Pioneer Front Speakers and Rear Speakers in a 2001 Chevy Truck - Standard-Cab Resonance

13.The Pioneer TS-C160R speaker's passive crossover has two areas for attaching the positive lead for the tweeters. As you can see, the positive lead is marked -3 dB. This means that if the positive lead is attached to this connection, the tweeter will be reduced by 3 decibels over the other speakers. In some cases, as the volume is turned up, the tweeter will progressively overrun the other speaker's volume. Remember, we used the stock speaker wire to run the tweeter, reducing its efficiency, therefore preventing it from getting the same amount of power. For this reason, we connected the positive lead to the second connection, preventing the tweeter from performing at the standard level.

14.With our door panel back in position, you can see a slight difference from the "before" shot. We mounted our passive crossover just above the kick panels in the dash and ran the wire under the seat to the passenger side, where our amp will be mounted.

15.Stock rear speakers in the Chevy were weak 4x6-inchers that really sounded like trash. This was mostly due to the fact that the new head unit we installed took them out on the first AC/DC track we jammed. We wanted to place a set of the Pioneer separates behind the seats, but we were told that it wasn't going to be easy.

16.The rear sections of the cab that tie the cab to the roof are known as B-pillars. Four screws and a grip full of snap fasteners hold plastic covers to the B-pillars. Under the plastic are the stock rear speakers that simply snap into their mounting locations. We removed the speakers to see how difficult it was going to be to mount the separates in the B-pillars.

17.We removed about half an inch of sheetmetal in the original mounting hole to find ample room to mount the speakers to the plastics.

18.A few dimension were transferred to the plastic to see how the alignment would work for grille placement. The grille slightly interfered with the side of the seat when moving the seat back and forth, but not enough to prevent us from mounting the speakers in these locations.

19.Again, we made use of the templates provided by the Pioneer packaging. We cut out the inner diameter of the template so we had the right diameter to mark our speaker hole.

20.By using the speaker grille in conjunction with the template, we were able to make sure the grille didn't touch the window and the speaker was centered over the original speaker hole. This made sure the location of our new speaker's magnet was going to be properly located in the hole made for the speaker and hide most of the original speaker mounting area.

21a.With the diameter marked in ink on the plastic, we cut out the speaker hole. As you can see, the original speaker pattern was going to still be shown because the design bled off the edge of the plastic in straight lines.

22.We didn't want to have the rear tweeters screaming in our ears, so we mounted the small speakers below the mids. A large drill and another session with the grinder made quick work of our tweeter mounting hole.

23.Again, we installed the passive crossovers, this time under the plastic B-pillar panels for safe keeping.

24.This time we wired the tweeters to the -3 dB connection on the crossover to prevent deafening ourselves with high frequencies.

25.Even though the speaker grille doesn't cover all the original speaker area, the separates fit where we were told they wouldn't. The top of the seat comes right up to the center of the speaker's centerline and can hardly be seen. The tweeters bounce off the back wall plastics and provide an excellent rear sound. We still need some bottom end, so next month we'll build a sub box that fits behind the seat without restricting the seat adjustability.