Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums Modifications Audio Amping Door Speakers

To begin, I have searched and found very limited results. In the next couple of weeks I plan to install tweeters in my sail panels (powered by the headunit)and amping my door speakers (which are currently running off of the headunit.) From what I have found it seems as though the easiest way to go about amping the door speakers is tapping into the factory wiring harness. How do I go about doing this? Where in the wiring harness do you tap in? The amp will be mounted in the trunk if that makes any difference. Audio gurus, please chime in with some information. Pics would excellent as well. Thank you for the information in advance.

- Andrew

Make sure when you hook up those tweeters off the headunit, that you put a bass blocker on it. You want to cross it over at high frequency to get rid of bass/mid's. they are about 10 bucks, and you have to do it!

The Tweeters come with crossovers

Anyways, IMHO you may have a problem with your plan:
1. I don't think you will be able to do this w/ most regular HUs (w/o a very highend internal HU X-over). Your tweeters require very little power compared with the mids. The comp X-over attenuates the power going to the highs...you would lose this feature (IIRC: there are some add-on MBQ tweets/x-overs which have this feature). You would also lose the ability to level set between the tweets and mids.
2. You would then have to choose the right X-over freq and X-over slope. The external comp X-over already takes care of this. Some competitors (myself included) run seperate amps for the mids and hi's, but this requires a bit of tuning (amplitude, X-over pt, & phasing) to sound right.
3. IMHO, to do what you propose, you will need 2 2-channel amps and a good X-over

It would be easier to put the X-over in the door, use the existing speaker wire to power it, and run wire from the x-over to the hi's and mids. You need one 4 channel amp to run the whole car.

Crutchfield has the amp bypass harness which clearly marks which speaker is which. You can run your speaker wires from your amps to this and plug it into the existing harness behind the glove box.

My $.02

I'm not sure what your saying. Right now I have a Kenwood powering my subs, and my sony 2 channel amp is gonna be for the door speakers. The tweeters will be powered directly from the headunit. Why wouldn't the headunit power the tweeters? I ordered the Kicker Resolution r19's tweeters. Thanks for the info.

You're sending the wrong frequencies into the tweeters. You need a clean high. I've never used bass blockers, they're just a bad solution, and don't give you the sound quality a good crossover could--also, it stresses the head unit. I get what Arclight is saying. It's all about adjusting levels. You lose your ability to tweak with the sound levels at your mids (stock doors), and your highs (tweeters) with the setup you're proposing. It's easier to get a crossover for each door, set it up for each individual speaker, and use one set of wires. What you propose requires a lot of rewiring, and it still won't sound right. By using the crossovers, you can also get more bang for your buck with the amp.

Look at your wiring harness for your Sony HU, and pull the rear door speaker leads so they're not connected to the hu. If you have premium audio, get a Crutchfield bypass harness, and set the rear door leads up from there. Run your leads to the amp output from those leads at the harness. Unless you're running comp these should be fine.

Pull your door apart, and cut the rear speaker lead before the harness. wire the crossover in, and send a lead up to the sail panel tweets. Mount, hide wires, and you're set. you can do this for all four doors. I hope my insight helps.