[B.rad.86]

Do you remember seeing any harness for the rear speakers that are in the premium. I want to add the rears to my base but don't want to deal with wiring them up

 

[GR86Talk]

Do you remember seeing any harness for the rear speakers that are in the premium. I want to add the rears to my base but don't want to deal with wiring them up

The aftermarket speaker harness for the rears are same for both premium and base as the factory connector is the same. The stock premium rears can go in plug and play in a base with no harness.

 

[TNcaveman]

Thanks for this thread! Looks like I get to try and crawl into the back seat area sometime soon. Sound proofing the rear side panels and doors will be an awesome side benefit too. While doing this work, I'll probably wire taps for a small sub too.

Steve

 

[Hachi Electronics]

Thanks for this thread! Looks like I get to try and crawl into the back seat area sometime soon. Sound proofing the rear side panels and doors will be an awesome side benefit too. While doing this work, I'll probably wire taps for a small sub too.

Steve

Don’t use the rear speakers for your sub signal. They’re crossed over.

 

[TNcaveman]

OK - Been spending too much time on figuring out what to do with my Premium (Base) BRZ So, I have 3 options

1 replace speakers with the Polks and figure out how to add a sub later
2 I have a friend with OEM speakers and is selling his car, so I can get his speakers for $300 and use the midrange in the back side panels and upgrade to the full OEM soon (wow - that was a run-on sentence )
3 Do nothing

So - here's my delima. With having the base model without the extra wiring already there and no rear amp, how do you get signal to the sub? Does the base head unit have line outs that are just not wired into anything? Or just tap into the font speakers' wiring? The tapping in seems like it could compromise the power to the front speakers and the impedence (which is already really low at 2 ohms). I really miss the good old days of getting a decent stereo installed easily without reading 3 hrs worth of threads. BTW - this is the sest one yet. Only concern is that the Polks will have even less bass and will be trebbley.

Steve

 

[Hachi Electronics]

So - here's my delima. With having the base model without the extra wiring already there and no rear amp, how do you get signal to the sub? Does the base head unit have line outs that are just not wired into anything? Or just tap into the font speakers' wiring? The tapping in seems like it could compromise the power to the front speakers and the impedence (which is already really low at 2 ohms).

Since the amplifier isn’t actually acting as an electrical load on the speaker signal, there’s no impact to the power level or impedance of the front speaker circuit.

I wrote a subwoofer install guide, i included instructions for base models with no amp. In my
opinion the easiest place to grab front signal is at the door boot harness on each side.

How to: Subwoofer installation

Howdy. Sorry if I suck at writing tutorials. I know a subwoofer is something the majority of the owners of these cars are going to want, so I figured I’d share my knowledge a bit. Background on me, I spent 4 years as a 12 volt electronics installer, and I’m pretty sure I still have an active...

www.gr86.org

 

[PhatFreshPrince]

I did mine over the weekend, significate difference, took about 6 hours and all material took me less than $100.

Could you post a link to what you use?

For the rear speakers I used the original brackets since they were already the necessary 3.5" ones. I did have to cut off the car connector's key since my Metra 72-8105 adapter had the slot on the wrong side, but that was easy to slice off with a knife.

I have the same car, the BRZ Limited. Did you have to cut on the stock "L" bracket to get the back speakers to fit? Did you cut the stock connectors or the Metra 72-8105 adapter? I wanted to know because I did want to damage anything that's stock because of the warranty.
Also, can you tell me how much louder are the new back speakers? I not expecting more base, but it is louder, right?

 

[GR86Talk]

Could you post a link to what you use?

I have the same car, the BRZ Limited. Did you have to cut on the stock "L" bracket to get the back speakers to fit? Did you cut the stock connectors or the Metra 72-8105 adapter? I wanted to know because I did want to damage anything that's stock because of the warranty.
Also, can you tell me how much louder are the new back speakers? I not expecting more base, but it is louder, right?

