Preferred Plus Speakers

It’s not what I’d call generic. It’s a very well designed system, made by Mazda and Pioneer, with some good speaker placement choices. The tweeters and mids are fairly close together for proper staging. The woofers are under the dash in enclosures for decent midbass

There is an advanced equalizer mode that can help tailor music to your liking. It is surprisingly crisp. The main thing is that there’s very little deep bass.

It is better than most standard audio systems. I come from many years of Honda, and it has better clarity, imaging and adjustability than even their premium options. It just needs a subwoofer.

One thing I will say is to turn off all sound processing other than the equalizer. Select all seats not driver only for the sound position option. The driver only option Ruins the imaging (that it supposedly is meant to fix).

I bought a jbl basshub and with the non Bose system. It makes me feel like I didn't miss anything by skipping the bose. You can get the Bose bass hubs from eBay for around $150 and I'm sure that would be a big upgrade too.

Where did you tap in for signal on your sub?

Calvin99 said:

Where did you tap in for signal on your sub?

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Sorry, I can't help ya there. I had it installed professionally.

Last real system I did ironically was a Mazda. My 2010 Mazdaspeed 3. Wore me out. Swore I’d never do another full system.

Calvin99 said:

Where did you tap in for signal on your sub?

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This is a really great question. I used to do a lot of car audio installs as a hobby and I was thinking about this the other day. The screen we have on top of our dash isn’t a traditional single/double-din design, so I’m guessing the harness you’d need to tap into with a high-low converter is buried somewhere below the dash. I suppose you could just use longer wires and tap into the door speakers but it seems like more of a hassle doing it that way. As for a 12v power source, you could probably could just use a fuse tap on the radio fuse.

What kind of arsewipe from Mazda would do this? It's like they fell out of shitnuts tree and smacked every branch on the way down. I mean I could let this slide possibly on the rear doors, but to do this on the fronts, it's inexcusable. It'd be one thing if they created some sort of mind boggling acoustic engineering miracle with 2.75" drivers and it sounded good, but I could duct tape 4 iPhones to my door panels and it would sound light years better.

I appreciate you ripping into your panels and ruining my day. 😂

wrxified said:

What kind of arsewipe from Mazda would do this? It's like they fell out of shitnuts tree and smacked every branch on the way down. I mean I could let this slide possibly on the rear doors, but to do this on the fronts, it's inexcusable. It'd be one thing if they created some sort of mind boggling acoustic engineering miracle with 2.75" drivers and it sounded good, but I could duct tape 4 iPhones to my door panels and it would sound light years better.

I appreciate you ripping into your panels and ruining my day. 😂

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You should have heard the Crutchfield salesperson. They were extremely surprised to see this size speaker in this car. I was hoping to just find somewhat of a standard size that I could easily swap out and get noticeably better sound. It really does almost appear like a very cheap speaker in an ancient radio shack type device.

spoulos said:

You should have heard the Crutchfield salesperson. They were extremely surprised to see this size speaker in this car. I was hoping to just find somewhat of a standard size that I could easily swap out and get noticeably better sound. It really does almost appear like a very cheap speaker in an ancient radio shack type device.

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Yeah and that's pretty much what they sound like. The driver in a Hallmark audio greeting card sounds better.

Thanks for the work and info. That is disappointing. However, mentioned in the 2nd post was that the main drivers were under the dash. Assume those have to at least be in the 5 inch range. If that info is accurate, did Crutchfield or you find those?

swt_carlos said:

Thanks for the work and info. That is disappointing. However, mentioned in the 2nd post was that the main drivers were under the dash. Assume those have to at least be in the 5 inch range. If that info is accurate, did Crutchfield or you find those?

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I'm not aware of any other speakers other than what's in the doors. Crutchfield only had documentation for the 2.75" speakers in front and rear doors, and tweeters in front upper door panels. The sub box that's shown in their screenshot above is for the upgraded Bose system.

I missed that. Why would they put main drivers under the dash? I don’t know what’s worse.

WHAT IN THE WORLD!!!??!?! How am I supposed to upgrade the speakers....

That's usually always one of my first modifications.. even upgrading from stock speakers without an amp always generates better sound... Is this the same speaker layout for Bose and non bose users?

This is just crazy to me...... I do not see where Crutchfield identified speakers under the dash... can we confirm somehow?


Edit:

Based on the above pictures there's no way to upgrade the speakers..... the mounting points will not work with normal speakers it seems...

Caestus75 said:

Based on the above pictures there's no way to upgrade the speakers..... the mounting points will not work with normal speakers it seems...

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In a previous car I had the same problem. My solution was to cut the cone & basket out of the face plate and mount the new speaker to that. Using it as an adapter, in other words. YMMV

spoulos said:

I'm not aware of any other speakers other than what's in the doors. Crutchfield only had documentation for the 2.75" speakers in front and rear doors, and tweeters in front upper door panels. The sub box that's shown in their screenshot above is for the upgraded Bose system.

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Those two other speakers have to be somewhere. Mazda states the stock system is 8 speakers. The front doors have 2 each and the rear doors have 1 each. That is 6.
I was listening to some mid-90s rap ... there is no way the midbass punch was coming from 2.5 inch speakers! If those other 2 speakers are in the dash somewhere, it looks like Mazda was going for a 3-way component setup in the front. They may not be audiophile quality or be able to go loud, but I bet if they got a little bit of power behind them, they'd sound much better. And of course, a subwoofer.

swt_carlos said:

Those two other speakers have to be somewhere. Mazda states the stock system is 8 speakers. The front doors have 2 each and the rear doors have 1 each. That is 6.
I was listening to some mid-90s rap ... there is no way the midbass punch was coming from 2.5 inch speakers! If those other 2 speakers are in the dash somewhere, it looks like Mazda was going for a 3-way component setup in the front. They may not be audiophile quality or be able to go loud, but I bet if they got a little bit of power behind them, they'd sound much better. And of course, a subwoofer.

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There is a perforated section behind the display screen... up under the windshield. I wonder if there are 2 speakers there?

spoulos said:

There is a perforated section behind the display screen... up under the windshield. I wonder if there are 2 speakers there?

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That's where the center speaker (Bose only) resides

Do you think they left the wiring in place for the Bose system so it’s plug and play? Has anyone taken these panels off to see if wiring exists?