How to: Replacing OEM Subwoofer in 3rd Row (2 Viewers)

[00N8]

Thanks to Ryan Bascom for doing this for me. His Facebook page here has the pictures too.

Here are a couple of pictures showing the Mark Levinson Sub taken out and the Ohm rating of ~13. The replacement Audiopipe speaker as previously mentioned after some resistors getting added to it gets around 12 Ohms before being put back.

This was put into a 2001 LX470.

 

[00N8]

All done, the final result. It sounds way better then the junk sub that was previously in it.

 

[BamaHeel]

Has anyone tried one of these? They are dvc and 2.9 inches deep so should fit

http://www.pyleaudio.com/sku/PLPW6D/6-600-Watt-Dual-Voice-Coil-4-Ohm-Subwoofer

 

[jmd93]

Just a heads up for people looking to fix this on the cheap as just temporary or just for a trade in, the glue gun fix works pretty well to. I've actually had to do this on both the left and right front bottom door speakers as well. It actually doesn't sound any different then it did before it blew out.

 

[bamabrock]

Does anyone know how many amps the stock amp is pushing to the subs/sub? I might just remove the entire enclosure and replace with a preloaded box in the stock location.

 

[JS114]

The TLC FAQ says the amp in a '00 is 170 Watts. Not sure how it's split up between the speakers and subs. If you've got an aftermarket stereo, just bypass the amp, sounds much cleaner. Space is tight in there for a preloaded box.

 

[bamabrock]

I was thinking a single 8" sub in a truck box or a cheap bazooka tube and just connecting it to the factory leads. My days of needing boom are long gone.

 

[xodeuce]

Thanks to Ryan Bascom for doing this for me. His Facebook page here has the pictures too.

Here are a couple of pictures showing the Mark Levinson Sub taken out and the Ohm rating of ~13. The replacement Audiopipe speaker as previously mentioned after some resistors getting added to it gets around 12 Ohms before being put back.

This was put into a 2001 LX470.

This is somewhat of an erroneous measurement.

A loudspeaker's impedance varies according to frequency, and the load presented to the amplifier will vary accordingly. This depends on several variables, number of winds in the coil, gauge of the wire, strength of the magnetic field, mechanical resistance of the driver, etc.

Just because the impedance matches with DC, doesn't mean that it will match with AC at the frequencies presented by the amplifier, unless all other variables are equal.

Will sound come out? Probably. Will it fry your amp? Probably not. However, the resistors are just going to dissipate power as heat and lower the efficiency of the woofer.

The re-cone solution is definitely the most ideal in terms of system compatibility. If you wanted to find the impedance of the factory driver, you'll need a sine wave generator and an oscilloscope.

Edit: Here's a document explaining how to measure the impedance of a speaker driver. Warning: trigonometry within.
http://www.cartchunk.org/audiotopics/ImpedMeasureFAQ.pdf

 

[JS114]

I was thinking a single 8" sub in a truck box or a cheap bazooka tube and just connecting it to the factory leads. My days of needing boom are long gone.

I did a pair of 8s in a truck box. Small, not too loud. I'm very happy with it.

 

[parnoren]

After my OEM sub gave in a couple of years back I installed one of these as a low cost alternative.

http://www.fusionelectronics.com/ca...losures-encounter/en-10-Active-Tube-Enclosure

The sound has improved dramatically and I now get the missing bass that I never really had even when the original sub was working. I connected the Fusion to the leads for the OEM sub and can adjust the Fusion sub from the OEM car stereo. I don't need the little box that came with the new sub. One thing less to install. This doesn't compare with a custom built box, but for about $100 you will get some much needed bass in the truck.
It can be removed at any time by unplugging the two wire harnesses on the sub itself.

 

[Matserelli]

 

[Matserelli]

 

[lesgarten]

It just required a resistor to be soldered in to increase the Ohms and all worked fine with the Audiopipe TS-V6.

