WRX Speaker Upgrade Guide Part 1: Choosing a Speaker

what's going on thanks for joining me today I'm gonna go over the upgrade path to upgrading your speakers in your WRX now if you don't have a WRX that's fine most of the stuff I'm going to talk about will probably apply to your car too I'm getting ready to install these speakers right here in my front doors I just installed sound skins on all four of my doors to seal the large cavities to reduce the vibrations within the doors and make it act more like a sub enclosure along with reducing road noise all of that actually worked and it worked phenomenally and I did that so that I can get more mids out of these speakers right here which is the speakers that I had the OEM kicker upgrade in the WRX now I thought I would be happy after doing that with these speakers and I mostly was but it sounded so good that it really made me want a little bit more bass and since the doors now can handle it with all of that sounds pins installed I decided to upgrade to better speakers just in the front so what a perfect opportunity to show you the difference between the stock speakers that come with the car if you don't have an upgraded audio system in your car the OEM of great solution which is this kicker right here and an aftermarket speaker now this is not going to apply to those of you who have the Harman Kardon package in your car because you already have a component upgraded speaker listening experience in your car if you want to upgrade that that's a whole different conversation and a little bit more complicated than what I'm gonna talk about here but the rest of you who have the regular stereo in your car with these speakers right here I'm going to show you exactly how you can upgrade your speakers in your car all of the parts are you going to need and the things to keep in mind when you're shopping for speakers so without further ado let's get to it okay so let's talk about the stock speaker and why it's a good idea to replace it so what we have here is a very basic mid-range speaker it's a forum speaker forms impedance and we'll talk about impedance in a little bit but it says right next to it max 35 watts so it's a very low power speaker but it's actually perfect for most stock head units because most stock head units are actually very underpowered and also the base and most stock head units is rolled off so as you turn up the volume the speaker gets louder but the base doesn't compensate as you go up in volume the speaker right here really doesn't do anything very well it doesn't do well with the lows it's very underpowered so it's not gonna give you very good lows at all and it doesn't have a built in tweeter within it so it's not gonna give you very good highs either so this is not gonna WoW anyone but it's cheap for the manufacturer to produce and they put them in all their cars and by putting this in your car they're pretty much guaranteeing that you're not gonna be happy with the sound system in your car and that you're going to pay for something like this so that they can make more money this right here is the kicker upgrade it's an OEM speaker specifically made for this car because it's made for this car it already has the speaker adapter right here that plugs right into the cable that's in the car so you don't have to do any cutting of any kind or splicing it already has the three mounting holes in the exact location where they need to be and it's also angled the way it's supposed to so you can see right here that it this part right here to wider than that part right there that's so that the speaker is angled up towards the listener this speaker right here it's an obvious upgrade over this speaker right here this is what's known as a coaxial speaker because it has not only your mid-range woofer right here but it also has a tweeter built-in for the highs now this speaker right here is considered a full-range speaker and you don't need a crossover network because it comes with a crossover already built into it so when the speaker gets a full signal right here from the head unit and it goes through here the crossover network that's built into the speaker is only gonna send the very high frequencies to the tweeter right here and then the rest of the frequencies to the woofer right here so you don't have to worry about having active or passive external crossovers it's all built in the speaker obviously doesn't need that because it doesn't have a tweeter or anything else as far as power is concerned this one says max 35 watts this speaker right here power handling 50 Watts average 50 watts RMS or a hundred watt max huge improvement over this speaker right here when you install this speaker right here with that jump and power and a built-in tweeter you can expect a little bit more mid bass out of them and you can expect better definition and I was pretty happy with these speakers for a while these speakers right here are going to satisfy most listeners but once I install that sound skins and left me really wanting a little bit or in the midbass Department when you upgrade to these speakers right here you'll be able to go louder in your head unit without any distortion at all in fact with the stock head unit you'll probably able to max out the volume and these will not distort it they'll sound great the all the way through but if you upgrade that head unit you're probably not going to be able to max out the volume in your head unit with these speakers but what I really do like is MIT right I like my music very punchy when I install the sound skins these speakers were giving me way better clearly defined mid bass and it left me wanting more that's when I decided to upgrade to these right here these are an Alpine r-series speaker and as you can see right here has a built in tweeter so this is also a coaxial speaker and although it doesn't say this one is rated for a hundred watts RMS or 300 Watts max so it's a huge improvement over these and you can see just based on the size of the speaker even though they're both six and a half inch speakers you can see the difference in the phone which allows it to to flex and allows that cone to move in and out as the bass is hitting and you can also see it in the distance that the cone has to travel so I don't know if you can see that right there but the speaker right here has much more distance that I can travel then the OEM kicker upgrade right here now you might be wondering why the speaker is better than this one right here even though this one has a much bigger magnet and that's because the size of the magnet doesn't matter what matters this is the strength of the magnet so you can use a much more powerful material on this speaker than this speaker right here and you can get away with installing a smaller magnet which is great because it actually reduces the weight considerably so the weight of the sound skins installation in those front doors is actually gonna be offset by taking these speakers out and putting these speakers and now the speakers in the WRX are four ohm speakers these are four ohm speakers when