Update: I just returned from the dealer and verified with a 15 Camry XSE-V6 JBL system, that there are (2) small speakers in the rear deck with only (1) larger speaker on the driver side of the rear deck. There is a "blank" ~5x7 speaker hole with no speaker on the passenger side rear deck! The (1) larger speaker on the driver side is I believe a "mid range" speaker and not a sub. What I did find was this;

The Dash:
(1) Front Right
(1) Front Left
(1) Front Center

The Doors:
(1) Drivers Door
(1) Front Passenger Door

Rear Deck:
(1) Small ~3" Right
(1) Small ~3" Left
(1) ~5x7 (midrange?) Left

Cant find the other (2) speakers in this (10) speaker system. One of which I didn't find by sight or sound is the sub. Is this in the center console?

This all came about as I noticed this JBL system is extremely "front staged". When the fade control is set to the center there is very little sound coming from the rear while in the drivers seat (seat all the way back). It's like there's no speakers at all behind you. When the fade is adjusted to a center stage sound, the control must be set way back to about 85-90% to the rear. But of coarse when you do this, you loose allot of sound/punch from of the system. As a benchmark, I am coming from two late model Ford products with the top end Sony Systems. Both of these systems produce very high and very clean audio levels with the fade control centered and equalization at flat. The Ford Sony systems also put to shame a '15 Buick LaCrosse that we recently tested that had the usual excessive "mushy" low end sound typical from the GM Bose systems .

The JBL sound system is-what-it-is; the more I listened to it, the more I adjusted to the sound of the heavy front stage. We got past it and placed an order for a XLE-V6 as this 2015 was quite impressive all the way around for the money!

 

You’re not alone brother I got the same situation for my 2015 Camry XSE . Only time it rocks is when I use Bluetooth YouTube Music .! The newer more current or remastered songs if you will . Heavy bass upfront popping lol . Not gonna cut it . Gonna put 6x9 in the rear deck with aftermarket amp

 

The two door speakers and the rear 5x7 are subs. And yes the sound stage is in front of you like it should be IMO.

 

The system doesn't appear to be updated much from the '14.5 model. That said, in my 14.5, I experienced the same thing as you. The way to fix it is to go to the settings app, audio, then turn off "surround." It will then sound normally. You must do this for each source. Hopefully on the '15s they've fixed the bug where it will randomly switch back on. (when switching sources) Basically, if you ever notice it's sounding bad again, just go switch that off again.

Let us know if the 15's do the same thing. Good luck!

 

I drive a lot of different rental cars for work travel. I notice most new cars have this problem. I like the sound better with the power and volume coming from the rear speakers. The front stage is never right and is too loud for listening to loud music. I do not have the JBL system in my car, but it still has the same problem. I will eventually replace the factory system

I agree with the turn off the surround response. A lot of cars have a selection to set it to optimized for all speakers or rear speakers.

I am convinced that by putting decent tweeters up front with mediocre drivers that have a little punch to them and putting underpowered crap speakers in the rear is a new cost cutting measure. Its a great idea. The tweeters make the sound sound great to people that don't really care about loud music.

 

Not trying to be funny but when you go to a concert or listen to a home stereo do you sit facing away from the band or stereo? Of course not. In the old days car stereo's had way more power in the rear than the front do to space constraints and also do to the fact that car stereo's were added once the basic car design was complete. Toyota and JBL designed the car and stereo together allowing the sound stage to be up front where it belonged all along.

Bill

 

Maybe, but I think that in terms of physics, there is no room for acoustics to enhance sound reproduction in the front stage. The cavern of the car improves the sound from the rear, IMO.

This is why I hate small movie theatres. Even a great sound system sounds less great when you're right in front of the soeakers. Especially at louder and louder volumes. IMO.

Think about the most expensive speakers. The price is not the electronics--its the cabinet materials, construction and sound physics that make the best the best.

