Boomers

I put new speakers in our Cutlass Ciera.

The ChevOldsmoBuiac was down to one or two speakers that made any noise. A cars stereo is not really high on the livability scale of a vehicle, with things like working brakes and seat belts really taking priority. However, the tome of the ages says that when non-audiophile spouses start registering complaints, things have gotten pretty bad and something might be done.

The annoying things about the base model Ciera is that it only has a couple of small 3 1/2" speakers in front and a couple of 6x9's in the rear. There's no center console speaker and no door speakers. The haynes manual shows there's slots for front door speakers, but the trim doesn't have an obvious cut out. Given the age of the car (crumbling plastic) and the extant head unit (2012 vintage Wally-world wonder), sticking with the same size speakers seemed the best way to go.

3 1/2" speakers are not a common size in car audio and I couldn't find any locally. I opted to use amazon to isolate a short list of speakers and then choose the cheapest, a couple of Kicker DS 30s. You can see that they'd likely work better than the 24 year old OEM speakers.

After installing them, it became quite obvious that the new speakers had vastly better high and low response than the rear speakers, giving the car a strange, over-the-telephone quality of sound from the more voluminous rear speakers. I found some 6x9 speakers on clearance at worst-buy.

The 6x9 were clearly intended to be installed with screws and an included grill by cutting out all the OEM mounting hardware. Partially due to lazyiness and partially due to the lack of desire to have a car that looked like it might have anything valuable in it*, I modified the original speaker brackets to hold the new speakers. The new 6x9s have a much wider magnet and a deeper cone, so I cut the back of the bracket off and moved the support to the back of the cone.

As alluded to earlier, car audio isn't exactly a place where a lot of investment is warranted. Old cars tend to have a bit of natural noise from being driven, and isolating or drowning out the outside world is a recipe for an accident. That said, even with economics optimized replacements, the new speakers sound terrific... Lynard Skynard sounds three dimensional.

*Painful irony is when someone breaks a 200$ window to steal a $60 head unit.