Adventures in Car Audio

Back over Christmas, I was at a loss for a good, personalized present for my sweetie. Fortunately, I came up with something--given my tinkering skills, I figured I should offer them up: so I gave her this gift certificate:

This gift certificate entitles the recipient to one (1) day of House Project / Construction / Furniture building / miscellaneous services. Services shall be rendered upon tender of certificate.

She had a great idea on what to collect with--her driver's side car speaker has been intermittent (and then dead) for close to a year now. Sure I'll do that--come on over!


Yeah, I know, too cute. My Subaru is the one that is older (1992!!), smaller, less sporty, and more weathered. Like me!

Anyway, I was hoping that speaker replacement would be a matter of simply pulling off a speaker cover or something. Nuh-huh. Turns out that you have to remove the entire door panel to replace a speaker. Grr. Fortunately, Sarah owns the Haynes manual for her car, and we followed the instructions to disassemble the door panel--mostly successful; not too many disasters:


I also told her to pose with the removed car door panel:


and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!

Anyway... diagnosis time. Hrm... no obvious problems with a visual inspection. Wiggle all the connections, and look for corrosion on the terminals? Nope. Continuity from the wire terminals to the speaker lugs? Checks out. Wait... I have a set of half-broken old speakers in my junk pile... temporarily connected it... yep, the original speaker is shot. Argh.

I suggested that we head to the Buy More Best Buy and pick up car speakers, to avoid reassembling and re-disassembling the car door.

Man... it's been a while since I had such an object lesson on how incompetent their staff is. We already figured out that it was a 6-1/2" speaker with... say... a ruler. We flagged down a salesbot, and he tried to convince us that it was a 5-1/4" speaker. After more fruitless conversation, we wandered off into the aisles. Fortunately, Sarah could get signal on her iPhone--Crutchfield to the rescue! She could get the list of compatible speakers by car model year, and then cross-reference the speakers on the shelves with how they were rated by users.


And people wonder why I think brick-and-mortar stores have a limited use. One set of Sony Xplods later, we were heading out the door.

Installation went smoothly, although I had to resort to a headlamp and flashlights when finishing off the passenger side installation.

As a final note... as we were wrapping up and putting things away, Sarah picked up the old speaker that I had sitting on top of the washing machine.

"Ugh... this speaker is sticky... I think it got stuck to your washing machine or something..."

"Um. Magnet?"

"Oh."

We both had a good laugh over that one.