Use your ears
Have a listen to all the speakers you are considering. Ask around among friends and listen to their speakers, and visit car radio shops. Use a special test CD if you have one, or at least a well-recorded piece of music. Listen to the music the store has, and then your own music. The best demonstrations will be in cars, as demo boards in showrooms are notoriously inaccurate. You will spend a long time listening to them, so your speakers should sound good to you.

Quantity or quality?
Are you going to use them for cruising and pumping, and playing them loudly all day at car shows like Summernats and Auto Salon? If so, you will need for speakers which are designed to play really loud. You will sacrifice some degree of sound quality to get that robust construction. If you are after sound quality, your speakers will still play fairly loudly when needed, and they will reproduce the music more accurately. There is always a trade-off in sound quality when you want to go really loud, despite the claims of the speaker manufacturers. The best-sounding speakers are not necessarily the most industrial.

Use the same speakers front and rear
Install the same brand and series of speakers in the front and rear of the cabin. It’s okay to mix and match the subwoofer, if you are using one, but all the cabin speakers must be of the same family. This is because the crossover components all assign a phase shift (delay) to the music. When you use the same speakers front and rear, they will be in-phase at all frequencies. Mix brands, and they will almost certainly play opposite to each other at some frequencies, and cause nulls and peaks in the frequency response.

Basket construction
Are the baskets non-resonant? Tap the basket, the frame of the speaker. If it goes ‘ting’, it will probably resonate at that frequency of music. A good basket will be ideally made of solid material, not stamped tinplate. Cast alloy is ideal, and there are some plastic/fiberglass baskets which also are non-resonant.

Cone construction
Are the cones light and rigid, or soft and floppy? An ideal speaker cone will be lightweight so that it can follow the music accurately, and rigid so that it doesn't flutter at certain frequencies. Do some homework on the manufacturers websites and see if they pay attention to their cone technology. Don’t expect hi-fi performance from cheap plastic injection-moulded cones. Cone materials all have distinctive sounds, and there are some space-age cone materials out there, ranging from aluminum to paper pulp (an old favorite) through to Kevlar composites.

Magnet material
Speaker magnets are not all the same. The magnet specs are never marked on the packaging or in the brochures, so you will have to do some research on this point. Some magnets look chunky, but have little magnetic strength. However, expensive magnet material used by the premium manufacturers has an intense magnetic strength, called flux density, and this dictates how much ‘control’ the speaker has over the electromagnet called the voice-coil. The better the magnet, the more accurate the speaker.

Magnet temperature resistance
When you buy good quality speakers you are probably paying a premium for magnet material with a high temperature rating.  This means that the magnet does not lose its magnetic strength when played loudly for extended periods. If you take a cheap magnet and heat it up for a long period, it will have lost quite a lot of its magnetism when it cools down.

Tweeters
Are the tweeters cheap and nasty? Have a close look at how they are made. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see the differences between tweeters. They play more than half the music, typically from 4khz up, so pay attention to the tweeters.

Crossovers
The crossovers are a frequency filter, which divert the high frequencies to the tweeters and the low frequencies to the woofers. The quality of the components is important. Cheap capacitors and inductors will have the same effect as throwing a blanket over the speakers.

Reputation
Some companies specialise in making only speakers, and these companies are the leading edge of speaker design and research.  They specialise in speakers, and their continuing existence relies on producing better speakers than the mass-production companies can offer.

Quality installation will ensure your products will work to the absolute best of there capabilities so you can get on with what's most important. Driving! View our installation gallery and see first hand our commitment to quality installation.