just an innocent bystander! here,
are you guys following the factory service wiring diagram?

the cheap radio appears to have the tweeters wired directly in parallel with the front spk huh.

the premium has all spk wired seperatly to the amp/?crossover in the rear

the entire svc info is avail for 12 bucks download,skip some guesswork like color codes,speaker polarity,etc.

it looks like the factory did a good job,even with the cheap tweet setup.

 

If you can wait until after work I'll pull my A Pillar cover and take a picture. Stand alone tweeters tend to have smaller crossovers than component systems. My Cadence tweeters, even though they are 28mm and handle a TON of power have extremely simple crossovers.

The crossover itself is about two inches long by an inch wide. The inside of the cover has a white plastic support piece to make it sturdier. There are rectangular notches in the white plastic piece, that are almost big enough to fit my crossovers. I trimmed out a plastic piece to open one end of the rectangle, slide the crossover in, and hot glued the crossover and tweeter down.

The tweeter was easy too, just cut out the white plastic part with the holder for the OEM tweeter with a hole saw, and left the outside part that you see intact, looks totally factory still.

The best way to "find" speaker wires is to make a "pop" tester. It's really simple, take a large D or C battery, and tape a wire to each end. If you touch both ends of the pop tester wire to both speaker wires it makes the speaker "pop" or produce static so you can find the right wires for each speaker. I basically just took some wire strippers, stripped a small section somewhere in the middle of the wires, and pop tested them.

One word of caution about a pop tester, I've never had it happen yet, but you do run the risk of shorting something if you're trying to pop test something that isn't a speaker wire, so you should be fairly sure before you try at. At least in our trucks, and most other vehicles, the speaker wires will be twisted together, and fairly thicker than other wires you're seeing. Make sure if you strip something and pop test it you cover it back up with electrical tape if you're not going to use it so you don't short anything!

Yes, yes, I know there are speaker wire colors floating around, but I'll tell you right now they're not worth a ****, or at least were not to me. Maybe 60-80% of the time the colors would be right, but there was always one or two off that were different colors, and I even had colors that were from both the monsoon and base systems, don't ask me, it damn near drove me crazy. Maybe the colors are like the chart says back at the amp, but up at the doors and in the wiring loom going to the back, no frigging way.

I have an 08 Alpha w/ Monsoon so the information I'm about to give may not apply, or it may, I have no way to be sure and have only gotten into my trucks wiring looms, not other years or models.

The front driver side speaker wire is tan and grey. The front passenger speaker wire is dark green and light green. I don't remember which is positive and negative, use a volt meter to be sure. The one thing that took me so long to get sorted out, is apparently the front doors both run down the same side of the vehicle. Seriously, wtf is up with that? You should find speaker wire for both front doors in your front driver side kick panel. You can also splice in under the plastic piece that runs along the bottom of the driver door, but I went to the kick panel because you have far more room to work with, and it was easier to fit things like crimp caps and whatnot in there.

With normal speaker wire you would use this method to splice in:

Mobile Electronics Installer- GPS, Sat Radio, Alarm, Audio, etc

However, with the factory wire it's too thick and stringy, so I would strip a portion in the middle of the speaker wires, wrap the aftermarket speaker wire around the stripped section as tight as you can get it, and SOLDER it in place, that way you don't ever have to worry about it coming undone, and wrap it up nice and tight with electrical tape, and pull a zip tie right around the electrical tape.

For the sake of your sanity and your vehicle do it the right way the first time, and please remember to cover up anything you stripped to splice or pop test.

Like I said, as soon as I get home tonight I'll get you a picture of the A Pillars.


Well, the information that's floating around for color and polarity if definitely not right in my case. Maybe it's from an 06 or something and it's changed since then. I didn't know you could download service manuals anywhere, and for that cheap. Where do I go to get it? I'd love to have one for my truck.

The factory did a decent job I guess as as simplicity goes for diagnosing and repairing the system in the event of a problem. The one things that totally stumped me is why the speaker wire for the front doors runs down both sides of the vehicle. I cant really think of an explanation for that, that couldn't have been done in an easier way, but I guess I'll never know the reasoning unless I tear everything apart and trace the wires and I'm not about to do that.

As far as factory speaker wire goes its pretty good, thicker than I expected, good quality copper, and heavy gauge enough that I'm running 125W RMS to each door without the wires heating up. Before I put everything back together I blasted the speakers for about 20 minutes and the wires were still cool to the touch. The strands of copper are thicker and stiffer than I would like, but it's good enough because the front door boots are not boots, but plugs, so there was no way to run wire into the doors without pulling them off, drilling holes, adding grommets to waterproof, etc.

It took me three whole days working on and off while attending to other matters to get my doors, tweeters, and amp done. It was so worth it though, the inside of my truck is like a concert hall now, all my alternator whine from the factory amp is gone, and I have very, very minimal white noise from the speakers that is not noticeable unless you're sitting still.

If the window is cracked, you're driving, or my head unit is even on 1, you don't notice the white noise.

 

Here's the tweeter's mounted. Don't laugh at my sparkly hot glue, it's all I had on hand and no one will ever see it! Jerks.



You can see where I had to cut the tab out to fit the crossover, because there's one just like it next to the crossover. If you do mount it, make sure its not in the way of the airbag, you don't want to get shot in the face with a crossover.

 

Wow, tons of great info, thanks! I don't have my speakers yet...they're en route...but it's a component set (Hertz Energy fwiw) and i suspect the crossover is going to be much larger than that. Unfortunately!

 

No biggie, plenty of room in the doors to mount a crossover. You could even mount it down in the dash where the A Pillar cover "plugs" into the dash.

 

I could be wrong, but this looks like and el cheapo crossover right on the monsoon tweeters themselves. Right?

 

Yes, but it's not really a crossover but more of a "limiter" or "filter" of the lower frequencies on the bandwith.

 

...AKA a cheaper version of a crossover just for the tweeter. Anyway here are some pics of my install similar to Draketh's. Alpine SPR-10TW tweeters. I would recommend these to anyone that wants to keep their system mostly stock but want's to be able to turn it up louder without the factory Monsoon tweeters starting to crackle and pop like a bowl of Rice Crispies. They sound great too and have a broad frequency coverage. Gluing all this stuff in is pretty much the only way to go with this tweeter setup, used a hot glue gun for mine.

Alpine Electronics of America, Inc.

Any of you guys getting a component set wondering how to wire the fronts...personally I would wire in the crossover that comes with JUST to the factory tweeter leads and to the new tweeters, forget about wiring it to the door speakers. Use the factory wire leads to do the door speakers. You don't really need to hook up a crossover to the woofers anyway as generally it just cuts the high frequencies out to them. They can handle high frequency input, they just won't reproduce it. My 2 cents anyway.