You have to cut the brackets for the 4” polks to fit correctly. The speaker basket is 3.5”, the premium GR86/limited BRZ brackets has a ~3.25“ opening. See the photos I posted at start of this thread. The good thing is you can still put back the original speakers even if you cut the brackets and no one would really know since it is behind the edge of the speaker. You can also save the old speaker intact by doing the following: Remove the factory car wiring harness going to the speaker harness on the stock L bracket. Remove the L bracket from the car that has the stock speaker. Once out of the car, you can remove the factory female speaker harness attached to the L bracket. There is a detent you put pressure on to slide it off the metal L bracket. You want to remove the female harness from the L bracket first before unscrewing the speaker. After you do this, unscrew the speaker and the soldered cables to the factory speaker harness are intact and can be reinstalled later if needed.

The back speakers for the base are 2.5” 6 ohm, so the 4ohm Polks are definitely louder. I believe the premium GR86/limited BRZ have 4ohm rears and are 3.5”, so they will probably be close to the same. I think the 3.5” in the premium/limited BRZ are pioneer. It all depends on the sensitivity rating… since the dome is plastic, I think it would be roughly the same as the polk, maybe 1 db less. I will say they will be brighter and smoother than the stocks with the silk dome. Since the rears have a high pass filter from the head unit, you won’t get any more bass. The polks have a silk dome tweeter that will produce slightly better highs. If I had a premium/limited, I may have not upgraded them if staying with stock head unit. For $59 for my base GR86, it was worth it.

 

[GR86Talk]

Also, the premium gr86/limited brz have the same speakers as the first gen, and you can find tons of these on ebay for almost nothing. Even if you have the premium gr86/limited brz, and you don’t want to mess with your original factory L brackets that came with your car, you can get a set of used ones, and save your originals if you would like.

 

[PhatFreshPrince]

You have to cut the brackets for the 4” polks to fit correctly. The speaker basket is 3.5”, the premium GR86/limited BRZ brackets has a ~3.25“ opening. See the photos I posted at start of this thread. The good thing is you can still put back the original speakers even if you cut the brackets and no one would really know since it is behind the edge of the speaker. You can also save the old speaker intact by doing the following: Remove the factory car wiring harness going to the speaker harness on the stock L bracket. Remove the L bracket from the car that has the stock speaker. Once out of the car, you can remove the factory female speaker harness attached to the L bracket. There is a detent you put pressure on to slide it off the metal L bracket. You want to remove the female harness from the adaptor first before unscrewing the speaker. After you do this, unscrew the speaker and the soldered cables to the factory speaker harness are intact and can be reinstalled later if needed.

The back speakers for the base are 2.5” 6 ohm, so the 4ohm Polks are definitely louder. I believe the premium GR86/limited BRZ have 4ohm rears and are 3.5”, so they will probably close to the same. I think the 3.5” in the premium/limited BRZ are pioneer. It all depends on the sensitivity rating… since the dome is plastic, I think it would be roughly the same as the polk, maybe 1 db less. I will say they will be brighter and smoother than the stocks with the silk dome. Since the rears have a high pass filter from the head unit, you won’t get any more bass. The polks have a silk dome tweeter that will produce slightly better highs. If I had a premium/limited, I may have not upgraded them if staying with stock head unit. For $59 for my base GR86, it was worth it.

Okay, Thanks for the advice and the write-up. I think you might be right about it not being worth it with the Limited setup. I have already got the OEM+ speaker upgrade kit, and I am waiting on the sub kit they are coming out with later this year. I know OEM+ is not doing anything with the back speakers, so I was just hoping to improve the sound back there before then. I guess I'll wait and see how it sounds with the sub and everything and decide then.

 

[GR86Talk]

Yeah, I would get the sub first. You may be better off using the virtual vocal sound stage on low with fader set a little more to the rear.

 

[cambest86]

Crutchfield has the speaker adapters for these for free and they fit perfectly.

Hey, thanks for the great instructions.
Quick question regarding the adapters for the rear speakers. Do you have a reference number for these? Crutchfield doesn't have the speakers in stock so I got them elsewhere, but would like to get the adapters from them.

 

[GR86Talk]

Hey, thanks for the great instructions.
Quick question regarding the adapters for the rear speakers. Do you have a reference number for these? Crutchfield doesn't have the speakers in stock so I got them elsewhere, but would like to get the adapters from them.

