I have been experimenting with speakers in my 2002 Ody. I did not like the sound of the factory speakers. The factory speakers have a blue plastic cone, and are rated 4 ohm, 20 watts. They sounded best with the treble and bass controls turned up most of the way to max.
My first experiment was to replace the fronts with Pioneer 1695s. I cut away just enough of the rear cone of the rain shield to allow the speaker to fit. With the 1695 in place, and the tone controls level, the treble and bass were great. The bass was particularly good and reached down to low enough frequencies so that I could even feel instruments like the bass drum. The only shortcoming was that there seemed to be a resonance around 1 -2 kHz which gave a honking sound to the music. I found this annoying on classical music with strings or woodwinds. On speech, and on pop music, the effect was not very noticeable.
My next experiment was to get some Clarion SRX1685's and put those in the front to see if that would fix the honkiness. The Clarions have much smaller magnets than the Pioneers, but bigger than the factory speakers. They seem to be slightly less honky than the Pioneers, bit I still want to do better. They also have a little less bass than the Pioneers, but are still much better than the factory speakers.
I then decided to try the 1695s in the rear. The factory speakers being replaced in the rear look exactly the same as the fronts except that they have paper cones instead of plastic.
With the 1695s in the rear, the bass sound that I had heard in the front was not there.
The cavity behind the speakers is enormous. It is probably 4 to 6 inches deep which gives plenty of clearance. The cavity is open down to floor level so the cavity volume is very large. On the passenger side there are some heating or a/c pipes there, but these are well away from the speaker.
The speaker mounts well to the white plastic panel. I got one of the screws through a speaker mounting hole. The other two screws are outside the speaker frame, and the washers on the screws clamp down the edge of the speaker to the plastic panel. The seal around the speaker is excellent.
The problem is that the white panel itself is not much large than the speaker and does not seal itself to the cavity. Both the gap is irregularly shaped, so there is no obvious way to seal it.
If I could seal the gap, I think the bass would come back, but I haven't thought of a way to do it.
On the fronts, I am guessing that the honking sound is a resonance effect. It may be the echo from the outer door panel. The spacing is just about right to give resonances in this frequency band. At 1000 Hz a half wavelength is about 6 inches. My thought is that I need to damp this resonance by adding some acoustic damping material which will absorb mid band frequencies behind the speaker. I would have to mount it close to the speaker so it would stay dry, and also not interfere with the window. I have not yet figured out what to use or how to mount it.
One other thought I had is that the original rain shield that I have partially cut away masked about half of the rear of the speaker. Could it be that it also had the effect of breaking up the resonance?
REQUEST 1
Could someone who has mounted the SRX1685s without cutting the rain shield listen for this midband honkiness and let me know if it is there? Classical music in the Mozart style shows this defect well.
REQUEST 2
Does someone have any ideas on sealing the rear panel? I did see a post from someone who tried a baffle on 1695s in the rear and said that the baffle made things worse, so that does not seem like the right way to start.
I hope someone can help get me closer to perfection.
[This message has been edited by Cymro (edited 12-06-2001).]