Since then I had a custom box built in the factory space and it now houses an 8" Boston Acoustics G1 which sounds amazing with my new ARC Audio amps and new speakers all around.

I can now turn it up loud enough to make my ears bleed with ZERO distortion.

I'm in S. FL as well.

Can you supply some details of the custom sub box you did?

 

[mtnracer]

Had it done at Auto Sound Plus by Commercial & Prospect. I am still very happy although I might try to find amps with passive cooling instead of fans.

 

[HiFiGuy]

This is somewhat of an erroneous measurement.

A loudspeaker's impedance varies according to frequency, and the load presented to the amplifier will vary accordingly. This depends on several variables, number of winds in the coil, gauge of the wire, strength of the magnetic field, mechanical resistance of the driver, etc.

Just because the impedance matches with DC, doesn't mean that it will match with AC at the frequencies presented by the amplifier, unless all other variables are equal.

Will sound come out? Probably. Will it fry your amp? Probably not. However, the resistors are just going to dissipate power as heat and lower the efficiency of the woofer.

The re-cone solution is definitely the most ideal in terms of system compatibility. If you wanted to find the impedance of the factory driver, you'll need a sine wave generator and an oscilloscope.

Edit: Here's a document explaining how to measure the impedance of a speaker driver. Warning: trigonometry within.
http://www.cartchunk.org/audiotopics/ImpedMeasureFAQ.pdf

This is basically solid info. However, you do not necessarily need an oscilloscope and sine wave generator. There are inexpensive CDs that have sine wave tones on them and several regular voltmeters with true RMS capability to measure the impedance of the speaker at whatever frequency that you happen to be testing. It really isn't important, unless you are trying to plot an impedance curve anyway. In that case, due to the complex nature of impedance curves of speakers, a little knowledge could be a dangerous thing, since a nominally "8 Ohm" speaker driver may easily measure 30-40 Ohms near its free air resonance. Someone without experience may judge this speaker to be a much higher impedance than it really is.

A good rule of thumb for estimating a speaker's rated impedance is by just measuring it raw, which means with no signal, so the frequency is "0" or DC, and multiplying that number by about 1 1/3. So a 3.2 Ohm DC resistance will probably be about a 4 Ohm speaker. A 5.7 or 6.2 Ohm DC resistance will probably equate to a nominally 8 Ohm speaker, for example.

I imagine, not having looked into it, that the reason there are two sets of wires is because there are two coils, which allowed the system to be engineered to a price point with off the shelf components. You could easily test this by checking to see if there is continuity between the negative on one pair and the negative on the other, and also check the positive wires. If there is continuity, that means the amp is already mono, which I suspect it is, and you could just as easily use an 8 Ohm single voice coil speaker, with the other pair of wires taped off, or connected to the second set of terminals on the single voice coil, which wouldn't change the impedance presented to the amp, but it would give you something to do with the wires.

If the original dual voice coil speaker in the enclosure was rated at 7.5 Ohms, that is probably the rating of both factory speaker coils in parallel, so the amp can handle roughly an 8 Ohm load and put out about 25 Watts at that impedance. It is worth measuring a coil to see. No need to measure them both unless you're curious, since they will be essentially the same. If that is correct, assuming the amp is mono and the wires are already parallel, and you buy a sub with dual voice coils, you need to find one with either 16 Ohms per coil and wire them in parallel (+ to +, - to - on each side), or 4 Ohms per coil and wire them in series. That would entail using one pair of wires from the amp instead of both, and connecting one coil's + to the + wire, the other coil's - to the - wire, and then connecting the first coil's - to the second coil's + with a short jumper.

If you have any more questions, please post them here, and I'll try to check in every once in a while to see them.

 

[HiFiGuy]

Thanks to Ryan Bascom for doing this for me. His Facebook page here has the pictures too.

Here are a couple of pictures showing the Mark Levinson Sub taken out and the Ohm rating of ~13. The replacement Audiopipe speaker as previously mentioned after some resistors getting added to it gets around 12 Ohms before being put back.

