Midrange front speaker fitting

[mbrock]

Well, in the absence of any dissent (or indeed assent!) for my previous speaker upgrade proposal, I have taken the plunge and purchased the relevant bits - which arrived today.

So far I have got as far as taking everything out of the box and soldering wires onto the midrange drivers. The plan is to fit them where Skoda fit the extra speakers on the 12-speaker pack - in front of the armrest. The crossover will be located somewhere near the existing bass speaker. I gather from the Superb 2 forum that the head unit output goes to that speaker first, so in theory (!!) it should be relatively easy to transfer the feeds to all three speakers to the crossover outputs.

Anyway, here are all the bits - the big squares on the paper are 1cm, for reference. Wish me luck!

Mark

Edited 8 March, 2012 by mbrock

[mbrock]

Here should be the images which I thought I'd included.

[Yeti_Man]

Looks interesting and I had a personal interest in upgrading the 12 speaker setup on mine with mid range aftermarket speakers. So you have the standard 8 speaker setup and are adding a mid range unit and using a crossover to sort the signal range out? Do you have a bolero or Columbus head unit? Good luck.

[mbrock]

It's a Bolero, and yes it is an upgrade to the 8-speaker setup.  We're only interested in the sound for front-seat occupants, and not looking for huge volume and/or bass, just something more balanced than the current over-bright setup.

[Yeti_Man]

IMO, even the 12 speaker setup via the Columbus is a little short on natural sounding mid range. Ill work out the sizes of the three speaker drivers some day and then look to replace them. :-)

[mbrock]

Well I've been making some progress. The nearside door is now complete, the offside door wiring is complete so I just need to fit the speaker and crossover in the offside door and put it all back together before we can decide whether there is an improvement.

Here is the nearside door before any changes. The red dot in the depression ahead of the armrest is the centre of the midrange speaker - I measured the distance from the two adjacent panel clips so I could accurately mark the centre of the corresponding hole in the door card.

Here is the door card complete with crossover and midrange speaker. The jubilee clip round the speaker is to try and flatten the door card material to be reasonably flush with the speaker - it is curved at that point. I couldn't get it totally flat but it looks reasonably OK. The crossover is fixed to a bracket made from "radio strip" and screwed into the welds joining two layers of plastic in the door card. I have used plenty of self-adhesive foam to hopefully avoid rattles, including some in the depression where the speaker sits.

I used 7-way trailer cable to connect the crossover to the car wiring via a 6-way connector (I cut the spare thick white cable short). The bass speaker, as standard, has a feed from the head unit and another cable coming off it to feed the tweeter. I intercepted the head unit feed near the bass unit, then connected the existing bass unit and tweeter - plus the new mid-range - to the relevant crossover outputs.

The speakers, crossover and foam were from Car Audio Direct, and the wiring bits from Vehicle Wiring Products.

Tomorrow, all being well, we will see (or rather hear) if it was all worthwhile.

Mark

[mbrock]

Some more pictures:

The crossover with bracket, prior to installation.

Detail of the crossover and wiring installed under the armrest in the doorcard.

The offside door ready to reconnect to the doorcard - note the new connector by the bass speaker and the foam lining the recess for the midrange unit.

The finished job!

First impressions - it definitely sounds more balanced than before, although a bigger midrange unit would have been better had there been enough room for it. The real test will be what it sounds like at 70mph - watch this space!

Mark