hey, does anyone know where the rear speaker wires run? i have a pair of 6x9 speakers with a lot of wiring for outside the truck. say if i go to a drive in movie i can put them in the bed with me rather than opening the window.

do they run down under the plastic "running boards" inside the door?

thanks
Nick

 

well, for the first thing, what kind of stereo do you have, stock or aftermarket? second I'm not quite sure the the harness is for the speaker wire but i do know that if you remove the side panel(not all the way just enough to get hand and arm in) and there right there for each speaker. But be warned, without another amp to push the 6x9's the a good change of blowing your stereo, i know this by experience.

 

You may find the rear wires running inside a plastic conduit under the carpet on the passenger's side of the truck. Pull up the door sill panel, it should be right there in the channel on the floor pan. You can either cut into the conduit to check the wires or you can follow it to one end or the other and check there. The speaker wires might be twisted together in pairs. If so it will be a lot easier to identify them. These are the colors you are looking for:

Left Rear (+) Brown/Yellow
Left Rear (-) Brown/Light Blue

Right Rear (+) Brown/White
Right Rear (-) Brown/Orange

I *think* all 4 wires run down the passenger's side, especially if you have the factory Chrysler Infinity Amp in the passenger's kick panel. If you don't find the wires on the passenger's side, just check the driver's side. You may have one set of speaker wires on each side of the truck if you do not have the Infinity system.

Not to dispute the above post but if all you are doing is splicing in a pair of 6x9's to the factory system it should be fine. If you are worried about damaging the system, you could cut the rear speaker wires and wire in some quick-disconnects so you could completely disconnect the factory rear speakers while you are using the 6x9's in the bed. Then just take out the 6x9's and re-connect the factory rears when you are done with the 6x9's. Either way it should be fine.

Jimmy

 

Well in my truck the speaker wire didnt run in the carpet. If you took of the side paneling the speaker wire was right in there.

 

Splicing in any pair of speakers in addition to the factory speakers can damage the head unit (though damage is not inevitable; there are a lot of variables).

The HU's internal amplifier is designed to be stable down to a certain impedance. In car audio, that's usually 4 ohms in stereo operation for HUs, thus most car audio speakers are 4 ohms. If you splice a pair of 4 ohm speakers in parallel along with an existing pair of 4 ohm speakers, you end up with a 2 ohm load on each of the two rear channels of your HU's internal amp. This allows potentially twice the current to flow through it than it was designed for (assuming it doesn't have built in protection circuitry to guard against it, which HU amps don't tend to have), and can cause damage.

On the other hand, if you wire the extra pair of speakers in series with the existing pair of speakers, you will end up with an 8 ohm load per channel. This is perfectly fine. It will not damage the HU and in fact, it makes life easier for the HU than running with just its normal pair of 4 ohm speakers, because it will only draw half the current that it is designed for. The downside to this is, half the current = half the power, so you have a situation where you are trying to energize twice the number of voice coils with only half the power, and this results in disappointingly low output.

There are two ways to do this properly with decent results:

1. Disconnect the factory rear speakers when powering the 6x9s, or vice versa.

2. Obtain a separate external car audio amplifier to power the 6x9s (there are various ways to approach this, and it will be trickier to do if using a typical factory radio with no preouts). This is the best approach for performance, though it is much more of a hassle and expense to implement.