- these are not subwoofers. So, uh- to make these things
sound even a little bit better what I can do with the amp, one of the freedoms it gives you is I can use what's called a
high pass or a low pass filter. And in this case, I
want to kinda block out some of those low frequencies that really can only be reproduced
by an appropriate subwoofer. So by blocking out some
of those lower frequencies I can make sure that these
speakers focus on the noises and the frequencies
that they're capable of hitting and then they'll sound as
good as they possibly can. Which is another reason that doing a custom setup
like this is worth it. Because you, you end up with a lot of control at your fingertips. You can crank the power up and down. You can add speakers,
you can add a subwoofer. If you maybe wanna reproduce
those low frequencies. So, I think that this is an
absolutely worth it mod to do. It's not that hard. It's kind of fun. It's a really good way to get into electrical stuff in general. And at the end of it, you come out of it with some skills and get to listen to music and it
gets to sound good finally. And in my opinion, that's one of the most
important things in life. So, I hope you guys learned a thing or two watching this video. I hope you had a good time. Uh- I sure had a blast. And now I've got a Miata
that makes some actual music. So, if you did have a good
time and learn some stuff like this video, subscribe to the channel, follow me on Instagram @zachjobe. Follow Donut @donutmedia. And I'll see you cool cats next Wednesday. For now, I got a Miata
to put back together.