I list and link to the harness models for front, door, and rear speakers. If you are talking about the metal brackets, just looks for any past FRS/86 rear speakers on ebay. They are all the same basically.

 

[TNcaveman]

This thread is really a good one. Here's what I did. Because the system is set up with the door as a woofer and the dash as a tweeter, I went with a component speaker that has the tweeter separate from the woofer. If you go with a coax in the door plus a tweeter, or a small driver/tweeter combo, I was worried about too much high frequency sound. I went for the JL Audio C1-650. I got the door adapter and wiring plugs mentioned in this thread. So, the first thing I changed out was the tweeter. Because there isn't a standard mount for these things, I removed the original unit and cut down the mount. The JV tweeter fits on the ring that is left, but there is no way to hold it down. So I JB Welded it in place. I did the epoxy at three places and left them to cure overnight. The wiring was pretty straight forward. I soldered the in-line bass blocker crossover to the wiring and shrink wrapped everything. I used a piece of trim attachment double sided tape to hold the crossover onto the back of the grill. I also covered the holes of the mid range grill with black tape.

For the doors, the adapter had no way of attaching the speakers to the mount. These things are for 5.5 inch speakers, even though it says 5.5 and 6.5 inch speakers. So I took the old speakers and cut the guts out. The three webs were easily cut off with large wire cutters and I cut the surrounds with a box cutter. The 6.5 speaker fit perfectly. Drilled 4 holes and screwed right up. A note on the screws: the plastic ring is pretty thin. Just snug them or the screws will spin. Luckily this actually mated up perfectly with the door panel. I did not cut the ring on the panel. It lines up with the space between the metal and the rubber on the JL speaker. For wiring, I took off the factory plug and ran the adapter through the hole left from the plug. I could have simply soldered the speaker to the plug.

For the wring, I just wired the black wires to the - terminal on both sets of speakers. On the doors, I used some electrical tape to hold the wires so they don't rattle around. While the panels were off, I added several pieces of Fat Mat and Spectrum sound deadening paint to the inside of the doors and the back of the plastic panel. I haven't driven with the speakers yet, but they are so much cleaner sounding. Bass is similar volume but way tighter. Over all sounded way cleaner. I'm still needing to crank the bass, but the equalizer now has the highs at 0 to +2 The mids I am running at -2 to 0 The sound deadening made the doors sound awesome when shutting them. Very satisfied and looking forward to doing the rear. Can't wait for my commute this morning.

An additional note on the sound deadening. The combo of Fat Mat and Spectrum paint has transformed this vehicle. I had already done the entire rear trunk, under trunk, inside rear bumper, front and rear fender wells (backside of plastic liner and metal areas). This made a huge improvement on the noise levels in the car. Even with my axle-back, it's really quiet on the interstate. I'm sure the doors will help too. Also, really looking forward to adding the sound deadening to the side panels in the back.

Steve

 

[Neptune86]

This thread is really a good one. Here's what I did. Because the system is set up with the door as a woofer and the dash as a tweeter, I went with a component speaker that has the tweeter separate from the woofer. If you go with a coax in the door plus a tweeter, or a small driver/tweeter combo, I was worried about too much high frequency sound. I went for the JL Audio C1-650. I got the door adapter and wiring plugs mentioned in this thread. So, the first thing I changed out was the tweeter. Because there isn't a standard mount for these things, I removed the original unit and cut down the mount. The JV tweeter fits on the ring that is left, but there is no way to hold it down. So I JB Welded it in place. I did the epoxy at three places and left them to cure overnight. The wiring was pretty straight forward. I soldered the in-line bass blocker crossover to the wiring and shrink wrapped everything. I used a piece of trim attachment double sided tape to hold the crossover onto the back of the grill. I also covered the holes of the mid range grill with black tape.

