Well I have had my Sony deck and Pioneer speakers for a couple weeks now and I can say I am definitely satisfied with it. It sounds good, the Sony deck has a ton of output power, not just in the rated watts per channel but in real listenable volume levels, both high and low. It sounds great to me and has zero distortion. The FM radio tuner works well and sounds good too but I don't listen to the radio very much. Radio stations around here are pretty bad.

The Pioneer TSG1644's have a good sound, smooth crisp highs and really good bass response. It's not like having a 10" or 12" sub on a 1000 watt high current amplifier but I am definitely impressed with the nice fat sound of the 1644's. I bought mine at Advance, regular price was $49.99, I used a $40.00 off $100.00 discount code so each pair only cost me $30.00. $15.00 per speaker for this good of a sound quality is amazing.

The Sony deck I bought at Best Buy cost $89.99. Last week it was on sale for $79.99, I went there with my receipt last Saturday and they refunded me the $10.00 difference plus tax. The deck itself is very good, the 7 band equalizer is much better than the 3 band parametric equalizers you find on other decks. The Sony sounds great and has the best tone controls I have seen/heard in a long time. It also has some basic time alignment adjustments to adjust the listening field. Mine is set to front and left center, it did help improve the sound to a degree but I have never been a big fan of time alignment, always found it way too complicated for what it does. The Sony is easy to operate while driving and is laid out very well. Even the red lighting is OK, it blends with my dash lights fairly well. Another great thing about it is I can see the display on it very well, even in bright sunlight while I am wearing polarized sunglasses. The only bad thing I can say about the Sony is I wish it had a black volume ****. I called Sony parts about getting a black **** from a different model, it is on back order until November, so I will get one then. I don't mind waiting and it only costs $1.00.

This system I have now sounds great to me plus it was dirt cheap. I even sold my old Kenwood deck, Autotek amp and Autotek equalizer on Ebay so I recouped some of the expense. The only difference is I kept my Alpine tweeters on my sail panels, the Sony has plenty enough power to drive them just fine. If you have the Infinity tweeters, keep them connected so they can brighten the sound up a bit. The DM+ and loudness features on the Sony deck work great at restoring the highs and good sound quality back to compressed MP3 songs.

I saw at Walmart yesterday they sell the same deck as the one I bought. The only difference is it has a "W" at the end of the model number, CDXGT57W but it is the same as mine, price on it was the same too, $89.99. Walmart sells the 3 way Pioneer 6 1/2's, I did not like the sound of those. They were pretty harsh and screeching. I thought the same about the Sony 3-way 6 1/2's on the display at Walmart. Way too harsh and not near the bass response of the Pioneer 1644's. The 1644's sound a lot more natural to me, plus they were real cheap with the coupon code from Advance.

For what I spent, the Sony and Pioneer system sounds great. It might sound just a tad different without some type of tweeter on the sail panels, and might sound a bit different in a quad cab with the rear speakers mounted low in the rear doors and down behind the front seat backs, but I would think the sound would still be very good. The factory Infinity tweeters will be a bit brighter than my Alpine silk dome tweeters but they will still sound fine too. If the factory Infinity amp is still working OK in the new quad cab, try your new deck interfaced with the amp. It should sound good, and be a bit louder than the deck by itself. The down side is you don't get much of a turn on the volume **** because the Infinity amp takes a high level speaker input, not low level RCA's so when you turn the volume up to maybe 7 or 8 it is pretty loud, like the same as a deck playing on its own power with the volume at 10 or 12. Plus the Infinity amp will make the beeping sound a lot louder when you press the buttons on a deck that has that feature. The button beep can be turned off on most decks, Sony included. The Infinity amp can be bypassed if it does not work or you don't like the sound.

