Speaker Replacement for JBL System

[michaelkingdom]

Hi everyone,

I have a sort of unique scenario that I thought someone might be able to help me with. I listen to a lot of audio books / voice / talk radio in my Camry. While music sounds good on the system, vocals are muddled. The sound is too bassy for the clarity I am looking for. I find that the words "smear" together rather than being crisp and sharp. When I put my ear up to the 6x9 in the door I can barely distinguish words.

Here is what I would like to do:

-Keep the head unit for the "clean" OEM look
-Replace the speakers with the right speakers

I am open to signal processors, amps, etc. but I'd like to keep the Toyota head NAVI unit.

I am guessing I need 6x9's and tweeters with sharper vocals.

I am willing to spend up to 1K to make this happen.

Any suggestions??

[touringcamry]

There are few speakers that will work well with the JBL system amp because it uses 2 ohm speakers. Most aftermarket speakers are 4 ohm.

Without sampling anything, I wouldn't go out and buy anything blindly based on anyone's recommendations -- especially speakers.

Years ago, someone recommended to me Infinity speakers as "good" speakers and they were horribly shrill. As were MB Quartz and whatever component set that Image Dynamics was selling at the time -- somewhat high-end speakers not in big box stores. CDT is supposed to be good also but I've only found them on sale on the Internet so I'm hesitant to buy any CDT speakers.

I finally found a small retailer that sold Focal and Arc Audio and those two were the best sounding speakers to me.

You are better off skipping the 6x9s for the front. Get a good component set, probably you're going to be looking at 6.5" component sets. Tweeters come in two flavors - silk/textile and metallic. They have different sound characteristics and people have their own preferences on them. Silk is generally smoother sounding while metallics are brighter. For best sound, put the tweeter as close to the mid as possible. Separating them by putting them in stock locations isn't as good for imaging. At first I thought that it wouldn't sound good to have the tweeters down by my knees because it wouldn't bring the sound stage down but it really hasn't bothered me.

Another issue with the JBL system is that the signal to each of the drivers are already crossed over somewhere so there are at least 8 distinct channels going to the separate speakers. You'll need to bypass the amp or whatever is doing the signal processing to get a full range signal into your amp if you go that route -- I have no idea how you do this.

[NathanWjh07]

when changing your speakers out, your front 2 door speakers you would have to buy a 6x9 adapter, Camry didnt plan this out to great but the aftermarket will not drop in place. There is only 1 company makes speakers just for the camrsy but they run like 500 a pair and the rear speakers dont fit either, i had to build my own bracket to make it work