Replaced stock speakers in front

[Bill Valley]

Thanks to reading all the posts on this forum I was able to do this fairly quickly and easily. For my upgrade I chose to use Diamond Audio D362 components. The mid driver is 6.25" and would fit in the baffle without mods. These speakers were reasonably priced and available locally so that I could listen to them before hand. I wanted to keep the largest mid possible to help with mid bass duty up front.

Install was a piece of cake. After removing the door panel I removed the woofer baffle. I scored the edge of the OEM driver with a utility knife (per a previous post). I was able to use a screwdriver to get the speaker past the little tabs. I pushed on the back of the speaker and it popped right out.










I used a soldering iron to remove the wires before popping out the speakers. Notice the OEM speaker is 2 ohms.



Comparison pics





I did not take pics of the mounting. I used the gasket supplied with the speakers and screwed the mids down to the baffle. Not pretty, but effective. The 6.25" woofer was just slightly smaller than the baffle. A near perfect fit. I also ran a small length of speaker wire from the new woofer to the OEM connections on the baffle. All connections were soldered and the OEM tab was used to hook up the speaker.

Next the tweeters. The Diamond Audio tweeters are 3/4" aluminum. The set included a surface mount cup and a recessed mount cup. Here are some pics of the OEM tweeters.





Notice the OEM tweeter is 8 ohm. The cone is made of a paper material and felt very cheap.

The OEM tweeters are mounted in a plastic cage that is screwed to the door frame. There is also a styrofoam piece that surrounds the cage.



I could not fit the Diamond tweeter in the cage, so I used the recessed mount cup. This fit snuggly in the styrofoam.



I cut the OEM tweeter wire very close to the tweeter. I used these wires to connect the new tweet with the hardware provided.

The sound is MUCH improved. All frequencies seem a lot tighter. I have lost some mid bass. I thought this would happen due to the 4 ohm driver were there was a 2 ohm previously. The new tweeters are very bright. This may be due to the 8 ohm to 4 ohm change. An aftermarket amp and the crossovers could even this out. But with <20 watts rms it does sound good.

All in all this was a good move. The tweeters are too bright for my taste, so I may replace them with silk. This is stage 1 of my system upgrade. I plan to proceed with the following:
Install DICE
Replace all speakers
Install concealed sub (10"?)
Install amp for speakers