Tweeters work, mids don't

**omehegan** · 09-10-2005, 10:53 AM

This is a weird problem, and may be Integra-specific. I posted about this on an Integra message board and didn't get any resolution there. My car has stock tweeters AND mids in the doors. Looking at the wiring diagram, the wiring harness runs a single pair into each door, and then there is a capacitor matrix that forms a simple crossover of sorts to run the tweeters, which are daisy-chained off the mids. So in the dash you have four pairs of wires for front and rear, left and right, as you'd expect.

When I wired up my amp for the car computer, I bought a wiring harness adaptor so I could easily plug into the stock harness behind the dash and not hack it all up. I ran four pairs of speaker wire up into the dash area and connected them appropriately to the four channels on the harness.

When I first put audio into the amp after getting everything going, I noticed that in the front, only the tweeters are working. I'm not getting any sound from the mids. The rear speakers work fine. This seems weird to me - if the tweeters are AFTER the mids in the circuit, everything should work, right? I've tried turning up the volume a fair amount from the PC side, thinking maybe I wasn't providing enough power to run both speakers in the doors, but that didn't help.

Anyone have any other ideas about this? I'm stumped. Thanks!

**sharpy39** · 09-10-2005, 11:13 AM

are yu making use of any type of x-over or hypass filter on yure amp??if so maybe yure freq is set too high???

**Bat** · 09-14-2005, 02:09 PM

Hi,
Are you sure you have the polarity of your amp output cables correct where you've connected to the original car wiring? If wired in reverse may cause this as your feeding the crossover through the tweeter in effect

Cheers,
Gavin.

**omehegan** · 09-14-2005, 06:58 PM

Hmm, I checked this pretty carefully, but I suppose I could just try reversing polarity at the amp and see if that does anything. I'll let you know!

**pancit175** · 09-14-2005, 07:43 PM

the speakers would still work if the polarity was incorrect. the speakers would just be moving in the wrong direction. you may have just blown that speaker. But you said that the speakers were running in parallel or series??? have you tried to pop those speaker lines.

**Willy-Mach1** · 09-14-2005, 11:50 PM

I would test by switching the front and rear channels..... connect the front speakers to the rear channel and the rear speakers to the front channels. That way you would test both the amp and the speakers at the same time, it the front speakers sound fine connected to the rear channel and you get the same problem on the rear speakers that means that the problem is probably the amp. like sharpy39 said, check your amp for an internal x-over or filter and make sure that it is on the correct setting (probably off)

**omehegan** · 09-17-2005, 10:46 AM

I have tried plugging the front speakers into the rear amp channels - no change. Also the amp has low pass filters for the front and rear channels. I was under the impression that these were only supposed to be used if you have a sub, which I don't, so they are both set to "off." Still haven't had a chance to check polarity yet.

**Adam432823** · 09-18-2005, 05:19 AM

Could you send us a link to the wiring diagram that you have and a link to the adapter that you're using? There must be more to this. I have an Accord that had tweets and woofers. Actually it turned out that the woofers were really full range speakers and the tweeters have a hi pass filter to keep out the lows (which matches your descriptions). My aftermarket head unit powered both just fine.... until I blew out the tweets.

**omehegan** · 09-18-2005, 03:12 PM

I'm not sure what adaptors you're referring to. My computer is an EPIA Mii, so it just has stereo 1/8" out. I have a 1/8" to RCA adaptor, and then two RCA y-adaptors. Those plug into the amp's front and rear channels. Then I have four speaker wires running up to the dash, where I used a wiring harness adaptor to tie them into the car speakers. You can see that here.

As for the wiring diagram, I can't seem to find a copy of it online. The amp is a Sony XM-444W. I bought it because it was cheap on ebay and I'm really not an audiophile

Looking at the various wiring options, I'm noticing that while I thought there were TWO switches for a low pass filter, one front and one rear, it turns out that one is a LPF and one is a HPF. That bears some looking into. I thought that both were set to off, which would make sense; I want the full range of sound going to both sets of speakers. But maybe one is on or something.

**omehegan** · 09-18-2005, 05:12 PM

Well I went out and fiddled with the low pass and high pass filters, but that didn't solve my problem. If I turn on the low pass filter for the rear, those speakers immediately sound all tinny - ok, that makes sense. So I turned that off. If I turn on the high pass filter for the front, the speakers sound the same basically. I didn't have a friend to sit in the car and tell me if there was any change at all. Maybe this is an amp problem, and the high pass filter for the front is stuck on? Seems a little unlikely, and I don't know of an easy way to test it without dragging another amp into the mix, and I don't have one available anyway. Oh, but I also already tried hooking up the front speakers to the rear amp channel and that made no difference.

I checked the speaker polarity and it's correct at the amp side, and I'm pretty damn sure it's correct at the wiring harness; regardless, my roommate (who works for Bose in their car stereo division) said that reversed polarity wouldn't cause this problem.

I'm back to square one. Blah. I'm beginning to wonder if the front mids EVER worked.