First off, what is your end goal? Are you just trying to replace a blown speaker, are you trying to build a sound quality system, or somewhere in between? Almost everything requires consideration when getting more bass in your car is the biggest concern.
Speaker Replacement
Let’s start with a simple speaker replacement. Maybe you just need a new set of speakers to replace a blown factory speaker, or you just want a little bit better sound, but you don’t want to make major changes.
Sensitivity Rating
You should be looking for a couple of things in your speaker. One is a speaker with high efficiency. This is the sensitivity rating. Generally, high sensitivity is somewhere in the 90 dB and up range. Those speakers will do more with less power, which is important because your factory radio doesn’t have a lot of power, so higher-efficiency speakers will sound better than lower-efficiency speakers when you are using a factory radio.
Power handling of your speakers
You also want to look at the power handling of your speakers. You don’t need speakers that can handle a lot of power. if you want speakers that can work with not much power at all, and if the speakers you’re looking at have a power range given, look for a very low number. For example, some speakers will work with as little as 2 watts of power.
If you’re comparing a couple of speakers and one of them has a larger tweeter than the other, for example, a one-inch silk dome tweeter compared to a half-inch silk dome tweeter, that larger tweeter will also sound better. It will blend better with the woofer and give you a nicer sound from the high frequencies down through the mid-range blending into the woofer.
Frequency Response
Another specification you’re going to see on all of our speakers is the frequency response. These are the frequencies that the manufacturer says any particular speaker can faithfully reproduce. The lowest number is bass.
How low can it go?
The higher number is all of the high frequencies, the stuff the tweeter, the electric guitars, the female vocals, trumpets, and things like that. And this range is kind of important.
If you’re looking for the speaker with the most bass, go with the largest speaker you can with the lowest frequency response. And on the high end, you’ll see some speakers go all the way up to 20,000 hertz and beyond. Now the range of human hearing is from about 20 hertz to about 20,000 hertz, and most of our adult ears can’t even hear up that high. So as long as your speakers go to about 20,000 hertz and beyond, you’re fine.
Better materials mean more wattage
If you’re looking for something above and beyond a simple speaker replacement, you’re going to want to look for a couple of different things. You can get better speakers that are made of better materials, they will also handle more wattage. This allows you to get a bigger amplifier, like in an aftermarket radio or a separate amplifier, and when you have extra power for your speakers you don’t have to be as concerned about the sensitivity rating.
Tweeter as a custom installation
We always want to consider a tweeter as a custom installation. You will be doing things like fabricating a bracket or cutting a hole and running some wires, there is nothing standard about those tweeter mounts from the factory, and aftermarket tweeters generally come with lots of hardware and brackets and screws, and ways to get them mounted.
Materials used in tweeters
And as long as we are talking about tweeters, let’s talk about the materials used in tweeters and how they sound. There are several different common materials, and they all have slightly different tonal characteristics. For example, silk or cloth tweeters will typically sound warm and musical, and ceramic or metallic tweeters will usually sound a little bit more crisp and sharp, and precise.
Conclusion
We get it, there are a lot of speakers to choose from, even when you put your car in you might be faced with hundreds of speakers to choose from. Hopefully, this article has given you some tools you can use to figure out which speakers are going to sound right in your car and allow you to get more bass without a subwoofer.
