Total Speaker Upgrade to your Gen 3 Convertible

phangz

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I'd like to address specifically those of you who drive a Gen 3 Convertible and if you have performed a complete speaker upgrade. Can you provide make and model of those speakers and also what amplifier (if any) you upgraded to? Thanks!
 

MoparMap

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I've replaced the full system in my car, but honestly, when my parents had a stock gen 3, it sounded just as good or better to me. One of the reasons I replaced mine though was because it had already been changed when I bought the car and the parts that were in it really didn't fit that well. The tweeters were just laid in under the grilles and pointing straight up and the windshield and the grilles for the door speakers stuck out and would hit my leg. I ended up swapping all the speakers out to Kicker as they were one of the few that made parts that fit in the stock locations. I don't remember exactly which ones they were, but the door speakers aren't your traditional 6 3/4", I believe they are just 6" or 6 1/2" or something like that and have a three bolt pattern instead of a 4 bolt. They fit under the stock speaker grilles though, so you can't even tell they are different. Same story on the rear sub. My box had the back cut out of it and I tried making my own, but eventually just bought one out of a junkyard and put a Kicker 6.5" shallow sub in it. I also replaced the tweeters with some 3/4" Kickers, though those didn't fit as nicely as I would have hoped. I had to cut up the grilles on them and made up some sheet metal brackets to attach them to to get them to fit in the stock locations. Now that I have a 3D printer I've thought about remaking them, but just never have gotten around to trying. The rear headrest speakers were missing when I got the car and I've yet to replace them. The amp and head unit are Alpine units. The amp is something like 350-400W if I remember right. It fit under the passenger seat in the stock location reasonably well. I can tune it up fairly nicely when I'm just sitting in the car with the engine off and I think it sounds good, but the second I start the car all the bottom end drops out and it gets drowned out by my exhaust.

Overall I'm still happy I swapped in parts that fit in the stock locations better, but I don't think I gained any real performance out of it. I've debated trying to go back to a factory amp to get the extra rear channels and cleaner wiring, but never really wanted to pay for one just to experiment. The nice part with an aftermarket one is that you can tune the channels yourself at least.
 
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