andrew tay
Active Member
Many have complaint about the HK sound system sounded muffled. High frequency was unclear and teary. Bass was loud but not punchy and defined. One of the forum member has suggested that one of the woofer is wired in reverse phase.
When I was changing all the car woofers I made 2 shocking discoveries:
1) one of the 4 woofers are wired out of phase with the other 3. For me it was the front L door woofer. I did not think its possible to do that in modern car these days. Took an subwoofer install and replacing all 4 woofers in each doors and over au $2000 poorer to find that out. Curse KIA.
- to check the phase of the woofer I use a phase checking app on my android phone call 'polarity checker'.
- Open all car doors outdoor to reduce inteference. Best doing it at night when is quiet.
- turn off any equaliser and surround sound mode.
- run the app at 80 hz which will play a popping noise through the speaker via bluetooth. Hold the mic of you phone next to the woofer that you want to check. I actually cut the wires which feed to the underseat woofer but you may be able to get away with just covering it with blanket while testing the door speaker and vice versa.
- it will tell you either negative or positive. I found that the front left door was reading differently from the others.
- you can then remove the door card, cut the 2 wires that run to the woofer and joint the wire in reverse.
2) the tweeters and midrange speakers are covered in felt-like material behind the metal grill and plastic cage. By removing the covering felt like material and put some black double sided tape in between the metal grill and the underlying plastic around the edges to stop it from rattling, it opens out the music like lifting a curtain. The vocals sounded so much clearer. No more tearing distortions. You can now set the midrange of the EQ to zero instead of +3. I still don't know why Kia do it in the first place. You don't expect you speakers to sound good if you covered them in blankets. Enclosed a photo of the metal grill with the felt material. You remove them by bending the little tags at the side
When I was changing all the car woofers I made 2 shocking discoveries:
1) one of the 4 woofers are wired out of phase with the other 3. For me it was the front L door woofer. I did not think its possible to do that in modern car these days. Took an subwoofer install and replacing all 4 woofers in each doors and over au $2000 poorer to find that out. Curse KIA.
- to check the phase of the woofer I use a phase checking app on my android phone call 'polarity checker'.
- Open all car doors outdoor to reduce inteference. Best doing it at night when is quiet.
- turn off any equaliser and surround sound mode.
- run the app at 80 hz which will play a popping noise through the speaker via bluetooth. Hold the mic of you phone next to the woofer that you want to check. I actually cut the wires which feed to the underseat woofer but you may be able to get away with just covering it with blanket while testing the door speaker and vice versa.
- it will tell you either negative or positive. I found that the front left door was reading differently from the others.
- you can then remove the door card, cut the 2 wires that run to the woofer and joint the wire in reverse.
2) the tweeters and midrange speakers are covered in felt-like material behind the metal grill and plastic cage. By removing the covering felt like material and put some black double sided tape in between the metal grill and the underlying plastic around the edges to stop it from rattling, it opens out the music like lifting a curtain. The vocals sounded so much clearer. No more tearing distortions. You can now set the midrange of the EQ to zero instead of +3. I still don't know why Kia do it in the first place. You don't expect you speakers to sound good if you covered them in blankets. Enclosed a photo of the metal grill with the felt material. You remove them by bending the little tags at the side
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