I have the premium audio and was looking to replace the large front and rear speakers with JL audio speakers but I don’t know enough about audio systems to assess if that could be done, I.e. plug and play. Curious if others have done this and your experience. Thanks!

 

You can certainly do it. The speakers are standard 6.5" units. However, if you're expecting night and day difference you'll be disappointed. They'll sound better than stock, sure. But that's a mighty low bar. The speakers will fit in the enclosures, but the mounting holes will not line up. I mounted the "mounting rings" to the enclosure and then the speaker to the mounting ring. I'll attach a pic and maybe it will show that.

The way the system is designed is you're supposed to be sitting in a concert hall and all the music comes from the stage in front of you, with minimal sound coming from the sides and rear. The heavy lifting is done by the in-dash speakers. The amp does all the crossover work and you'll only get middle frequencies out of the door speakers. The corner tweeters are wired in parallel with the door speakers and have a capacitor to filter out all but the highs, and they're pretty anemic. You'll have two subs in the rear seat corners, too.

The PO of my car managed to blow both speakers in both doors. I replaced my door speakers with some nice Infinity units (the fancy 2-way thing in the center is useless, unfortunately), and I scoured eBay for replacement tweeters as I couldn't find suitable ones to fit the housings. I think they sound better than stock, but, as I said, it's a rather low bar. If your system is already working you may not want to bother. BTW, the speakers are all 4 ohm except the subs, which are 2 ohm. Oh, and you'll need connector adapters to mate the Jag connectors to industry standard speakers. I got mine from Amazon. Red Wolf, or some such brand. They don't fit real well, but they're close enough. And you don't have to hack up the stock harness.

 

I have replaced the headunit and amplifier and kept the original Alpine speakers, exept for the tweeters, and these 25 year old speakers sounds actually good.
I must admit though that the new amp is a very expensive one with built in digital sound prosessor, that takes care of crossovers and eq.
And with four 6" speakers you will not get any real deep bass. (Mine 2000 XKR is a convertible)

 

my view is replace all the speakers and the head unit with something 4ohm, you will have much better experience. I tried various half measures but when i completely replaced everything the difference was stark. It sounds massively better now. Also added an amp in the trunk.

BTW, these are the absolute largest subs that will fit in the stock enclosures in the convertible:
https://www.crutchfield.com/S-hZ9mBB...48CWRT674.html

 

This raises questions, on the Alpine system (coupe with the subwoofer), which is what I have, what is the weak link? The amp? Head unit? Speakers? My audio quality is decent, but nowhere near audiophile grade, which I think is very hard to do on a car.

On my car I find that:

• Bass = good
• Sub-bass = sometimes good sometimes bad
• Mids = ok
• Highs = lacking

Tweeters could definitely use improvement.
The system sounds warm, and no amount of playing with the EQ seems to improve it. The soundstage is not very wide. I do feel I am missing details that I do hear with my Sennheiser headphones. I wish it were more analytical.

 

The bottom line is that a vehicle makes for a lousy listening environment. I have a massive vintage home audio system and that is where I do my serious listening. It is simply not worth the money to me to spend it on car audio in any of our vehicles....

 

Well, all the speakers are cheap doped paper, subs are 2 ohm (thought all the speakers are actually) and the amp is nothing to write home about. Thus why I say replace the whole thing, once you move to 4 ohm a whole world of options opens up with replacements.

 

IMO the weak link is the amp. It's anemic, plus it does all the crossover work itself which limits what you can achieve with speaker upgrades.

 

I chose to only replace the head unit. My theory was that if it didn’t give me an improvement, I could always add in an amp or new door speakers at a later time.

The new head units come with a lot more power than our original ones. So when I bypassed the stock amp and directly wired the new head unit to the speaker bundle in the trunk, I was pleasantly surprised. Those 22 year old stock speakers sounded great with no amp. No distortion so far, it I’ve also only tested while parked in a garage (still way too cold here).

IMO I’d say that the weak link is the head unit. The amp is irrelevant when you update the head unit. And it gave me a chance to add in some nice features like CarPlay and Bluetooth.

Here’s the one I chose. Pioneer DMH-C5500NEX Digital multimedia receiver — does not play discs at Crutchfield

Keep in mind that the nav, head unit, cd changer and amp are all connected. If you disconnect one to replace it, the others won’t work. In my case, I went with the new head unit, wired it to the trunk, bypassed the amp and disconnected the cd changer.

The biggest surprise is the awakening of my dash speakers and tweeters. Great highs and I’ve actually adjusted the fade to more rear, in order to tone down the highs a bit.

 

My complaint is that there are no rear speakers in the convertible. Adjusting the fade just reduces the volume of the dash speakers.