Front speakers little sound output

[mathblaster]

Issue with front speakers not being nearly as loud as the rear speakers. When I mess with with balance controls in the after Market head unit it got very crackly and lost all sound until turned off.

The car is a 1987 “325” no premium speakers no factory amp.

Installed new speakers all around and just recently a sub and amp. Now much more obvious that sound is barely getting to the front. Any thoughts? Car has the old fader control as well. Doesn’t seem to let me balance the car to the front from the Sony head unit without issues.

[reelizmpro]

The placement of the front mid bass speaker in the E30 isn't ideal. Couple this with the fact that non premium systems don't have a separate tweeter and you really don't hear much from the front. Get a pair of good quality tweeters in OEM housings, hell even stock front tweeters will be a big improvement. You should even have the wiring in the door already. Be sure to wire in high pass filters between the tweeters and the mid speakers.

[mathblaster]

The placement of the front mid bass speaker in the E30 isn't ideal. Couple this with the fact that non premium systems don't have a separate tweeter and you really don't hear much from the front. Get a pair of good quality tweeters in OEM housings, hell even stock front tweeters will be a big improvement. You should even have the wiring in the door already. Be sure to wire in high pass filters between the tweeters and the mid speakers.

Thank you for the response. I feel like they are pretty quiet. But I do have OEM tweeters sitting in the doors and saw the wiring will wire them up to the fronts with the high pass and see if that helps.

[e30davie]

Thinking back a few years I'm fairly sure the OEM speaker wiring has common earth between the front two speakers (and maybe the rears too). where as aftermarket speakers have a separate earth. Ie - OEM has 3 wires for the front (L/R/ Shared E), Aftermarket (L, earth- L, R, earth - R)

A quick google confirms this common earth thing.

I ended up just running new speaker cables to all 4 speakers and left the OEM cabling there. This seems to be the suggested approach by the interwebs.

[mathblaster]

I found out the hard way the factory early speakers are all grounded through the fader control. Which I’ve seen people bypass on here. But never understood the reasoning

[Gregs///M]

As mentioned on here, you are using the factory fader control which utilizes the common grounding of the speakers. What you want to do is bypass the fader control because your after market head unit is not compatible with common grounded speakers. If you continue to use it, it is possible you will damage the after market head unit.

Reaching back into the dash, beyond the wiring of the fader, you will actually find the rest of the speaker wires with all four speaker grounds connected together. What you will need to do is to cut this and extend the wires to your new head unit. Basically, all four pairs of the speaker wires are in the dash and BMW common grounded it to the fader, you will need to delete all this. Running new wires is another alternative. These wires are also easier to find and access if you remove the instrument cluster.

With a nice set of speakers and an amp on them, you can achieve a high output good quality sound from the front.