Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums Modifications Audio Help me please!!

Hello,

I am in a little bit of a quandry. I own a 98 contour SE.I just recently replaced my factory speakers with another set of 5x7 Clarion speakers. I wanna preserve those so I am looking for an amp. I have the original factory head unit. Could someone please tell me what type of amp I should be looking for and what other things I can do to get a more loud and clearer sound. Can you guys give me some ideas? Thank you.

Being that you still have the factory HU, the best thing you could do is to scrap that, and buy yourself a good quality HU; Alpine, Clarion, Eclipse, Nakamichi. If you were to simply add an amp to your factory HU, it's still going to sound like %#it. I'm not sure if your car has the premium stereo in which case there is allready an amp behind your glovebox which is the most god awful thing ford ever created, and that needs to be bypassed. Goodluck and welcome aboard.

I concur. A head unit in the $150-200 range would be able to power those speakers comfortably, say in the 20-25 watt range.
You can then add an amp later.
A wise man once said, "Garbage in, garbage out." The stock stereo is garbage. No sense in amplifying trash.

......or if you don't have the cash right now & want something you can hear with the windows down you can buy a alright 4 channel amp for about 250, with tax & wires about 3 - asuring you will do the install, if not add about 60 bucks. Either way you can power the new speakers fine, and with at least 40watts RMS to each that will be plenty loud and clear, most smaller/mid-sized amps have low & HIGH level inputs, bypass the premium sterio amp if there. Remember power is clarity - & BTW clarions have great highs !

You can go that way if you want, but myself, and most other people on here wouldn't recommend it. You can give them all the power you want, but the fact is that the main source "the HU" is a POS. and should be the first thing replaced.

Not so fast, trigger! :p
Signal integrity (not strength, don't confuse the two) always deteriorates or stays the same. There is no hardware on the market that can overcome a poor source unit. If there were, wouldn't everyone have one?

That being said, an amplifier only does what its name implies. Amplifies any given signal within it's operating range. You feed it a bad signal, you get an amplified bad signal. Throw more power at it, you get a louder bad signal. From entry to exit of any piece of hardware in a system, there may be alterations to the signal, i.e. the signal to noise ratio. Any alteration is considered bad.

I'm sure there's some obscure mathematical equation I could put here, but I hate math.

So are these stock radios really THAT bad? I've never used the CD only tape - I replaced mine the 3rd day I had the car but I know people don't always have the cash at the right time - but think of it this way, if you buy a amp and wire everything to the back ( or were ever you put it ) it would be easier to just install a new HU later than re-wire the doors from factory wires and the oh so pain in the ars door panels - but I guess these sonyfab HUs really are junk, from all that I read. :p

Yes they are that bad. As far as having a budget, why would you spend 300.00 on a nice 4 channel amp when instead you can spend it on a good HU and I'm almost certain it will sound better. Yeah, you can say well the amp is providing 50 watts rms to the spaeakers and the HU would only be around 15 rms, but like T-red said, it's all about the main source. Let me give you an example. in one of my previous cars, My system consisted of a jvc "lower end model POS " HU, a soundstream ref 300 amp running a pair of mb quart coaxials and a pair of clif designs components at 2 ohms, and a soundstream ref 700 running 3 JL 10 w6's. Now it sounded pretty good as far as the bass goes, but the clarity just wasn't there. So, here's my point, I switched out the jvc cd player and put in an eclipse "don't remember the model #" and I couldn't believe the difference. Every speaker in my car sounded completely different. The results were truly amazing, and It wasn't because I added any power, it was just alot better source.

I'd go with a cheap HU.. almost anything is better than stock. You could find some used ones for under a $100 in ebay. Or you could find a brand new one for just a little more. Then upgrade to an amp. Almost all the time, the amp will make it sound much better.

you could buy a nice partially used HU from eBay and get much better sound than the factory system. yes, the factory system IS THAT BAD!!! Premium or not, they all suck.

get a nice HU first, you'll be thankful.
like this one:
Pioneer DEH-P6400
or this one:
Alpine CDA-7873