The combo radio is built by Mitsubishi and is very high-quality, but there's two different versions of it. They DO develop a few common problems that once repaired, are repaired for life. They also have no failures of their cd laser pickups, unlike the 100 percent failure rate of GM lasers.
The only difference in the two two versions is the Infinity model puts out less bass. It is made up in the remote-mounted amplifier or with little amps bolted to four of the speakers. That's how they modified the tone response for the different shapes of various vehicles. The standard radio puts out more bass but everything else is the same.
My reason for mentioning that is if the original radio developed a problem and someone put an Infinity model in its place, it won't sound very good unless you turn the bass way up. Just replacing the speakers won't change that.
If you remove a door or rear speaker and find four wires on both halves of the electrical connector, it will also have an amp bolted to the speaker frame. Those are about $145.00 speakers so you'll want to think twice about replacing them. The standard speakers with two wires used to cost about $35.00 through the dealer, which is over-priced but typical. You can do better with new ones rated to handle a higher power but that only means what they can withstand, not that they are going to deliver more sound. In fact, higher power speakers get their durability at a cost of needing more power to develop the same volume so they may sound worse than what you have now.
Also keep in mind a big part of the tone comes from the speaker sitting in the door which acts as an echo chamber. No speaker in a store display will ever sound the same as in your car. It's common for expensive speakers to sound terrible and it's fairly common for cheap speakers to sound just fine.
The next issue is all car manufacturers seem to think they've discovered the shape and size of a speaker that can't be duplicated by an aftermarket speaker company. And in fact, there are so many variations and such limited interchangeability that few of them even try to offer replacements to cover all those sizes. Instead, it used to be fairly common for them to offer speaker adapters to allow the installation of standard aftermarket speakers for a variety of applications.
The place to start looking for replacement speakers is a place like Crutchfield. I never bought anything from them myself, but I've never heard anything bad about them other than they're expensive. I'd be real happy to know you're not trying to blow your eardrums out like many young boys want to do. There are other places you can find on the internet offering good-sounding speakers at reasonable prices. Size is going be be the biggest hurdle.
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012 AT 5:52 AM
