Be afraid...Be very, very afraid...Well, sorta.Jan 19 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line As another member commented, in most cases it's best to have a professional do it. Save yourself some time and aggravation.
Picture this: So you’ve just gotten home with your brand-new set of awesome car speakers. You just can’t wait to get them into your car so you can listen to your favorite CDs in booming, true-to-life sound. As soon as you get these babies into your dash, doors, rear deck, or wherever you’re going to put them, you’ll be at peace with the world and everything will be allright. Okay, so perhaps I’m overexaggerating a little bit here, but you get the idea. At this point, you’re probably expecting me to say something like, “Anyone can install his/her own car speakers!” in this review. After all, it seems like most reviews on subjects like this (i.e., those that involve some sort of do-it-yourself installation or other work) either espouse a gung-ho, anyone-can-do-it type of attitude or are relatively unhelpful. After all, if I were to tell you that installing your own speakers were so hard that no one other than a professional should ever attempt it himself, you’d probably either become depressed, or you’d decide that I’m full of *@%! and ignore anything else I have to say. Well, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that I’m not going to tell you that installing speakers is so hard that you shouldn’t even bother trying to do it yourself. In other words, there’s nothing so manifestly difficult about hooking up the speakers themselves that should cause you to shudder in fear. The bad news is that it can turn out to be such a pain in the butt that it may very well be worth $30 or so to pay Circuit City, Best Buy, or someone else like that to install your new speakers for you. Now, I’m not going to get very specific here, because it’s not my intention in this editorial to provide you with explicit, step-by—step instructions on how to install your speakers all by yourself. The actual act of installing the speakers themselves is really relatively easy. In most cases, all that’s really required, other than the screws which are holding the current speakers on, is either a soldering iron and some electrical tape or some crimping caps and a pair of pliers. The former is pretty much universally considered to be preferable in order to ensure the best connections and therefore the best sound. Of course, you’ll also need a screwdriver. If you’re just switching out a pair of speakers already in the car for a new pair (which presumably are either the same size or are either big or small enough to fit into that space), all there is to do in the course of the actual installation is unscrew the old speaker, cut the wires, connect the two sets of wires using one of the methods above (taking care to connect positive with positive and negative with negative), and screw the new speaker on. Every set of speakers I’ve ever purchased has come with instructions on how to do everything I’ve just described, as well. So, like I said, that’s really not all that hard. If that were really all there were to installing new speakers in my car, I would never have paid anyone a dollar to install speakers for me. Unfortunately, though, you have to get to the speakers before you can take the old ones out and install the new ones. This sounds like it would be the easy part, right? Well, while I suppose that some automobile manufacturers may make this relatively simple, there are many cars in which it can take a fair amount of time just to figure out how to get at the old speakers. Certain Japanese car manufacturers, for example, while notorious for making high-quality cars that last nearly forever, are also notorious for making many parts and components nearly impossible to get at -- especially in compact models. Take my 1999 Toyota Corolla, for example: In order to get at my front speakers, which are located in the two front doors, I had to unscrew a few things, unsnap a couple dozen different fasteners that I couldn’t even see, and guide the door handle assembly through the hole in the inside door cover -- all of which was in one big piece, which made it rather unwieldy and heavy to manipulate. Did I also mention that these various kinds of fasteners on the inside of the door assembly are rather difficult to undo without breaking them off? Oh, and it’s also pretty annoying to get the front of the door back on once you’re finished with the installation. I also had to modify the mounting brackets that were already inside the doors so that the new speakers would fit. This basically involved getting a drill and making some holes in the right places in the brackets. All in all, it took me about two and a half hours or so to install the one pair of speakers. About thirty minutes of that was spent drilling the brackets as I described above, and only about ten to fifteen minutes were spent on the actual installation of the new speakers. The rest of the time was spent getting the various door and trim pieces off and putting them back on after the installation was complete. Of course, I’m not the fastest in the world at this kind of thing, but I’m not the slowest, either. I had already taken the door apart once before, so I had a pretty good idea of how to do it this last time, so it presumably took me less time than it would take someone with less experience on that particular car. I guess my point here is that getting your speakers in can be frustrating, annoying, and time-consuming. All that, and you can break off little pieces if you’re not careful enough. Obviously, I was capable of installing speakers myself (and I’ve done the same thing in an older Corolla, several years ago), but it was still a pain in the butt. Sure, I got a nice feeling of satisfaction upon finishing this seemingly never-ending task, but was it worth it? Let me put it this way -- next time, I think I’ll just bring my lunch for a few days, save the $30, and pay Circuit City to install my speakers for me.  |
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