My old Alpine components and coaxial speakers were starting to not sound so good any more. Old age and been through hell and back with me behind the volume ****, I guess. This past Tuesday night I bought myself an early Christmas present and ordered two pairs of these Kicker KS60's from Crutchfield:

http://www.crutchfield.com/p_206KS60...S60.html?tp=95

I installed all four Kickers today. UPS did not get to my house until almost 6pm but I got an early start anyway this afternoon and did a lot of the prep work while I was waiting for the speakers to get here. Crutchfield sent me 2 sets of plastic mounting adapter plates but I have never liked those. They seem to be real flimsy to me and I think mdf is a much better choice because it is so much more dense and will not resonate or rattle. Mdf also forms better and makes a better seal to the speaker mounting surface and gives a more solid/reliable method to mount the speaker as well. The Kickers take a smaller diameter mounting hole than my Alpines did so I made four new mounting plates out of mdf. I used half inch for the front door speakers and quarter inch for the rear sides. Here they are, I painted them all flat black so none of the wood color of the mdf would show through the speaker grilles on my truck:



Here are a few shots of the installation process.

Left front speaker and adapter plate mounted to the door:



Right front speaker and door panel reinstalled:



Right rear side panel speaker and adapter plate:



Right rear side panels reinstalled:



I don't know why, but I took a pic of the shipping box and speaker boxes too:



Here is what I took out, these Alpines are about 7 or 8 years old now:



I kept the tweeters from the Alpine components in my system. I removed the Alpine crossover networks and just wired in capacitors for a simple passive crossover inline at the tweeter. I wanted to use a 6.6 microfarad cap so the tweeter crossover would be roughly 6 kHz. I could not find that value of cap in a single cap so I bought six 2.2 microfarad caps and just wired three of them in parallel, to make up the 6.6 value. The Alpine crossover network crosses the tweeters over around 12 kHz at 18 db/octave. Cutting the crossover point in half at 6 db/octave really brightened the Alpine tweeters up a lot. The tweeters are a lot louder and more present in my sound stage now too.

These Kickers have got to be one of the very best sounding 6 1/2" speakers I have ever heard. And I have heard a LOT of speakers in my time. The Kickers have a titanium dome tweeter that is bright and crisp without being too harsh. The whole speaker just has a real warm natural sound to it. I use a Kicker KX350.4 amp that I bought about 6 years ago when my JL amp took a dump and had to be sent off to Arizona for repairs. Now, with the KS 60's the mids and highs come through very clear and they have such good bass response to them that I was able to lower their crossover point on my amp to about 120 hz. The woofers on these speakers are polypropylene, and that kind of speaker material used to have a bad reputation for being very stiff and hard to get good sound quality from it and it was hard to get decent volume from a poly speaker. I have no idea how Kicker made the KS 60 sound this good. The surrounds are a material called Santoprene, I don't know what that is, it looks and feels like rubber to me. Maybe the surround has something to do with the improved sound.

I recently swapped out my old Alpine deck for a Pioneer that I ordered from Crutchfield. I didn't like the way the Pioneer sounded after I had it for about a month or so. It was really lacking in mids and high end response. I had also switched over to using flash drives instead of my Ipod. I returned the Pioneer deck to Crutchfield and bought this Kenwood:

http://www.crutchfield.com/p_113KDCX...5.html?tp=5684

The Kenwood is a great deck, has a ton of features that I actually can use and has better sound quality than the Pioneer but it was still lacking in good sounding mids and high end response, no matter what source I used. I was worried that I had screwed up by making the switch to mp3 format and flash drives. It seemed like on some songs it sounded just OK, and others sounded like total dog crap. I tried different bit rates on my mp3's but that did not help. I figured there had to be some problem with the speakers and that was when I ordered these Kickers. My whole system sounds 1000% better now, it has plenty of mids and highs. These Kicker KS60's sure did the trick for me.

I don't work at Crutchfield or anything but I would say if any of us here needs speakers, these Kickers are sure enough my new favorite. I stopped at a Best Buy earlier this week to audition the KS60 and compare it to other speakers before I ordered them. I thought the Kickers sounded great in the Best Buy display board, so I knew they would do even better in my truck. And I was right. The KS 60 is one righteous speaker, in my opinion anyway.

Right now Crutchfield has the KS60's on sale for $74.99, the regular price is $99.99. Best Buy does not match prices of online retailers, so what I did was order two pairs and used a Crutchfield $20.00 off of a $100.00 purchase coupon code I found on www.retailmenot.com. I got both pairs for $129.99 shipped. Crutchfield has free shipping from now through the end of December. I could not be happier with this whole purchase. If you need new speakers for your truck, the KS 60 is a great speaker at a great price.

Jimmy

 

Looks good..

 

Hey man, I bought new tweeters for my 200QC and I need mounting brackets for them.. Do you know where to get these? THe stock brackets don't work for my new tweeters....

 

Sorry, I have no idea on buying brackets for the new tweeters. If you are trying to replace the stock tweeters with new aftermarket tweeters what you might have to do is remove the stock tweeter from the back side of the door panel and then make up some kind of a mounting plate for the new tweeter. You could stop by a good car audio store and ask if you can buy a sheet of ABS plastic from them. It's a sheet of black plastic about 1/8" thick. You could cut a bracket out of that and drill holes in it to match the original tweeter screw holes, cut a hole in the ABS and mount the tweeter to it and screw the whole thing to the back of the door panel. Depending on the mounting style and thickness of the new tweeters you might even be able to use 1/4" mdf or masonite and make up a mounting bracket for it that way.

You could also buy some plumbing strap at a hardware store or Home Depot, the car stereo store might have it too. Position the tweeter on the back of the door panel and cut pieces of plumbing strap to go across the back side of it in 2 directions, then screw the plumbing strap pieces to the original tweeter screw holes and use either epoxy or hot glue to hold the tweeter in place.

I have done tweets in Dakotas both of these ways, the ABS plastic method is the most reliable. I hope that helps.

Jimmy

 

Post some pics of the old/new and the brackets you can also hit us all up on sonic electronics forums.. many people there specific to car audio.

 

Sorry I don't have any pics of tweeter mounts. I did mount a lot of tweets in Dodges back when I installed car audio and alarms for a living. I was a pro installer from about 1985 until I retired from car audio in 2000. I have no pics of any tweeter mounts, but I did post pics of my own tweeters when I replied to another post trying to help another DF member about tweeter locations:

https://dodgeforum.com/forum/2nd-gen...eter-help.html

I guess if Krowbar's truck has no power mirror **** up on the sail panel he could put his tweets there. It might look funny with two tweeter provisions on the same door though.

Jimmy

 

na; I'd leave one inactive It will look like he has 2 sets.. :X

 

looks good. I have a brand new set of 10'' kickers comp cvr10 600rms each in a nice box i got them then sold my car there not even broke in yet. trying to sell them for $250 but there not moving to fast lol

 

Silver; BTW; I really like that old Vacuum on the self; cant find ones like that hardly they are the best!

 

Yep its an old Sears canister vac, someone gave it to my wife way back in the 1990's. It still works great but now I use an upright vac in the house. That Sears one works just as good as any Shop-Vac I have ever seen, I just can't use it for liquids.

Jimmy