I am installing a new CD player into my 79 wagon along with new front speakers. I picked up a new Alpine deck around Christmas time. This car has factory installed door speakers. The original door speakers were still there till now. The first thing I did was to replace the drivers door speaker that has been blown out for years. I used the factory door wiring. The speaker seemed to be working fine with the old Kenwood cassette deck. Last weekend I wired in the new deck. I powered it up before buttoning everything up and the front speakers are distorted when the volume is up. WHen it is low you cannot tell. The factory wiring bridges both negative speaker wires into one connection. I bridged both wires from the deck to match, like I did with the kenwood. Disconnecting the original pass speaker did nothing. When I cut the pass negative wire loose, the distortion on the drivers speaker goes away. It sounds just fine. I also unbridged the negative wires and connected them individually with the same result. Does anyone know what my problem could be? I really do not want to rewired the front speakers. I am trying to keep the factory harness and door grommets for a clean install. I am stumped on this one.......
Hello Tigger,
Try swapping speakers side to side and see if the problem remains.
If so? Then you know for sure it is the wiring.
Possible you have a defect in the NEW speaker???
From Pintony
hi new car steros req there own seprate ground wire and pos wire for each speaker . old stuff didnt need it. i have anew jvc cd with four speaker all have their own 2 wires for each channel for balance and fader front to rear. also all neg back wires go all the way to the back of your stero . so you schould have 1 neg and 1 pos wires for each channel for a total of 8 wires.plus proballey 1 main pos i pos hooked for main power 1 hooked to your lights for night use . 1 main ground maybe i more if you have a power ant. if any water or short happen to any of the speaker wires you could blow that speaker side out of your stero. hope that helps chris in ca.
They done said what I would say. + are the power ratings the same a under powered or over powered stereo will sound distorted. or to many speakers on the same channel!
Hey Tigger
chrisf1219 is right on the 2 wire setup.no floating grounds anymore.Also make sure that the wires match on R and L channels.I does not matter where you wire pos and ground as long as you do it the same on both sides.I'm just getting mine finished,started it Saturday.This ones running about 960 watts RMS.A little smaller than I'm used to.
As a former Navy electronic tech, I can say that the majority of what is said is true. There are some things that an inexperienced or not-quite-knowledgeable person may have problems with.
chrisf1219 is right. Two wires for every speaker. Also, NEVER connect the neg side of the speaker directly to ground. This can potentially damage the head unit as well as the speakers.
Doc is right that the speaker wiring must match. The reasoning for this, is that in most speakers, there is a circuit setup to keep the low frequencies from reaching the smaller speakers in a 2, 3 or 4-way speaker set. If the speaker wiring does not match, they can be out of phase.
The speakers should also be hooked positive to positive and negative to negative. This is just good practice and makes any troubleshooting you may need to do later a WHOLE lot easier.
Most head units come with hookup instructions and diagrams. If you can color by number, you can figure out how to hook up a stereo. Most newer head units are wired with the same color scheme:
Red is switched power. Black is ground. Yellow is constant battery power. Orange for lighting. White, Gray, Green, and Purple are the speaker paired wires, with the stripe typically being the neg (-). Blue is usually a remote activate wire (for something that needs to be turned on when the head unit is switched on, like an amp or power antenna.) then there are other wires that have other functions that you may or may not use, i.e. car phone mute, etc.