you're doing your research for an aftermarket speaker make sure that you're looking at four own speakers you have to match the impedance otherwise you can come across some issues that can possibly damage your stereo another neat thing about these speakers in particular is that you can actually angle the tweeters to wherever you want so that it's more directed what I'm holding right here is the stock tweeter that comes with a car so you'll get these tweeters with these speakers right here in the car these tweeters right here are enough to do the basic job in my car right now I have the kicker upgraded tweeters are actually smaller and lighter but what I want to talk about if you look right there it says 35 watts max so this is for low power applications appropriate for the stock head unit but it's also 6 ohms so when you go to replace that you make sure that you replace it with one of equal impedance now this speaker right here has a built in filter right there so it's only gonna allow the proper frequencies through but you can still overdrive the tweeters and have Distortion if you overpower them so it's a good idea if you're upgrading the head unit to also upgrade these tweeters they're not powerful that's pretty much the same story with these speakers what's going on here is these speakers are 100 watts RMS and these are 50 watts RMS where the stock head unit these speakers right here are actually going to be louder than these the head unit is actually going to be able to drive these closer to where the speaker is most efficient because it's a 50 watt RMS speaker so if you feed the exact same power to this speaker right here this speaker right here is not gonna be able to get as loud as this one because it needs more power in order to be as efficient so where that becomes important is when you're considering the tweeters in the equation why do I say that I say that because if you're gonna start pumping more power to the front channels you're also going to be pumping power to the tweeters and that's because the tweeters are actually parallel with the front speakers it's not six channels you don't have two channels for the rears two channels for the front and two channels for the tweeters no you have four channels you have two channels for the front and two channels for the rear and the front channel is actually paralleled with the tweeters so it goes just like this so if you buy a speaker like this one right here just know that there is a possibility that you may overdrive your tweeters when you go and try to bring these closer to what these are most efficient and if that happens then you have two options at that point you can either upgrade the tweeters or you can install crossover Network to actually limited the power that goes to the twee I do want to talk briefly about some terms that you bound to come across if you're shopping for an aftermarket speaker in your car so like I said this is a coaxial speaker but you're gonna see 3-way speakers out there you're gonna see four-way speakers out there and what you end up choosing it's entirely up to you a four-way speaker versus a two-way speaker that has two more drivers basically and then the frequency spectrum is split amongst the four drivers so each one is gonna take care of the frequencies that it's made to reproduce so it should in theory sound better but that's not always the case a high-quality two-way speaker is fantastic and you don't really need to go for three or four-way versus a two-way that performs better just for the sake of having a four-way the reason why you can get away with that is because they have built-in crossover networks so that's what these capacitors are so because the speaker has a building crossover network it's considered a full-range speaker so you can feed it a complete signal and the speaker is gonna filter whatever frequencies it needs in or send it to wherever it needs to send it there are systems that are superior to these systems that are called component systems and those are a little bit more complicated that's not what our car has from the factory in a component system you are going to send the lows to a speaker the mids to another speaker and you're gonna send the highs to a tweeter and you're gonna install crossover networks it's that's gonna handle all of that splitting up if you spend the money and take time and you have to know how to do a component system it's gonna sound far better than a system like this but that's really for people who are really really demanding of their music most people are gonna be just fine with this I'm pretty demanding of my music and I'm just fine with something like this in this particular car a lot of speaker series like these right here will have the version that is a full range like this one and they'll also have the component version just know that if you get a component system like that you're not gonna be able to use the wires that the tweeters are using right now because those wires are in parallel with the speakers that are built into the car you'll have to run all new cabling so when deciding which system is right for you keep that in mind if you get component you'll have to run the wires and if you use full range like these you can use the existing wires that are already there so in summary the stock is a low-power speaker but it's light and it's appropriate for the stock sound system only it's not particularly good for lows or for highs or for music with really high definition so it's not good if you upgrade the head unit your kicker om upgrade is appropriate for an upgraded listening experience and you just cannot be the ease of installation with these speakers right here once you upgrade the head unit or add an inline amplifier these speakers right here really come to life but there might not be enough for the most demanding listeners the aftermarket speakers here you get much more for your money and it greatly improved listening experience but they do require the proper wattage in order to get the most out of them so you might be jeopardizing your tweeters or you might need an amplifier to drive these speakers and really get the most out of them otherwise it's no point in upgrading from these speakers right here because these are enough this video was getting a bit long so if you're interested in seeing exactly how to install the speaker in the WRX be sure to check out part 2 where I'll go over it in detail I hope you enjoyed the video if you did be sure to hit that like button thanks a lot for watching and until next time take care

Channel: Boost & Shutter

Views: 197,517

Keywords: Wrx speaker upgrade, wrx speaker install, wrx speakers, wrx speaker adapter, 2015 wrx speaker upgrade, wrx kicker speaker, wrx stock speaker, wrx component speakers, how to choose speakers, choosing car speakers, choose car speakers, how to upgrade wrx speakers, wrx tweeters, speaker impedance, 2016 wrx speaker upgrade, 2017 wrx speaker upgrade, 2018 wrx speaker upgrade, 2019 wrx speaker upgrade

Id: IKTI_JzUlC4

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 05 2019