This was put into a 2001 LX470.

This jives perfectly with my previous post. The DC resistance of the coil being 13.1 means that the rated impedance is about 16 Ohms. That's one coil. If you wire the two coils of that speaker in parallel, that makes 8 Ohms. If the enclosure has a sticker that says 7.5 Ohms/25 Watts, then that tells you the coils are indeed wired in parallel, and the amp is almost certainly mono with two sets of leads. The difference between the sticker at 7.5 or the estimated impedance of 8 is relatively insignificant.

 

[HiFiGuy]

From the feedback I am getting my hunch is that the AMP is shutting down because of the low impedance of the new speaker.

I did try both channels independently in my troubleshooting. I tried the yellow / red and the black / green combos and both channels on the sub. They all work as long as I only hook up one of the voice coils. I initially thought that the speaker had a short but another brand speaker had the same issue. I am also pretty sure the amp is fine as the original JBL woofer was working fine except that the fabric was torn and sounded like crap.

That brings me back to impedance. Can anyone confirm?

Yes. The problem is impedance. It is too low. If you have a dual voice coil like the TS-VR6, which seems to be 4 Ohms per coil, you could just wire them in series and be fine. If it is a single voice coil at 4 Ohms, you probably need to find a different woofer.

 

[lesgarten]

A good rule of thumb for estimating a speaker's rated impedance is by just measuring it raw, which means with no signal, so the frequency is "0" or DC, and multiplying that number by about 1 1/3. So a 3.2 Ohm DC resistance will probably be about a 4 Ohm speaker. A 5.7 or 6.2 Ohm DC resistance will probably equate to a nominally 8 Ohm speaker, for example.

.

This has not been my experience with reference to speaker impedance's.

A 4 ohm, or 16, or 32, or 64 ohm, usually measure their ratings failry closely IME. Like maybe 5% worse case scenario. I just did a quick and dirtymeasure of 2 low grade 4 OHM speakers in my garage, and they were both 3.9 ohms. I do some stuff with terminating speakers and HiEnd headphones. If I had a speaker measuring 1/3 off it's rating, I would look at it with suspicion. Indeed most of the high end matched drivers are around 0.1 ohms of each other IME, and close to their rating. All the rest of your stuff jives perfectly.

I was going to pull my sub out today to measure the voice coils because I am sure I have a foam issue from the rattle/buzz I'm hearing. But a house emergency stopped me early on.

I surmised a while back that the Audiopipe speaker was presenting a load to the amp that the amp believes is a short when both coils were hooked up in most likely in Parallel. I wanted to measure my coils today to confirm how they are wired and what they check out at in ohms.

Another little complication is that there are multiples of configurations for these subs. The dual 4" is one, The Dual Voice coil 6" is another, and the Levinson system seems to be a single voice coil 6" from the looks of one of the posts I had seen.

Dual voice coils on a Sub usually double their output from being wired Single Coil. I have them in some Old Martin Logan Monoliths that came from the factory wired with only one VC wired. I had spoken to them about building a crossover when they let me know I could wire in the second VC and pick up another 3 dB or so.

I'll post back here when I check the Voice Coils on my sub when I pull it.

Do you work in the Audio industry?

 

[Reincer]

Great post

I just completed the sub install and it was smooth sailing with your post.
Thanks

 

[SHTF]

Has anyone tried one of these? They are dvc and 2.9 inches deep so should fit

http://www.pyleaudio.com/sku/PLPW6D/6-600-Watt-Dual-Voice-Coil-4-Ohm-Subwoofer

Just pulled my sub box out from the 01 TLC and going to try this
Anyone figure out the wiring yet +/- green/black red/yellow?
Not sure which is which to wire the DVC sub
Also want to make sure I have it set up in 8ohm from the beginning

Boy have I been working on my cruiser a lot since I joined this forum , thanks for the writeups guys! I will try to contribute with this sub, take some pictures, and see how it goes, only $22 on ebay shipped