Sound system replacement

Brewmaster-SKO

Advanced Member
Joined
Jul 27, 2020
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31
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Usa
was wondering what folks have done to fixbtheir sound system, my bus is a 27 foot shorty with an in dash radio and 4 5" in roof speakers, to put it bluntly, they sound like crap, so I took out the speakers and insulated and faced the ceiling, now I want to install speakers, not to play for the whole camp, just good sounding speakers, any ideas that are worth their price and sound good? I was thinking of a bose system. But was told not a good choice. Any ideas appreciated. BTW no. I'm not goingnto install a 500w amplifier. Just a regular system...
 
Ah, **** if I know about buying new equipment, but something you have to pay attention to is the ohm rating of them.

Basically, if the system is supposed to use 8 ohm speakers, you have to use 8 ohm speakers. There are ways to mix and match, but I don't recall exactly. The wiring gets a skosh more complicated and I didn't want to deal with it
 
was wondering what folks have done to fixbtheir sound system, my bus is a 27 foot shorty with an in dash radio and 4 5" in roof speakers, to put it bluntly, they sound like crap, so I took out the speakers and insulated and faced the ceiling, now I want to install speakers, not to play for the whole camp, just good sounding speakers, any ideas that are worth their price and sound good? I was thinking of a bose system. But was told not a good choice. Any ideas appreciated. BTW no. I'm not goingnto install a 500w amplifier. Just a regular system...
Your bus is similar to mine... 27 foot.. two garbage front speakers... does it perhaps have a Blue-Bird body?
 
This is a rabbit hole of personal opinion and creeping requirements. Here's mine and some ideas:

Anticipate where you might go before just getting speakers. Just replacing speakers with more expensive ones won't do much unless there are other improvements as well.

If you're not up to it, find a friendly car stereo installer - shop around till you find someone you trust.

Figure out the radio first - what is the ohm rating on the outputs? What is the wattage output? RMS (root mean square = average) and peak? Stereo out (4 wires)? Front and rear(8 wires)?

Almost any 6" round (or 6x9) with a second dome tweeter will be an improvement (assuming you've matched the ohms to the radio). Some come with 3 speakers in a 6x9. About $100 / pair and up... They will be sized for a car door-sized space (meaning 3" deep or more) so they probably won't fit where your original speakers went.

But now that you have better speakers in new housings, you'll likely find your wiring is limiting, or your radio isn't that good - meaning it can't adequately move those speakers.

You might as well pull new wires while it's open. Depends on length, but putting in 14ga wire will probably make a big difference. Wire choice is woo woo on the interwebtube forums. Go to HD and get duplex 'speaker wire' - it's fine.

A small amplifier will make a huge difference with those new speakers even at lower volumes. Here's one, but there are lots....

And with a new amp, you'll want to revisit the wire choices to make sure you have enough ampacity to get the sound to the speakers.

And you'll end up wanting some more bottom end. You don't need to rattle the windows, but it's just better. ;>)
 
This is something I'm interested in as I'm going to have to fully and manually install a whole speaker set up in my bus. It never had anything audio wise in it.
 
was wondering what folks have done to fixbtheir sound system, my bus is a 27 foot shorty with an in dash radio and 4 5" in roof speakers, to put it bluntly, they sound like crap, so I took out the speakers and insulated and faced the ceiling, now I want to install speakers, not to play for the whole camp, just good sounding speakers, any ideas that are worth their price and sound good? I was thinking of a bose system. But was told not a good choice. Any ideas appreciated. BTW no. I'm not goingnto install a 500w amplifier. Just a regular system...
I got my bus with the stock dispatch radio with stock speakers. Here is my upgrade story.
1. Just changed the head unit to a $100 JVC at your local Best Buy store, but the two way 6 inch 4 ohm speakers kept blowing out.
2. I replaced the 2 stock speakers like for like. Guess what?! Eventually they all started to blow out. The head unit kept saying check wiring / misswire. One of two things is happening, my head unit is the problem and blow out my stock speakers or my 4 ohms two ways are not a good fit for my $100 head unit.
3. I chose to go to the junkyard. Found some pioneer 6 inchers 200Watts three ways. Cost me $60 for 4 with a 90 day guarantee.
4. Installed the them, they have not blown out for 3 months and going.

Pro tip: At the junk yard I was zoning in on the cars with the expensive floor matts, since a lot of the radios were MIA. My thought process was this. If they were willing to spend money on high quality floor mats, I figured when I pull the panels out there will be high quality speakers hidden underneath.
 
Your original speakers must of been junk. Even if you reverse polarization of the speaker wires, your sound won't sound good but it shouldn't blow, It'll make the woofer go in the reverse direction making the audio sound terrible, but it won't damage the speaker. Polarization needs to be correct.

Blowing a speaker means it was receiving too many amps from the head unit. More than the speaker could handle. So you probably just had really cheap low amp speakers.
 

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