--X-post from electrical mods--

So I was tinkering with my door panel this weekend for sound dampening reasons and I was listening to the volumes coming out of each door panel speaker. I noticed that the front woofer and tweeter were a lot quieter than the middle speaker on the door.

A few days later, I though to myself, 'What if that mid speaker wasn't there, there would be a tweeter and a woofer in the front, and a full range speaker in the back.'

Tonight, I disconnected both front mid range speakers, and moved the fade to the the front +6 and holy cow it sounds like a normal car stereo!

To my ears, it has the right amount of bass, a much lesser amount of mid range, and just a touch of highs from the tweeters.

The only downside is that the 'gong' sound plays completely through those two speakers, so the gong is pretty much gone. My next steps are to possibly find an inline way to lower the volume going to those speakers, or possible get a 2/3 way speaker and disconnect the mid range.

Let me know what you guys think! I'm interested to see if I'm completely imagining this or not

 

Did you ever get a response? I am tempted to see if I can turn down the 2 mid range door speakers since they are located in such a bad position anyway

 

What I ended up doing (which I do not recommend unless you're ok with possibly frying your HiFi amp) is soldering a resistor to each mid-range speaker, which is essentially raising the Ohm rating of the speaker, making it quieter. This does alter the sound of the speaker slighty, but it's nothing that I've noticed to be any worse than the original tone. Again, I do not recommend this unless you're prepared to replace the entire system due to failure (which is what I'm secretly hoping happens to me so I can justify getting the Integral Audio System ).

 

I understand, did you ever decide if that makes it sound better to you though? I will have my doors taken apart in the next week and can play around with disabling those two mids and seeing how well the 6.5s and A pillar tweeters sound without that mid

 

To me, it sounds a lot better. I prefer heavy bass, clear highs, and low mids; so this setup appeals to me. I've also noticed that I can turn up the volume a little bit more wihout the speakers clipping. When I went back to stock I realized the the mid range speakers start clipping while the bass and tweeter are at roughly 60% power. By lowering the volume of the mid-range speakers, it allows you to push the bass and tweeter a lot further before beginning to overdrive any of them.

 

I noticed my mid range speakers do distort first... interesting.

What resistor did you use and how many and where? I would love to bring the volume of the mid range door speakers down 20-25%

 

Just so you know..increasing the ohms of a speaker does not harm the system or amp.. Its when you lower the resistance that you run into trouble..over heat the amp type deal.. most radio shack dealers have 8ohm and 16 ohm ceramic resistors just for this type of application!! So you will be fine increasing the ohms..(resistance). cheers!

 

Thanks Zippy! I've read a few times that increasing the ohms would overheat the amp. I'm glad that's clarified.

I ended up using 16ohm .25w resistors. But I bought everything from 8ohm to 100ohm resisters and tried each one.

 

did you use one resistor per speaker? or more than one
I will have to play with different ones to find the level I like I am sure

 

One resistor per speaker. I'll have to snap a picture of how I did it.