 

I thought I'd also mention the location of the 10 speakers... I found this on the JBL website. All of your locations are correct, except there are two speakers in each dash corner, according to JBL. One is an 80mm and the other is a 19mm tweeter located directly on top of the 80mm driver.

1 80mm midrange Center
2 80mm midrange Dash L/R
2 19mm tweeter Dash L/R (same location as 80mm Dash L/R)
2 180x250mm woofer Front Doors L/R
1 180x250mm woofer Rear Deck L
2 80mm midrange Rear Deck L/R

I was pretty shocked when I saw the the blank woofer spot in the back as well... My plan is to put an amplifier over the hole (inside the trunk) and use the other woofer as a high level input for the amplifier. I'll then put a sub in the trunk. This should more than adequately replace the missing driver.

 

So do the JBL systems not come with a sub in the trunk anymore? I thought the 2012 JBL system had it tucked in a corner. Our old '13 and current '14 RAV4 has the JBL audio. It has the sub in the back, so that may be confusing me as to if the 2012-14 Camrys had a sub in the back.

 

My '14.5 doesn't. But I'm in a Camry. I think they put the subs in if it's not a trunk, but an open rear end... Hatch style, if you will.

My '07 JBL had four 6x9's acting as subs. The '14.5, and '15's I've seen just use three. Probably a cost saving technique, and they can sell it as "green." (GreenEdge)

 

Hey Everyone,

I bought a new 2015 Camry XLE and I was also pretty surprised to see the empty speaker slot on the rear deck.

Also, I've observed that the audio sounds a little too flat for my liking. At times it almost feels like there's no sub present (especially on FM/XM).

Playing around with the tone settings doesn't seem to help much either.

Initially I thought it was just me (or my phone/aux), but I recently tested my phone/aux on a new Mazda 6 with Bose audio and felt it sounded much better overall.

Anybody else feel that the sound could use a little more bass?

 

It seems to depend on the source material, maybe too much so. I turned off surround sound and have bass set one notch below the max with mid and treble at 50% or a bit less. I also fade two notches to the rear even if it means running a higher volume level. It works for most stuff but, again, the system is very sensitive to the material.

 

I got a 2015 Camry XLE a few weeks ago. It came with the JBL Premium sound system which, when you turn the Surround feature off isn't half bad. After looking at JBL's website and its speaker specs for the Camry, I took a look in the trunk and saw one speaker mounted on the left side and an empty cutout on the right with a plastic cover on it. Initially this was a WTF moment but when I looked at the rear deck itself, I saw the 80mm mid-range speakers on each side and when I measured the larger speaker, it seemed to be the sub-woofer that JBL shows in its speaker chart. Why Toyota chose to mount it on the left side as opposed to dead center is a bit of a mystery as is the empty speaker mount but I am satisfied that it did conform to JBL's specs. The sound quality is the least of my concerns with the Entune system. It's having to re-index a music loaded flash drive every time you start the car is a royal pain. It's much worse if you've pulled the drive to add new (or delete) mp3 files. That takes what seems like forever. The system is very sensitive to the bit rates that MP3s are encoded with, another negative. The favorites list is OK but its being being broken down by source or at least showing the XM channel names would have been nice. My biggest gripe, however, is the alleged voice recognition system. It's downright poor with frequent misses on clearly spoken commands. One example on the flash drive: "play the album Smooth Jazz". Rather than going to that album and immediately playing the music, the system tells you that it's found x number of artists in that album and starts listing them on the screen. You have to tap one of the names in order for the music to start playing. There seems to be a real issue with the system's reading of ID3/ID4 MP3 tags which are the standard for those files. It's a good thing that the car itself (V6 engine) is a great ride, fast, smooth and reasonably quiet on the road with very nice Michelin Primacy MVX4 tires. I just wish that Entune would have been better thought out.

 

My 2015 SE with 6 speaker has the same problem, sound too loud in front, I have to set the balance 70-80% to the back to make it sounds normal.