View attachment 17567

View attachment 17567

View attachment 17568

For the doors, the adapter had no way of attaching the speakers to the mount. These things are for 5.5 inch speakers, even though it says 5.5 and 6.5 inch speakers. So I took the old speakers and cut the guts out. The three webs were easily cut off with large wire cutters and I cut the surrounds with a box cutter. The 6.5 speaker fit perfectly. Drilled 4 holes and screwed right up. A note on the screws: the plastic ring is pretty thin. Just snug them or the screws will spin. Luckily this actually mated up perfectly with the door panel. I did not cut the ring on the panel. It lines up with the space between the metal and the rubber on the JL speaker. For wiring, I took off the factory plug and ran the adapter through the hole left from the plug. I could have simply soldered the speaker to the plug.

View attachment 17569

View attachment 17570

View attachment 17571

For the wring, I just wired the black wires to the - terminal on both sets of speakers. On the doors, I used some electrical tape to hold the wires so they don't rattle around. While the panels were off, I added several pieces of Fat Mat and Spectrum sound deadening paint to the inside of the doors and the back of the plastic panel. I haven't driven with the speakers yet, but they are so much cleaner sounding. Bass is similar volume but way tighter. Over all sounded way cleaner. I'm still needing to crank the bass, but the equalizer now has the highs at 0 to +2 The mids I am running at -2 to 0 The sound deadening made the doors sound awesome when shutting them. Very satisfied and looking forward to doing the rear. Can't wait for my commute this morning.

An additional note on the sound deadening. The combo of Fat Mat and Spectrum paint has transformed this vehicle. I had already done the entire rear trunk, under trunk, inside rear bumper, front and rear fender wells (backside of plastic liner and metal areas). This made a huge improvement on the noise levels in the car. Even with my axle-back, it's really quiet on the interstate. I'm sure the doors will help too. Also, really looking forward to adding the sound deadening to the side panels in the back.

Steve

I used the same exact component system for my fronts in my base, very happy with them. I used the C1 4" speakers for the rears but it was a pain to figure out how to mount them as there is no way they fit in the factory mounts. I ran this alone for a while but ultimately still put a sub in the spare tire area to round out the system. I added some lightweight sound deadening material in the doors, trunk and rear quarter area to improve the speaker quality. I may have to try the fender wells to reduce some of the tire noise.

 

[TNcaveman]

I'm looking like I'm going to use 5-1/2" rear speakers that are really efficient for the rear. And get a sub of some kind. I'm going to mount the rears directly to the side panel. Since there won't be any bass, buzzing of the panels won't make a difference. And I'll put in sound deadening in there too. The Spectrum paint from Amazon is really good. I also use FatMat where I can too.

Steve

 

[zenk78]

The stock rears in the base model are very weak. In the base they are 2.5“ paper cones and run at 6 ohms. The front run at 2 ohms. This difference in ohms greatly unbalances the front to rear speaker volume balance. They are also filtered at the head unit, so you also won’t get low to low-mid frequencies from the rear speakers.

The only thing I can suggest if you keep the sound system as is is to set the fader 3 clicks or more to the rear and set the virtual sound stage a few to the rear as well, or set the auto vocal sound stage to medium. The vocal sound stage will help balance the vocals so it doesn’t sound like everything is coming from the front but allows you to keep the fader more toward the middle so you can get base from the front woofers.

The other big problem is that they're unbaffled. They're practically sitting in open air. That won't affect the highest frequencies, but you won't get the midrange that you could get from even a 4". I'd recommend fabricating baffles and maybe putting some polyfill behind that.

 

[zenk78]

The other big problem is that they're unbaffled. They're practically sitting in open air. That won't affect the highest frequencies, but you won't get the midrange that you could get from even a 4". I'd recommend fabricating baffles and maybe putting some polyfill behind that.

And... if you're making baffles... you aren't constrained to 4" speakers. You could put larger speakers in there. If you have the 8-speaker system, you should be able to 5" or 6" components... if you have the 6-speaker system, you'd probably want to focus on efficiency.

See below for specs on the speakers:

 

[GR86Talk]

I think that is my screen shot I took from the translated Japanese Toyota site. 😂. I have it in another early post during my research.

 

[GR86Talk]

One thing with I experienced with baffles a long time ago with low wattage speakers is the speakers seem to loose volume/efficiency.

In addition to the stock base rears being 2.5 and 6ohm, the rears are filtered at the head unit, which limits the freq range of any size speaker back there unless you use a non oem head unit or external amp feeding off front channels.