If you wire it with the Infinity amp, remember to connect the blue/white amp remote on wire on the deck to the solid blue wire in the matching installation wire harness. Or use the green/red wire in the factory radio plug if you do the installation without the harness. The harness will make it much easier but you need to check the polarity of the speaker wires. I wired my new speakers according to the polarity of the factory speakers, yet when I wired in the deck I double checked the polarity there and 3 out of 4 were out of phase. You can tell for sure if you have the polarity correct by connecting a 9 volt battery to the speaker wires. It will make the speaker make a popping noise and the cone will move in or out. If the cone moves out away from the basket, the polarity is correct, you have the positive speaker wire on the positive terminal of the battery and the negative on the negative. If the cone moves backwards toward the magnet you have the polarity reversed. Speakers wired out of phase will have a significant decrease in bass response. Plus they just won't sound right.

An edit here: If you install the Sony or any other deck in your truck, do not use the installation kit from Walmart. I had to buy a new kit because I had filed out a notch on my old one to run my Ipod cable to my Kenwood deck. I needed a new kit and got it from Walmart and the front face did not quite fit the dash opening correctly. You can see that in the pic of the Sony deck in my dash. Plus the front face of the kit snapped in place and within just a few days it was popping out of place, would not stay snapped in. I returned it to Walmart and bought the Metra "Raptor" kit at Auto Zone. It cost a few more bucks but fits perfectly and is one piece so nothing is coming apart on it.

Jimmy

 

Wow Silver, that is very helpful! It may be a couple of weeks before I even get time to do this, but I'll post the results when I do.

Thanks again.

 

I pulled the trigger and ordered the basics of my system.

Head Unit = Pioneer DEH-P8400BH
Speakers - Kenwood KFC-1664S

That's it. Install on Friday. I know about the blue/white wire for the amp, anything else I should know for the install?

 

Crutchfield will send the wire harness for the radio and speaker wire harnesses for each speaker. I believe the speaker harness for the front doors will already be pigtailed to the wires for the tweeters, you should be able to plug the harness for the Kenwood speakers in and have both the new Kenwood and the factory Infinity tweeter work together. Crutchfield will also send you a free set of plastic speaker mounting plates, one set for each pair of speakers, an they include a boatload of screws, tinnerman clips, etc for mounting everything up. Personally I do not like the plastic mounting plates. I have preached about that here a lot. I think it is much better to use 1/2" medium density fiberboard (MDF) and use one of the OEM speakers as a template to make your own mounting plates. MDF is better because it will not resonate or rattle, plus it just gives a much more solid a sturdy method to mount the new speakers. If you decide to do it that way, Home Depot sells a 2x4 sheet of MDF for less than $10.00, it is in the shelving area of the lumber section at the store.

Since you still have the factory amp it is not a good idea to try checking the speaker polarity with the new harness. I would say just wire it color for color and see if it sounds right. It will probably be fine, on my own system I may have gotten a bad harness or wired the speakers out of phase at the speaker locations. Just remember the harness they send to connect to the factory radio wiring will have a solid blue amp turn on wire. Connect that wire to the blue/white wire on the Pioneer to trigger the factory Infinity amp.

Crutchfield will also send what they call Master Sheets to give you instructions on removing the old radio and speakers. They are pretty well correct, if I remember it right. When I had that Pioneer deck in my dash for those few days before I returned it, I thought it was a little strange that it had no screw hole or provision to mount a rear support strap to it. I always use a rear support on any deck I have put in my truck. The Pioneer had a big old aluminum heat sink on the back of it and no way to mount a support strap. I got creative with it and used two pieces of thick foam, the round kind you buy at Home Depot to insulate exterior air conditioner lines outside your house. There is a cross brace under the radio location and I just cut two pieces of foam and put them on top of each other on that cross brace piece to help support the deck in the dash. The deck will last a lot longer and be a lot less likely to have internal problems later on if you take some sort of steps to support it securely in the dash. Also the Kenwood speakers will have a clip on the back of the basket. Run the speaker wire under the clip and push it in to secure the speaker wire so it won't come loose later.

