Installing Tweeter Speakers On Comanche Help

[NEO auto]

I have these tweeters from an XJ style Wagoneer.  How difficult is it to wire them up?  Thanks

 

 

[Jeep Driver]

Tweeters require crossovers, active or passive. 

 

Watch his vids, he is one of the best. 

 

 

[Jeep Driver]

Also, you'll want to understand 'staging'.............positioning those in the lower panel offers the worst of staging. Useless. 

 

 

 

[Minuit]

The factory wired the tweeters in parallel with the main speaker and relied on the 8 ohm impedance of the tweeters to keep them from being overpowering. That's terrible and you shouldn't do that, because you'll have the tweeters and the main speakers fighting over the high frequencies without a crossover. If you have aftermarket speakers with their own tweeters, I just about guarantee it'll sound at least somewhat tinny in the high ranges. You do not need or want multiple speakers on the same channel competing for the treble frequencies. As you add speakers to a channel, you make it exponentially harder to tune and make actually sound good. To make it worse, they're perpendicular to the main speaker. Say goodbye to any kind of imaging unless you're running a crossover.

 

one more thing: the factory tweeters have capacitors to prevent them from playing low frequencies. That's the only reason the factory tweeter can go in parallel with the main speaker. Doing this with an aftermarket tweeter meant to go with a crossover will kill the tweeter.

 

My advice, unless you feel like building tweeter enclosures in the sail panels, is to do what I did and use those brackets for a proper component set. If I were going for an all-out audio build, putting the tweeters in the sail panel is what I would do. I'm shooting myself in the foot on my truck because I refuse to have any aftermarket audio stuff in view, so I was limited to the less than optimal factory locations, but I would call the imaging in my truck "surprisingly good for having the tweeters at knee level". I suspect it'll sound even better when I get and tune a DSP for the front stage and modify my radio to have RCA pre-outputs.

 

[Minuit]

To answer your question: the tweeter is simply connected to the same + and - wires that go to the door speaker. I wouldn't suggest it, but you can try doing that and see how it sounds to you. If you like the way they sound, great! Sometimes but not always, the + wire on the tweeter has a white stripe.

 

Be warned though. If you're anything like me, car audio is even more of a rabbit hole than the trucks themselves. You'll find yourself going crazier and crazier to find something that makes you happy.

[WahooSteeler]

Neo, another option is to put the tweeters in the door panel by the handle. The picture attached is not the best example because they were flat mounted, whereas for best imaging they would be mounted with some type of irregular base that gave you some flexibility to project the sound waves in the most optimum direction. I've seen more custom mounted efforts that achieved this. The sail panel is the best place to mount tweeters IMO because it is the most forward of the seated listening position, allowing for greater positioning of the high frequency sound direction. But as already noted, that gets in to a much more custom installation. With your fantastic looking "brochure ready" remodel, I'm guessing you'd be like Minuit and want to keep it as stock looking as possible.......i.e. hidden speakers. 

 

 

[SuperSwede]

My recommendation is to copy this solution, the result is amazing compared to the original setup which is sort of crap.

(With the tweeters at the same level as your ears)

[NickyV]

I like to think of myself as an audiophile, although I'm by no means an expert. Also, I'm not made out of money.

 

Over the years, I have inherited a lot of car audio components, including an two-channel Alpine amp and some 3 (or maybe 4)-inch midrange speakers.

 

Over the past month, I surfed FB Marketplace, picked up a small sub and bought some better 6x9s (the ones that came from the PO were POS's). Because the Alpine was only two channel and I installed speakers in the doors a few years ago, I had to do some math-ing. I used Chat-GPT and figured out how to wire it all up using a combination of series and parallel. It sounded pretty good. But it was bugging me that the dash speakers were not the intended size. And because they weren't the intended size I wasn't able to mount them the way tweeters were intended to be mounted in the truck.

 

Just today I went to the junk yard and found some Jensen tweeters in an 88 XJ. I took of that damn kick-plate AGAIN. (Man... I hate taking that thing off). I took the 3" full-range speakers out and put the tweeters in.

 

I think it sounds pretty good! I did not use a crossover, but because I had done the series/parallel wiring, maybe I ended up wiring the system close to the way they did it in the factory? The tweeters are not overwhelmingly loud or tinny and overall, I think there's a bit more balance to the system.

 

TL;DR — Tweeters under the dash with the factory brackets, 5" full-range speakers in the doors,  full-range 6"9"s in behind the seats in the pillars, and a single 12" sub. I'll never be able to make the cab as quiet as a modern car, but now it doesn't really matter. Sound system sounds great!

 

Ed Note: I am running a little bit of a crossover on the amp that is driving the tweeters and the full-range speakers. I am cutting the sub at about 80hz on the low end and the mids/highs at 100hz. I think that's right... I'm tired right now. But jazzed about my system. I think it's complete!

Edited November 17 by NickyV
Wanted to add a little more context.