I just replaced all six speaker with pioneer speakers, the sound is normal now when the balance is set in the center of the car. I will found sometime to make a full tutorial here.

 

My 2015 SE with 6 speaker has the same problem, sound too loud in front, I have to set the balance 70-80% to the back to make it sounds normal.

I just replaced all six speaker with pioneer speakers, the sound is normal now when the balance is set in the center of the car. I will found sometime to make a full tutorial here.

Can you send me the tutorial? Having the same issues. Thx.

 

After speaking to an Entune rep I got some info on the problems with the re-indexing of my music flash drive and the weird actions in response to voice commands. In regard to the former, yes the Entune system does, unfortunately, have to re-index the flash drive with every start up. the specified max capacity of the drive is only 8 GB and my drive is 32GB with 22GB filled. 8GB of music is pretty paltry by today's standards. That explains the slowness of the indexing but eventually it will complete it. The system does not seem to have any internal memory in which to store music selection information. With a drive >8GB when the car starts, the system will play the last song in the chosen album but will then only load songs by that artist. You have to go into the album and manually select another song for all of the albums songs to be available. Very cumbersome to say the least. As far as voice activation goes, I usually have each album in a folder on my PC, MP3 player or a flash drive. That was a problem with Entune. It prefers all of the music files to be in the root of the drive. No biggie really (although I did have to move the entire 22GB's worth of files up one level from their folders). Once I did, the voice system was much more accurate in terms of understanding and executing what I asked it to do. It seems to me that Fujitsu (or whoever builds the head unit) is behind the current levels of technology. A buddy has a 2014 Ford Fusion and can load a 64GB flash drive almost instantly with very accurate voice command responses.

 

Answer to USB Source problems


In response to lewie49,

I completely agree that there are many problems with the way the "premium" system sounds and functions. You have hit some of them. However the drive size is not limited to 8GB (at least for 2015 or newer). I am successfully using 64GB formatted to *FAT32.

This may help with your problem using the USB source:
- see main Camry 2015 manual pages 273-275 for specs on using a USB device.
- the first time the system scans the USB for files, it takes a very long time. I think about 20 minutes for my 50GB of music.
- then, if you leave the drive plugged into the port (car running or not), it takes under 5 minutes to re-scan the next time. I think it just looks for changes to the file allocation table, and if there is none assumes it can use the same index which it must have stored in its own memory.

Hope this works for you as well as it has for me. Now if Toyota would at least make the system EQ/settings open source, we could probably do something about that sound quality without a complete rebuild!

* If your whole music collection won't fit on a single 32GB drive or smaller and you have to go larger, you will have to re-format it to FAT32 before you copy your music files to it. Thanks to MS, this requires special utility called fat32format. Google to find it.

 

i think the JBL and the standard system seem to fall short for 2015. Very flat sounding.

 

I have two Camry in my family - 2007SE and just purchased 2015Hybrid XLE. Both have JBL sound. I can compare sound in a both cars - huge difference. In 2007 sound much louder, equalizer control much wider.
I opened amplifiers in both cars: 2007 has powerful transistor arrays installed on a big heatsink, so designed for heavy duty work; 2015 has small amp, just little larger of a cigarette pack and with small output Integral circuits.
Speakers: two twin wide range rear speakers in 2007 and a single bass speaker in 2015. (By the way, in many comments people say that a rear bass speaker size is 5x7", but It's same size as 2007 - 6x9").
I really do not like this audio system design and would like to improve it with aftermarket amplifier and two rear wide range speakers. I have studied this system and got very upset: not much possibility to improve sound with the current sound amp.
My engineering research: All signals to speakers are filtered, so you can not take signal from the rear bass and connect to a new amp to create wide range sound. Bass signal limited on probably 100 Hz. Also, rear bass speaker is a mix of left and right channels, so forget about stereo on the new rear speakers if it connecting to bass.
If you still decide to connect to the rear bass speaker, I guess, you get effect of very low frequency drum, but not a music sound.
Maybe is possibility to install one more amplifier (not same on a bass) connected to the rear midrange speakers. But no place for additional speakers on the rear dashboard. If you have hands, you can install two (or more) way rear speakers and separate bass and higher frequency connections.
I will appreciate if you write your ideas, or your engineering research concerning sound system improvement.

