Guide: Subaru Tweeter Upgrade For 2nd Gen Tacos, NO SPLICING, CUTTING, OR SOLDERING REQUIRED

Nice.. thanks for the info.

Add on.. speakers installed and working!

 

Can anyone recommend a true plug and play version sans the trimming? truck is still under warranty and the dealership I have to take it to (god forbid) anything happens tried to fight me on my husky floor mats. when I went in for warranty work on my window motors.

 

If you're willing to pay and do some work, you can get what you want. See if you can buy yourself another pair of stock tweeters, or get one from a salvaged Tacoma at the yard. Cut the tweeter off and splice in the tweeter of your choice. Plug it in. If you want to go back to stock, then just plug in the original tweeters. I installed new tweeters the other day and didn't need to alter the wiring at the plug or the plug itself.
If you're wanting specifically the Subaru tweeter, you could splice those in too, but working room with the wires seem tighter.

 

Damn! $94 for the Subie Kit! Anyone ever substitute cheaper tweeters, say around $25 - $ 30? LOL

 

You need to bring up the Magnusson Moss Act (dealer cannot dent warranty due to aftermarket parts etc) because that is complete non-sense for them to say anything about floor mats. Do you homework before you go in.

 

You can find them a bit cheaper but not that much and anything else wont be essentially plug and play.

 

Am I confused, or is your photo of the wiring before and after rearrangement the same? Based on your description it sounded like the wire colors should alternate not pair, yet your photo of how it should look after rearrangement shows them paired.

 

Just chop the stock connector off the shit stock tweeter and use that to wire in any aftermarket tweeter.

Documented here

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/tweeter-wiring-colors-on-my-2nd-gen.422730/

Easier, quicker, cheaper, no fucking with the stock main harness.

 

Yeah, they told me if I had an issue to get a lawyer.

 

Sorry if this had already been addressed but it does matter in terms of phasing. Meaning do the woofer and tweeter move in the same direction. It'll work, just might not sound quite right if the 2 tweeters are out of phase to each other. Which wires have the capacitor? That wire, will connect to the negative side of the tweeter, and be on the positive of the woofer. This is because capacitors invert an AC signal. Positive in, negative out.
Hope that makes sense.

 

Damn dood that’s not cool. Hopefully you live somewhere with more than one dealer cause that’s BS. I had the same issue with mine. Changed over to a place further down the road. They agreed that they’ve gotten a ton of work from the other place for the same crap. Good luck man.

 

Anybody know where I can get a couple of those little white plastic clips. Don't ask me why I need them.

 

Large toe nail clippers help when cutting off the plastic bits if you have them. No dremmel. They get in there, and make it nice and flat.

 

So i have the driver side wired and the system works but I’m not sure what tones i should be getting out of the tweeter i can’t tell if it’s the tweeter working or the speaker. 2013 non jbl

**Edit**
found a youtube video for testing tweeters and everything is working great. Thanks for the write up.

 

I’m a horrible procrastinator and dragged my feet on replacing my tweeters cuz I didn’t want to deal with the headache. Sometimes procrastination pays off!

I nominate Black_cat for man of the year! Now if only I’d seen this before Christmas; I could have asked Santa to bring me a set.

 

I've heard of the Subaru tweeter mod but never cared enough to look into it as I'm a retired installer and I wouldn't use stock tweeters anyway.

That Subaru tweeter is made by Kicker! At $94 a pair you've got to be kidding! Lol! I bought the entire set on Amazon for $128 that included the woofers and crossovers. That's a $34 difference for a complete proper front set of speakers instead of a decent tweeter and a complete crap woofer with no crossover.

This plug and play hoopla is ridiculous for a tweeter, come on people it's 2 wires!

A dealer can deny a warranty claim for any aftermarket "reason" they feel like. But if you decide to not fight because of your aftermarket floormats (or speakers) that's more on you than it is on the dealer. The dealer is just trying to make some money and get his techs a proper paycheck instead of a bullshit warranty work paycheck. Come on people fight for what's right and for yourselves... just because a dealer denies a warranty doesn't mean that dealer has the "end all say all" because they don't.

The tweeters require a mounting plate

but I finally found a use for that one mud flap I had

Phasing has absolutely no affect on tweeters - zero. Phasing has to do with bass and low mid range and tweeters don't play bass or low mid range. Anyone that claims any different is full of poo poo. An out of phase speaker is wired backwards in relation to the opposite side speaker or mounted in an inappropriate manner. A speaker can be wired correctly and still be out of phase if it's mounted at an adverse angle.

There isn't a tweeter on this planet that has a crossover within it, there isn't any room for it inside the tweeter. There may be a capacitor on the tweeter where the wires plug in on the terminal plate but there is never a crossover inside the tweeter.

Capacitors used in crossovers are non-polarized, the capacitor can be wired in series on the positive or the negative side of the tweeter. The capacitor can be wired on the positive side on the left tweeter and on the negative side on the right tweeter, they'll sound identical, and it doesn't make any difference. One of the tweeters can be wired backwards and you still won't hear a difference. You can hook up a mic and a scope and you'll see it with your eyes it makes zero difference.

Ok now you all can get back to your regularly scheduled misinformation within this thread.

 

Oh yeah, you can definitely use a less expensive tweeter. If it's a tweeter it'll work fine. The impedance stated by a manufacturer is static and as it plays music the impedance drastically changes, the higher the frequency being played the higher the impedance. I highly recommend using crossovers with any tweeter.

 

There’s the key phrase. For those of us that don’t have any depth of knowledge or experience in car audio, having something that’s plug and play means getting things installed with little worry about botching it and having your daily driver intact at the end of the day and not looking like a garage sale while you try to figure out the install, troubleshoot, and fabricate mounts and connectors.

That said, thanks for adding your expertise to the thread to dispel any misinformation and provide options. Do the speakers in that kit fit the 2nd gen Tacoma, or do you have to fab mounts for those too?

 

Speaker mounts, called speaker adapters, are available to mount the tweeters and the 6x9's into Tacomas. I fabbed mine only because I'm out of cash. They're available at most any car stereo shop, eBay, Amazon, Crutchfield, etc... I get that electrical confuses a lot of people but it's still only two wires per tweeter and misinformation only makes it more confusing.

 

Amen to your last sentence. All the “yes, no, maybe so” is a large part of why I haven’t made the upgrade. At some point I’ll decide a course of action and jump in.