Hey all,

I know this has been done before, but I wanted to share my experience with upgrading the factory front speakers.

I finished installing 6.5's in the front doors over the Thanksgiving weekend, and the sound upgrade was substantial even though I used moderately priced speakers. I purchased the Polk DB651 for about $60/pair. I liked that they are 4 ohm (same as factory non-Bose) and have a high sensitivity of 92 dB/W.

At the same time, I used the popular McMaster-Carr sound deadening material (EVA-based, not tar). McMaster P/N 9709T39. It's deadening abilities are commonly compared to Dynamat and RAAMmat, but at a lower cost. It comes in ~12 sqft mats at ~$16 ea, and one mat was enough to do all four doors for me at ~90% coverage.

Realistically - the difference was not night and day like installing a proper amplifier or a sub. (I had a full system in my last car, but I did not want to go through the trouble on this one and also did not want to sacrifice any space.) However, the difference is substantial and instantly noticeable. Biggest difference for me was a fuller sound, and much tighter mid-bass. Bottom end is also lower now. This is just speculation, but I believe that the deadening had as much to do with the improvement as the speakers did, especially relating to the tightness of the lower frequencies.

In all, I definitely recommend doing this as a nice sub-$100 mod that you can enjoy every time you drive your car. The most time consuming part was cutting out the deadening material to work around existing bolts, cables, and wires. Took me about 4 hrs, including cutting out the speaker mounts from 1/2" plywood. I had to do the deadening in a bunch of smaller pieces because this particular product doesn't conform to compound curves very well. Dynamat Extreme is a lot better at conforming, but it is also way more expensive and was a pain in the butt to work with. The McMaster stuff cuts easily with normal scissors and didn't leave a gummy mess everywhere.



Happy modding,
Tim

 

Is there a hole from the insidecto outside door skin? I believe i heard putting a small piece of deadening material on the inside of the outside door skin reduces vibration alot.

 

That's actually the best way then Cover the holes behind the door panel it also makes it all little more dent resistant lol. But the g/z's if you take out the window the whole inside panel comes off.