 

I just bought the 2015 Toyota Camry V6 XLE as well, but...

When I go to APPS -> AUDIO, and both the "Surround" and "Automatic Sound Levelizer" options are checked and simultaneously greyed out (aka: I don't have the option to uncheck them). After seeing your post, I called my dealership here in Omaha, NE and they said that every Toyota Camry XLE V6 is made that way and that there is nothing they or JBL can do to fix it; in other words, I got waved-off.

Could you perhaps give me the contact info to the dealership that you bought the car so that maybe I could get to the bottom of why my options are not available? Thanks for your help!!

 

^Was the vehicle's motor on and were you moving when you tried?

 

After listening to my JBL "Premium" sound system for 3 months, it's obvious that its bass response can be thin at times if you're in the front seats. Today for the first time, I sat in the rear seats and listened to some of my MP3s. Because the "sub-woofer" (if it really is that) is on the rear deck, the overall sound in the rear is beefier than it is in the front. It's actually pretty pleasant. I'm contemplating supplementing the system with a real sub-woofer on the smallish side, hopefully one that can make use of the second cutout on the rear deck. I don't need a big thumping sound and really don't want to tear the car apart to replace all of the speakers but I would like a better, more rounded low end that can be more readily heard in the front seats. We have a highly regarded car stereo shop in town so I'll try drop by and get some ideas.

 

I've listened to the JBL system in both the new Highlanders and older version, i have not heard them in the Camry. However, from what I have read and the way the car is presented for sound, it's not ideal anyways. Stock speakers sound good and JBL sound good, not worth the upgrade to JBL though. Your best bet is to look into building a new sound stage for your car and putting in aftermarket speakers in.

I'm honestly looking to redo the entire system and convert all my speakers to RF series fronts and rears, keeping my JL Audio sub in the back until i complete the custom fiberglass box for the news RF subs. Just take a peek at your local shop, see what they have just make sure you SHOP AROUND, most of the time you will find a better deal for the same speakers online.

 

Door Rattle

I've had my 2016 XSE for 4 months now and i've noticed the front doors beginning to rattle from the bass.

Anybody else have this issue?

Was thinking of using dynamat to insulate the front two doors? Can i do this or will i void warranty?

Thanks,
Alex

 

I am also disappointed with the "Premium Audio System from JBL, and my list is even longer than yours.
You are right about the 10 speakers and subs. The JBL site only reports the 8, with no mention of any subs at all.
But here is a tip on getting more from the rear speakers without using the front/rear balance control: go into the Main Setup/Audio and turn OFF (uncheck) the surround feature. You have to do this for each type of source! I left the surround effect ON only for AM radio since I don't use it for music, and don't care to have voice coming strongly from the rear anyway.
I am probably going to visit a local car stereo shop and have an additional rear woofer added, if I can do it without adding more amplifiers.

 

:smileyvault-popcorn

If you care at all about sound, just replace the factory system. Even the lower end cheaper aftermarket decent brand stuff is way better than factory. Especially now with factory head units putting out up to 20 watts per channel! Certain things should be factored in to what the car will cost. You can do it with just $150 for speakers these days. I put the aftermarket stereo at the top of my list. I avoid the "high end" factory stuff. I know the way I like to listen. I have an idea of what speaker materials sound good to my ears. I hate vibrating factory directional muddy bass. I spend pretty long periods of time in the car, so I always replace the stereo. I buy the car, so whatever goes in is staying in, if something needs to get cut, it gets cut. If you lease short term, places like Best-Buy will remove anything you put in so its the same as when you got it before it goes back. Don't waste your ears or money on factory stereos if you want to actually hear the bells and whistles.

:deadhorse