Since my Camaro will be down for a while, I want to upgrade the audio system. It has Cerwin Vega 6x9s, but they are not working and I don't know why. Is there anything I can do to test to see if they are blown or if they are just wired wrong or something? Thanks.

 

i always take them and wire them up to my home system. Get an old radio even and plug them in, the small pin is negative and the larger male connector is the posisitve terminal on the speaker.

As for busting out the volt meter and testing for ohms and grabbing that old test light and being all fancy, you aint going to accomplish nothing without a musical signal going to them.

Also - The signal coming from the posistive speaker wire can juice up any test light. See if its getting power

 

A 9-volt battery across the terminals will tell if the speaker itself is OK.

Pete

 

or take out your headunit and wire it to a car battery, then connect the speakers to the headunit... I did that because I had to run new power wires for the receiver.

 

make sure you use a fusible link. I know theres a fuse on the back of your head unit (least i think so, would hope so anyway) but why chance it?

cheers

 

Thanks guys, I just took the speakers out right now. I also took out the dash becuase I don't want it to crack over the winter, and I have no 4X6 speakers where the grilles are. I have kickpanel speakers, but I thought those were in addition to 4X6's. Is that how its supposed to be with the Bose system?

 

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actually, a digital multimeter can tell you more about a system than any test light ever could. test lights are ok, but they only test for a presence of voltage. test lights are pretty much obsolete amongst today's automotive techs. one reason is: placing a current path, such as a test light between the head units speaker terminals may not be the load it wants to power.

a multimeter set to measure AC voltage can see the presence of a signal, a well amplified source signal should give you 2-8 volts AC in most cases (fluctuating).

the 'resitance' measuring setting on the multimeter can tell you the DC resistance through the speaker's coil. for a 4 ohm speaker this would be 3.2-4.5 ohms.......the DC resistance is roughly the same as it's impedence. if the meter reads infinite or zero ohms, double check and consider tossing the speaker. don't assume it's bad right away because a meter can be broken too. I went months before I realized my old sears multimeter wasn't reading resistance, only 0 ohms or infinite.....which certainly caused some confusion at times.

if a speaker has continuity through it's coil and the cone moves freely, chances are that it is ok.

I would not recomend using home audio to test car speakers. most home auidio is made for an 8 ohm load while car speakers place a 4 ohm load. This is an impedence mismatch that can overheat and destroy your amplifier's output circuitry. you can avoid this by testing two 4 ohm speakers in series on one channel. Two 4 ohm speakers wiried in series makes them into an 8 ohm load. This is much safer for your stereo equipment and will prove good speakers.