54regcab,
Thanks for advice, you said you went then easy way of hooking up your speakers to your amp, so is there a downside to hooking up speakers to your amp thru the wiring harness instead of wiring them directly to the speaker.

What is a coax speaker is it just a regular speaker, what other type of speakers are there. Just wondering

 

There are two types.
Coaxial (coax) and components.
Coax are easy to install and can be a great improvement over stock.
The tweeters are normally mounted in the middle fo such speakers.
If you want to go all out get the component speakers they sound much better than most coax IMHO.
It puts the tweeters where you can hear them better instead of behind the frequency limiting factory grills.
Also you get real crossovers for separating the lows to the midbass and highs to the tweeter instead of just a capacitor on the tweeter.
I have the components and I love the sound.
Once you have had components speakers it's hard to go back.
I even bought some coax but had to take them back and tarde up to the component speakers.
You can pull new wire into the doors to reduce the resistance to the speakers.
This in theory is better.
I doubt you would ever be able to here the difference especially behind the factory grills.

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99 XLT 5.4l reg cab
4 wheel disc/ABS
5 star larait style wheels
Toreador red 2tone
3.55 gears
255/70/16 OWL
Delta toolbox
Eclipse 5340 cd player
Memphis ARCS50 component speakers (excellent sound)
Sherwood amp
subwoofer coming soon
More mods as funds become avalible.

 

Wiring your amp to speaker wiring harness is ok if you aren't pumping alot of watts through them. 25W per channel you should be ok. If you go with 50W per channel, I would run new wire to each speaker. I would use 16 gauge.

Nice thing about using your wiring harness is that you can pull all of your speaker wires to a single point and connect them to existing wiring. Downside is that the speaker harness will not cleanly carry alot of current.

Coaxial speakers, commonly known as two-way speakers, are midrange drivers with tweeters mounted above. A built in passive crossover directs the lower frequencies to the mid driver and the higher frequencies to the tweeter. Component speakers are also two-way speakers except the mid driver and tweeter mount seperately.

ALA G8R

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97 Lariet SC Flare 4x4, Red/Silver, 5.4L, 3.55LS, ORP
**Superchip, K&N w/ ABM, Flowmaster
** Westin Nerf Bars, Soft Tonneau, Bel Radar Detecter
** Pioneer CD Player, Infinity 57.1CS components up front, Polk 572a's in back, MTX 5000 Thunderform subs, 300 Watt Soundstream Amp for sub, Rockford Fosgate 400a4 for front/rear, Audio Control EQX, Streetwires Power Distribution

 

As far as wire gauge is concerned, you can use 8 gauge for anything under 500 watts. In my truck I run 8 gauge from the battery to my capacitor, 8 gauge from my amp to ground, 4 gauge from the cap to the amp and 4 gauge from my cap to ground. My amp peaks at 500 watts and runs without breaking a sweat at 350 watts. All this just so I can have the JL Audio sticker on the back window...

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Silver 99 F150 XLT Sport with Flare Sides...
Mods: K&N Air Filter, Tinted Side Windows, Reese Class 3, Pioneer Deck, Zapco Amp, JL Audio ('nuff said.)
Coming soon: Herculiner Bed Liner, Solid Tonneau Cover

 

I am not sure if that is sound advice. Or safe. I believe the two factors and/or concerns should be run/length of cable and total combined amperage. After all they not called wattifiers. This is not a good area to cheat. While it is true you can use eight for many applications I generally run 4 gauge. Try this link if in doubt.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca/DrOhm/powerwire.html

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97 White F-150 XLT 4X4 ORP, 4.6, SuperChip, Stillen Air Intake, Gibson Exhaust, Hellwig Sway Bar, Weld Wheels, 33" Bridgestone A/T Duelers, 3" Body Lift, Rancho 9000's, Billet Grill, SmittyBilt Nerf Bars (Stainless), SnugTop Shell (Expo), Sunroof, Sony ES CDX780 Head Unit, Sony ES 10 Disk Changer, Sony ES XDP 210 EQ/DSP, MTX Pro 4X75W AMP, Kenwood 300W AMP for Sub., 1 Fared Lightning Monitor Cap, Optima Yellow Top Battery, MTX ThunderForm W/2-8"-4ohm Fosgate Punch XLC, Infinity Kappa components in front, Infinity Kappa 5X7 rear. On Order: White face gauge? Still looking.......

 

One or two other things to consider. Get a good battery. Once you start to approach that 500 watt area dump the stock battery and go to something like an optima sealed marine battery. Cheap batteries die fast with big stereos. Get a high quality crossover or you will have noise in your system. Cheap crossovers will give you horrible ground loop problems. lastly ground your head unit, crossover and amp all in the same place and do on the drivers side of the truck somewhere near the floor board by the fuse block. This was the only place I could ground and not get terrible alternater whine. good luck

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97' F150 XLT, 4 X 4, Auto,4.6L, Vortech Supercharger, jet-chip, Gibson Cat-back Duals, rear Posi, 4.10's, jet shift improver, Tonneau cover, Rancho RS5000's, 33's on American racing rims, Rhino brushgards and pushbumper, Dual Fosgate 800's w/Alpine head,
and musty smelling A/C system. Lookin for Chevy's to eat!!



[This message has been edited by weck (edited 09-27-1999).]

 

I just got done running new wire to the amp(Phoenix Gold M44)(Texas Star DX400 for the Ham radio). Originally i had 8 guage going to each component from the battery. Went down to the local welding supplier and bought 2 gauge wire at $1.10 a foot and ran it back to a power block and then ran 8 gauge(short lengths) to the amps and the difference is very noticeable. If you get the welders cable, make sure it is the multistrand type. I think mine is 2,300 strands or something like that and didn't cost $3 to $4 a foot like the stereo shops charge. The only difference is that it doesn't have that neat looking outer covering but who can see it anyway.