Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums Modifications Audio Why are rear spkrs muffled and weak?

Are rear stock speakers weaker than the front ones by any chance? or is the unit designed to do that kind of separation???

Even when I shift all of my fader to the back they barely sound anything like the qualiy of the front ones?? no they are not misconnected or anything but seem to be much inferior in sound quality from the front ones? I know they are the stock ones since I've seen them many times ...Any clues...I will be putting two after pioneers that I bought for the front ones soon and wondered if I should s the original rears with the stock front ones?? any one noticed/tried this??Thank you

Hey Kal --

I'm no expert, but part of the problem might be that you have front seats in the car!

I can't imagine that you're hearing the full range of sound from the rear speakers through your seats... the position/quality of the stock speakers seems to me to be Ford's way of keeping the aftermarket audio industry booming. At least those companies who make 5x7/6x8 speakers.



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1998 Mystique LS V6 ATX
Satin Green/Grey Leather
Moonroof
Ford Remote Starting System
885s for fogs

From my experience, the problem with the rear speakers is that there is a large hole in the bottom of each rear door. Too much air leaks around the door and cancels out the sound of the speakers. I haven't done this yet - my next improvement - but dynamat should work wonders for sealing off that space.

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98.5 Tour SE Sport 2.5 ATX
Mobile 1
80W low /100 W high beam... in transit

Both of the previous posters are correct. It's a combo of those two things and the fact that the speaker grille partially covers the cone.

SO you are sure there's no difference between them?? I find that very hard to believe..but I guess it is..I recently dynamated the rear doors on the back of the outside panels and put acoustical foam between the door panel and the inner sheet metal.. I guess that made things worse not better..As for the whole inside the door, well front doors have that too but still sound acceptable!! I guess the foam is the bad part what I sold have used there to support the panel should have been some sort of spacer instead.

The problem is that when designing the contour, ford apparently didn't think about speaker placement or quality components. So they stuck the speakers in the leaky rear doors and also built the HUs out of $#!+. Kind of pisses a guy off when you pay a couple hondred bucks for a component set and it still sounds bad because of the location. I guess cars aren't the most stereo friendly environment in the first place, but it's almost as if ford purposely made the tour a crappy stereo car. Good thing it's so damn fun to drive...

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The Honkeytonk Monkey
Jewel Green 96se MTX

The rear doors grille/hole for letting the sound out is way off axis with the speaker and a good percentage of the tweeter/midrange gets cut out because of the hole opening. Very piss poor design I might add. I added rear speakers and can barely hear them because of that. What a waste!

You could mount midrange/midbass speakers in the doors, and add tweeters on the doors aiming towards the center of the roof for the front speakers or such for the rears.


Best thing to do is to build kickpanels pods from the stock kickpanel locations for the best imagining possible, and in our case, rear speakers wont ruin any type of soundstage so put them in for the rear passengers.