I've got a 99 camaro with the monsoon sound system in it. I was reading the FAQ on it and I'm still a little lost. I realize that the spearks are wired like components. However I am a little lost on how I can replace the speakers with aftermarket ones and have them sound right. I have speakers in there now that I tried to hook up but they sound choppy and as if they are shorted out. They just dont sound right. No matter what set of the wires I used I couldnt get it to sound right. Any ideas?

 

Did you make sure they were in phase? Also did you hook the midrange wire to the mid and the tweeter wire to the tweeter?

 

You must not use the car's tweeter highpass. Instead, use the car's woofer wire only. It will go into the input for the crossover that came with the components, and that will have outputs for the woofer and tweeter. Completely ignore the car's tweeter wire as that filter will not be correct for your speakers. Also, seal the big holes in the door up. It will improve quality and give you a gain of 3-6dB which is very significant (equivalent to running two to four times the power).

Ignore anyone who says otherwise. There is a lot of half-assery going on here when it comes to sound. Do it the right way. The only right way short of using an aftermarket amp is what I said in the previous paragraph.

 

So your saying to basically run a full range speaker to the low only input and bypass the high pass portion? That makes no sense at all, if it was a component set maybe, but for just an aftermarket replacement you can use both the outputs in the door.

 

You are incorrect. First of all, the car doesn't have a lowpass filter for the front speakers (the only one is for the sail panel speakers - and no, it's not appropriate to use for fronts as the cutoff frequency is much too low). The woofer signal is full-range. The tweeter signal is high-passed, but it is not the correct filter for any aftermarket speakers. To properly hook up any aftermarket components, the only valid option is to run a full-range signal into the crossover, which means using the woofer wire if you feel you must use the stock amplifier.

It will generally technically work if you use the stock tweeter wire for the tweeter, but it WILL sound worse for almost no gain. The tweeter is only handling about 15% of the power in the system. You are giving up significant sound quality for less than a single decibel of output.

If you use the stock tweeter wire, then you either then run the aftermarket woofer full-range, or you try to use the crossover that came with it only for the woofer. Not hooking up the tweeter to the crossover will often change the response of the woofer output as well.

The only valid way to hook up components is by following my advice. Use the woofer wire only with the crossovers that come with the speakers, or use an aftermarket amp. There is no reason to do otherwise. I feel like most of you insist on using the tweeter wire only because it's there, and that's horrible reasoning that will give you a half-assed system. If you have done it the wrong way and think it sounds fine... congratulations. You're satisfied with a half-*** install that gave you zero benefit over doing it the correct way.

If you bought decent speakers, call up (or email) the company that makes them and tell them what you drive, explain that the car had components stock, and ask them what they think about using the car's wires instead of the crossover that came with your speakers. Seriously.

 

Ok again I wasn't referring to a component speaker, but I can see why the factory did it that way if it was wrong.

 

They did it that way because they don't care about car audio. Are you under the impression that stock audio is ever good? I've never heard good stock audio in any car... and F-bodies are not even close to the best stock audio I've heard. My G8 also came with absolutely terrible stock audio, by the way.

If you're not talking components then... what I said is not incorrect, either. Though it's less important. 99% of coaxial speakers have similar style crossovers - woofer full range, tweeter on a first or second order highpass. The difference is that the highpass frequency would probably be different.

But with components, you are provided the correct way to hook them up... so use it.