Crutchfield has excellent customer support. They actually do want you to be happy with your purchase and they can help over the phone if needed. Lots of us here have done sound systems in our trucks and can help you here too. The only thing to remember is the volume with the new deck may be a lot louder than what you are used to. If it is not how you like it, you can always bypass the factory amp and use just the power in the Pioneer deck. Pioneer has a lot of output power on its own. Check the Crutchfield forum too, you can get a lot of really useful info and help there. The link for the forum is at the bottom of the Crutchfield home page.

Let us know how it turns out, it should be a real good system.

Jimmy

 

Well, I got it all in today. Having installed a similar setup in a Saturn Vue and Nissan Frontier, this was amazingly easy. Why so many reviewers hate the interior build quality for the Dakota I just can't figure out. It was so much more solid than other interiors I have worked with.

Everything plugged straight in and worked first time. My only gripe was the trim ring I got. It had the very small tray under the actual hole for the head unit. I almost had to break it to get the install to line up. It doesn't look great. I might get another one and redo it if it really starts to bug me.

Sound wise, I am very impressed. Granted, all the speakers were rattling around either off the cones or broken drivers. The low end is fairly accurate down to about 400 hz. Not bad for 6 1/2 inch speakers. I have an 8 inch sub that I will probably add later just to bring in the lower frequencies. I'm not a boomer, but I like to have the entire frequency band represented.

The head unit is much, much easier to use than my previous Pioneer unit. And infinitely better than the JVC I had, which only worked part of the time anyway. There are video walkthroughs on how to do different things with the receiver. The only disappointment is the bluetooth calling feature. I'll tweak it, but probably won't end up using it.

I love best the minimal system. With only a few hundred dollars, it sounds very good. I used to be a sound engineer, so I'm a little picky. This system is pretty good for a car.

 

I replaced my stock rear infinity speakers Friday. Kept getting bad noise out of them, finally replaced them with some Infinity 6022i's I bought off a member on here a year and change ago. 150% improvement.

My front doors are still stock to my knowledge. Tweeters are clean, the mid's could use bass-blockers though. They don't sound near as bad as the rears did, but they're on that path I'm sure. I have the rear's capped at 150hz.

Behind my seat is a 8" Sony cheap sub, and behind the console is a 6.5" mid-sub from our firebird (has a monsoon, one went, replaced both, I took the good one). Both powered by Visonik VB101PK Amplifiers, one under the passenger seat, one under my water stockpile.

Generally speaking, it's a blend between a stealth install, and getting the sound of a bigger system. I built both sub enclosures for high gain, the 8" peaks at 30-32hz and 6.5" peaks at 36-40 hz as I recall.

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Magnethead, those original speakers look exactly like what came out of mine. I just got the truck so I don't know what abuse they took, but it makes me wonder.

You stealth sub takes up the driver's side floorboard?

 

Taking up too much room was one of the reasons I removed my amp rack and sub enclosure. It is great to actually be able to use my back seat to carry stuff like groceries, stuff I bought at Home Depot, etc etc...I go to Home Depot a lot now that I bought a house a few months ago.

Glad to know the system worked out so well for you Martin. I guess Crutchfield must have been out of the regular Dodge kit to have sent the pocket kit instead. If you do decide to replace it the Raptor kit at Autozone fits and looks great.

Jimmy

 

Yes. The 8" Takes up from seat to seat. I slide the seat back until the motor nearly stalls, which then pins the sub between the 2 seats.

Sideways, takes up from the console to about 1" shy of the rear cup holder The fire extinguisher then uses up that 1", and has about 1" clearance to the door panel. .

The 6.5" sub sits swedged between the rear seat and the console.

The trick is that by swedging both subs by friction fit, I can remove either one if I need to, but they both are pretty much firmly attached to the truck, which helps deepen the bass, in the terms of vibration.

 

Jimmy, you said that the stock upper tweeters will work with an aftermarket woofer? Is there a specific impedance match? I figure the tweeter is 8 and woofer is 8 to make 4 in parallel. I can't see each being 2 to make 4 in series? How hard are the door panels to get off? I need to repair my pass door interior lock mechanism, may do the speakers while the door panel is off, after seeing the rear's.