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Speaker Change

3K views 1 reply 2 participants last post by  Vanzanten 
#1 ·
Greetings fellow Insight Drivers!

I have recently upgraded my speakers on my Insight (2nd gen.) and wanted to share my experiences with others who are about to try.
Sadly, i did not take any pictures as I was a bit intimidated by the task and only thought about how to successfully finish it :)

I won't repeat what has already been written and will just concentrate on my additional comments:

  • Unplug your car's battery if your operation takes longer (but have your radio's security code ready)
  • I bought "standard size" jbl speakers (GTO629) and they do not fit right into the hole in the door.
  • Get this kind of rubber sticky tape - i was able to make my new speakers fit by using the tape and the provided bezels to have the speaker mount a bit "away" from the metal door frame.
  • When buying "Honda Insight Speaker adapter cables", you will most likely get the ones for the first generation Insight; they will not fit.
  • With most speakers (like mine) you need to drill holes in the door.
  • If you have the variant with 6 speakers pre-fittet, the tweeters come wired in parallell (?) to the front spakers; as the cables are not colour - coded, you have to test out which ones of the cables go back to the stereo and which ones go to the tweeters. I would have done well to disconnect the stock tweeters but i did not. (the speakers i got have their own tweeters)
  • Be prepared to solder connections onto the speaker cables if you cannot get a speaker cable adapter; most plugs that you would get expect bigger cable sizes and thus cannot be just squeezed onto the cables with pliers - you have to solder.
  • As you have to solder the speaker cables "i the air",i asked someone to hold the cables for me while i soldered - if you are (like me) not particularly adept at soldering , be prepared that you might need a second person to hold you the cables while you solder.
  • When prying the plastic door cover from the door, it worked best for me when I started tugging on the bottom of the plastic door cover. Still, i destroyed some of the red caps that fix the plastic cover to the metal door when tugging it out; the door covers when reattached still hold superbly well.
  • Depending on where you touch the metal door, grease will spill out - i tried to put all grease back whence it came as it will seal the inner part of the door from rain (?).

As for sound quality, the built-in radio actually works very well when hooked up to better speakers ;)
I had to put down treble a bit as i think that the stock tweeters still over-steer a bit; as i said, i should have checked which cable was going to the builtin tweeters and disconnect it.

Apart from that, i am very happy with the sound; bigger speakers with 3-way components would have made way more decent bass sounds but i decided against them as i did not want to cut into my doors.

Why did i say to disconnect the 12V battery? It is the reason why i did not take pictures ;)
I thought that i would not need to drill holes on the doors and thus did not have access to a drill when I started changing the speakers; so i stopped when I saw that i needed to drill and got one the next day and continued then. By then however (that was when I wanted to take pictures) my battery was drained completely and the car would not start (of course i left wires disconnected etc over night). As soon as i got jumpstarted by someone after i finished installing the speakers my Insight worked again like a charm. I am not sure what it was but one possibility is that somehow the system that checks for open doors drained the battery because i disconnected all the cables to the switches on the doors and unhung the strings that actually open and lock the doors - so maybe it thought the doors where open?

Hope this helps others, suggestion and input of course welcome!

Best regards,

Christian
 
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