Replacing front speaker question - 2023 Explorer XLT.

[Zebrawood]

4 speaker stock system. Actually 6 if you count the little tweeter in the front doors. It had stock 6x9s in the lower front doors. And a tweeter in the upper front doors. These are wired in parallel I believe.

I’ve replaced the lower front door speakers with 6x9 Kicker CS series. 120 watt I think. I left the tweeter hooked up. As a test. The system sounds just awful. No bass no midrange. Gotta go to volume level 15 to even hear music.

But now I’m wondering if the ‘in parallel’ wiring scheme is messing the sound up. Oem speakers were 2 ohm and tweeter is 2 ohm. These are guesses as I didn’t test them. Usually oem stuff is 2 ohm. But the Kickers are 4 ohm. Could the 4ohm Kicker and 2 ohm tweeter wired in parallel be causing an issue. I read you are not supposed to parallel diff ohm speakers ??

 

[dvdswan]

The 2 ohm tweeter is sucking the power from the 4 ohm 6x9. That's why your lows and mids don't sound good. Either get some 4 ohm tweeters or just remove them.

Google Search

 

[Zebrawood]

Excellent. Thx for the tip. I’ll disconnect those this weekend and update this thread.

 

[Zebrawood]

Thx again dvdswan !! That helped significantly. I just removed the tweeters in the front doors. Turns out the tweeter is 5 ohms. The new Kickers are 4 ohm.

They sound a lot better but I think I’ll need an amp now. The OEM head unit just isn’t putting out enough juice for them. Still have to set volume at 20 to make them rock.