Car Speakers: Your Gateway to Great Music

So you have bought and installed the best deck money can buy, and you attached it to an amplifier so big that you had to upgrade your car insurance to cover broken glass because of it. You turn on your engine, ready to rock out to your favourite Van Halen power ballad and turn on your super-sound system.
Nothing.

That’s right. Unless you have decent speakers in your car, your expensive car stereo is just a really pretty piece of dashboard jewellery. So you head over to your nearest audio center and are surprised to find that half the store is filled with speakers of different sizes and shapes.

But just what car speakers are right for you? Well, in this case, buying car speakers really can be a case of “you get what you pay for.” Feel free to shop around for discounts and deals, but keep in mind that you are paying for quality here. Good speakers can mean the difference between scratchy, ugly sound and beautiful DVD-quality beats.

The Car Speaker “Big Three”:  Car speakers are split into three separate types. Each type covers a different range of sound and has its own set up and installation requirements.  Subwoofers are those big, heavy speakers that you often see in boxes. They are low-tone car speakers, meaning that they cover the bass and low drums in your favourite songs.

Midrange speakers are what most people think of when they think of car speakers. Midrange speakers cover the middle tones, such as guitars, some drums and some of the vocals. If you’re into moody Goth-rock, it may cover a lot of the vocals.

Tweeters are the little speakers that you often see in the dashboard or door panels of a lot of cars. Tweeters car speakers cover the high range tones. High range tones include the cymbal and the bulk of the vocals. Balancing the three speakers to achieve the perfect sound can be a frustrating sound, and it is something that can take up the bulk of a car audio enthusiast’s time. Thankfully, installing car speakers is something that is relatively simple.

Installing Car Speakers:  Installing your car speakers is a simple task once you know where they go and what you are doing. Just wire them up from your amplifier and you’re ready to go. You should take a few minutes to consider where you are going to put your new speakers in your car before you set them up. Essentially you want the music in you car to travel from the front of the vehicle to the back.  You want your tweeters speakers up front in the dashboard and in the side panels of your car. These are small speakers with a smaller power threshold than your midrange or subwoofer speakers, so they need to be as close to you as possible to prevent being drowned out by heavy bass beats.

Midrange speakers can go in the back of the car, and if they are positioned properly you can even achieve a type or aural illusion by bouncing the sound waves toward the front of the car. This way it will appear that the sound is coming from the front of the car even when the speakers are in the back seat!
Subwoofers need to be as far back from you as possible. Some people even elect to put them behind the back seats, though this is unnecessary. The huge bass sounds that come out of your subwoofer will carry throughout the entire vehicle, so you don’t have to worry about not hearing the bass properly.

Of course, there is a lot more work to properly installing your speakers for your car, but think of this article as a primer to get you going. If you’d like to read up on speakers some more, you can visit the websites for companies such as Bose, Boss, and Infinity.  These companies have made speaker quality their life’s work, and you should be able to find everything you need to turn your dashboard jewellery into a the perfect sound machine!