Hey, I’m Niloy, manager here at upsidereview.com, and in this article, we’re going to write about how to choose the right car speakers for you and your car and your music.
1. What Speakers Fit My Car?
One of the first things you should consider is what speakers will fit your car, and thankfully we’ve done a lot of the work for you. You can simply enter your vehicle in the “Find What Fits My Car” section of Crutchfield.com. Once you’ve entered your vehicle details, it will show you lists of speakers and receivers that we know will fit either with or without modifications. Once you’ve plugged your vehicle in and you can tell what fits your car, there are a lot of other things to consider.
2. What’s Your End Goal?
First off, what is your end goal? Are you just trying to replace a blown speaker, are you trying to build a really great sound quality system, or somewhere in between? All of those things should be considered when you’re choosing your speakers. Let’s start with a simple speaker replacement. Maybe you just need a new set of speakers to replace a blown factory speaker, or you just want a little bit better sound but you don’t want to make major changes. You should be looking for a couple of things in your speaker.
3. Speaker Efficiency And Power Handling:
One is a speaker with high efficiency. this is the sensitivity rating. Generally, high sensitivity is somewhere in the 90 dB and up range. Those speakers will do more with less power, which is important because your factory radio doesn’t have a lot of power, so higher efficiency speakers will sound better than lower efficiency speakers when you are using a factory radio.
You also want to look at the power handling of your speakers. You don’t need speakers that can handle a lot of power. In fact, you want speakers that can work with not much power at all, and if the speakers you’re looking at have a power range given, look for a very low number. For example, some speakers will work with as little as 2-watts of power.
4. Speaker Sizes & Fit:
There are a lot of speakers that fit in most cars, and sometimes there are even multiple sizes that will fit in the same location in your car, and that’s because of things like speaker brackets and the ability to put smaller speakers into a larger opening. So, whenever you can, go with the largest speaker that will fit in any particular location in your car.
For example, if you have a choice between six-and-a-half and five-and-a-quarters, six-and-a-half generally will sound better. They’ll go a little bit deeper and play a more full sound. Five-and-a-quarters won’t have quite as much bass as a six-and-a-half.
Let’s apply that same logic to the tweeter. If you’re comparing a couple speakers and one of them has a larger tweeter than the other, for example, a one-inch silk dome tweeter, compared to a half-inch silk dome tweeter that larger tweeter will also sound better. It will blend better with the woofer and give you a nicer sound all the way from the high frequencies down through the mid-range blending into the woofer.
5. Frequency Response:
Another specification you’re going to see on all of our speakers is the frequency response. These are the frequencies that the manufacturer says any particular speaker can faithfully reproduce. The lowest number is base. How low can it go? The higher number is all of the high frequencies, the stuff the tweeter, the electric guitars, the female vocals, trumpets, things like that. And this range is kind of important.
If you’re looking for the speaker with the most bass, go with the largest speaker you can with the lowest frequency response. And on the high end, you’ll see some speakers go all the way up to 20,000 Hertz and beyond. Now the range of human hearing is from about 20 Hertz to about 20,000 Hertz, and most of our adult ears can’t even hear up that high. So as long as your speakers go to about 20,000 Hertz and beyond, you’re fine.
6. Upgrade:
If you’re looking for something above and beyond a simple speaker replacement, you’re going to want to look for a couple of different things. You can get better speakers that are made of better materials, they will also handle more wattage. This allows you to get a bigger amplifier, like in an aftermarket radio or a separate amplifier, and when you have extra power for your speakers you don’t have to be as concerned about the sensitivity rating.
7. Component VS Coaxial Speakers:
As you start looking through the speaker options you’re going to notice that some speakers have tweeters and mid-ranges built into the basket along with the woofer, and some of them have separate tweeters. These are called component systems, and they can be very different when it comes time to install speakers with the tweeters and the mid-ranges built-in.
We generally call these two-way and three-way speakers, they’re going to be a little bit easier to install than a component system because they will simply replace the factory speaker in the main factory opening in your doors or in your dash, or in your rear deck.
8. Installing Component Systems:
The benefits of going with component speakers where the tweeter is separate from the woofer are better imaging upfront, and that happens because your tweeter is generally mounted up a little bit higher, making those higher frequencies much easier to hear you kind of want it to sound like the band is on the hood of your car.
One thing to consider when installing components is that the woofer will generally be a straightforward replacement, however, the tweeter will be a little bit more difficult to install. We always want to consider a tweeter as a custom installation. You’ll be doing things like fabricating a bracket or cutting a hole and running some wires, there’s nothing standard about those tweeter mounts from the factory, and aftermarket tweeters generally come with lots of hardware and brackets and screws, in ways to get them mounted. So you’ll get it done, but it’s not the easiest thing in the world.
Many component systems come with a separate passive crossover network. It’s usually a box, and inside that box is a bunch of coils and capacitors and that’s where all your speaker connections are made. The job of the crossover is to send the high frequencies to the tweeter and the low frequencies to the woofer.
That crossover has to be put somewhere you can put it in your doors, in your kick panel, in your dash somewhere, or even back by your amplifiers. Some of the component systems are kind of made for you to hook them up to your factory radio, the crossover might simply be an inline capacitor with your tweeter so there’s not much extra installation concern there.
Again, the benefit of component speakers is getting that tweeter mounted up a little higher and creating a nicer stereo image and a better sound stage. You can’t always put those extra tweeters in your car, though, so you might need to go with a two-way or a three-way, and there are some with a swiveling or pivoting tweeter so that you can angle it up towards your listening area towards your ears so that even though your woofer is mounted down low in your door, you can sort of angle the sound up to where you can hear it.
9. Tweeter Materials And Sound:
As long as we’re talking about tweeters let’s write about the materials used in tweeters, and how they sound. There are several different common materials, and they all have slightly different tonal characteristics. For example, silk or cloth tweeters will typically sound warm and musical, ceramic or metallic tweeters will usually sound a little bit more crisp and sharp, and precise.
Some tweeters even have a little switch on them, which is an attenuation switch that allows you to determine just how bright they sound. And that’s important if your speakers are mounted in different places. If they’re mounted up high fairly close to your ears, you might tone them down a little bit, but if they’re mounted down low in your doors you might want to make them a little bit extra bright to get that sound to be a little clearer and sharper.
10. Woofer Materials And Sound:
Next, we’ll write about woofers. The woofer is usually the biggest part of the speaker, and it’s responsible for the lowest frequencies all the way down into the base and up into the mid-range. Woofer materials will also differ just like tweeter materials. You’ll see things like paper, plastic, polypropylene, flax, some very exotic materials, and some of our more expensive options. When they design speakers what they’re going for is something that can accurately and faithfully reproduce the music without distortion. To do that, the woofer needs to be lightweight and rigid so it can handle the power and move in and out without distortion.
11. Surround Materials:
Around the outside edge of the woofer cone is something called a surround. This is part of the speaker’s suspension system. It connects the woofer cone to the frame and allows the woofer cone to move in and out, making music. The material of that surround is actually pretty important as well.
You’ll see foam surrounds on most of your factory speakers, which is why they deteriorate and fall apart after a few years in your car. Most of our aftermarket speakers have either treated cloth or butyl rubber surrounds, and these materials will last a lot longer. They’ll be more durable and still give your speaker the freedom it needs to move in and out, playing your music.
We get it, there are a lot of speakers to choose from, even when you put your car in you might be faced with hundreds of speakers to choose from. Hopefully, this article has given you some tools you can use to figure out which speakers are going to sound right in your car.
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