wite97z28

Okay so when i bought my car i thought that the front speakers were blown since they were pretty scratchy. It has a sony xplod head unit. Took the panels off and noticed the speakers have already been replaced with pioneers and there were 4 wires. I assumed one set for tweeter and one set for mids. The 2 pos were hooked together same with the neg. I took them off and tried just hooking up a set at a time and it helped some but still gets scratchy when i turn the radio up some. I know that it has the monsoon system with the amp. Would the amp be causing this to happen. Could i jump the amp out, or should i just rewire all the speakers?

Thanks,

Shandlar

This is my first response, so please bear with me a bit.

Let me say this first off and foremost. It is not the amp causing your problems with scratchy sounds. This is from most likely the speakers starting to go bad.

I too have a 97 (z28) and when I got it, it still had the full stock stereo system. I did replace the head unit, the front speakers, the middle speakers, and the rear speakers.

To answer your question, the stock front speakers had a dual voice coil setup going. This has been the first and only time in my years of doing stereo work that I have seen this on stock speakers. I tried a few things:

1. Running both sets into the same voice coil (both positive leads onto the same connection and both negative leads onto the same connection) I don't know much about ohms but I do think that this can/will damage your speakers/head unit. This is not advised. Most car speakers (short of the realllllly good ones) run at about 4 ohms of resistance. This wire setup will drop the resistance to 2 ohm, which isn't good.
2. I tried just using one set of the leads, and neither set yielded the result I wanted as it had to be turned up way too much to get any sound volume.
3. Running the connections in series (one positive terminal onto the speaker, the negative terminal for this pair onto the positive terminal of the second pair, and finally the last negative terminal onto the speaker) Once again, not a good fix.

What was actually the easiest, was to just run a new set of wires to your head unit. The black boot in your door-jam is easily popped out and popped back in. Get yourself what I would call a "seeker" or "finder" which can be something as simple as some good stiff wire. Shoot it through the boot that you have popped out, and then into the cabin. Going into the cabin will be a headache. Get comfortable and accept the fact that you'll get a few knuckle busters. It took me about an hour on each side, but that is mostly just lack of experience.

Once you're in the cabin, it's gravy to fish it to the rear side of your head unit. Then just pop out the head and make your new connections onto the harness. Be advised that the power to your speakers will be coming straight off the head unit, which would be around.....12-25W RMS. Generally sufficient enough for most standard speakers.

Side note, it sounds like you've tried my #1, and #2. I ended up replacing the speakers a 2nd time because the tweeters were blown from my experiments.

Also, I found it weird that the middle and rear speakers were standard 2 wire setups but the front speakers had the 4.

Hope that helps.

GaryDoug

See this topic for an excellent description of the Monsoon system and the options available in the F-body cars.
Monsoon FAQ - LS1TECH

According to this, the stock speakers in your doors were not dual-voice-coil speakers, but were the normal 2-ohm midrange and 4-ohm tweeter setup. This is not to say that your system has not been significantly modified from stock. The probable cause of the scratchy noise is voice cone foam surround separation from the metal frame. This is very common. The 2-ohm speakers in the door will be very difficult to replace exactly. Most speakers that are advertised as "2-ohm compatible" do not function well in this application.

Shandlar

^^^^^^ he's probably correct on everything he said, so if anything I said conflicts, go with his answer. He seems to have a better technical understanding of it all

However, going back to the posed question, running new wires will solve this issue since it would be connecting straight into your head unit. Full range coming out of the head unit, connecting to the full range speakers in the door. Granted I am taking the assumption that both the speakers and the head unit are 4 ohm as well as the idea that the speakers in the door are full range, so keep that in mind.

Is there anyway to +1 to GaryDoug's answer for being better than mine?