Speaker Upgrade from JBL "Premium" System

Hi all,

There is a really great thread that @orangebang did over on the Gen4 forums on how to upgrade the speakers on the non-Prime and non-JBL setup here: Prius 2016 4th Generation: How to remove door panel" and my speaker install. | PriusChat. His directions worked almost flawlessly for me on my upgrade, but there was one head-scratcher I ran into, and I wanted to throw in some additional JBL details that I found.

The main difference in the installation process is that the dash speakers are wired differently. Crutchfield does not have an adapter for them, so you will need to reuse the wiring harness from the factory speaker unless you want to cut into the car's wiring harness.



Here is a comparison of the stock JBL dash speaker to the aftermarket ones. Orange = JBL.



You will cut the wires at the solder points above. The cables factory-marked with the blue dot are the positive leads. You only need to reconnect one set (green and black OR yellow and purple) to the new speakers.



Finally, a look at the difference between the door speakers. Again, the orange are the stock and the others are the aftermarket. My jaw about hit the floor when I saw that even the JBL system gets the same "marshmallow" speaker magnets that the stock speakers get. So far I have only done the dash and rear door speakers, but there is already a night and day difference in the sound quality. I don't expect any more differences from his directions on the front doors, but will update this post if I find any.

 

Did the front speakers over the weekend. No differences in the directions, however, the front door speakers are woofers only, with a little bit more magnet than the rear speakers. Again, the orange is the stock JBL speaker.



After installation, the full-range speakers in the doors only produce bass, and the bass needed to be turned way down in order to get speech sounding mostly intelligible again. I'd call the upgrade an overall success, but may look to an aftermarket amplifier down the road to get full-range sound all around if I can't get the speech fidelity where I'd like it to be.

 

It's because there is no internal connector between the tweeter and the woofer terminals on the dash speakers, like there are on the rear speakers, so a separate input is needed for each driver. Not sure why they chose different setups per set of speakers, but knowing car manufacturers, it probably saved a quarter or two per vehicle sold...

I am getting good highs and mids (and some lows - the new speakers have resistors for a crossover frequency around 120Hz) off of the new dash speakers just using the black and green wires.

Still having issues with certain spoken vocal frequencies, which I think is a confluence of factors - the radio stations I'm listening to, resonance in the dash from extra bass, and the equalization of the stock head unit/amplifier. Cranking up the mid range 3-4 pips helps, but isn't a full cure. However, music OTA or via Bluetooth sounds positively amazing with the new setup.

 

4 wires on both dash speakers.

 

The front door speakers appear to have some kind of a high-pass filter on them, so that only low frequencies pass through. Nothing was visible with the door panel off, so my guess is that this is a function of the amplifier which is supposed to be under the driver's seat.

The dash speakers appear to use a variant of the door speakers' wiring harness - in retrospect, the connector looked very similar but I didn't actually try it out. Two leads only - the green and yellow both go to one wire (the positive lead - used a multimeter to figure it out), and the black and purple go to one wire (negative lead).

 

No complaints here with the low bass after my upgrade.

My one lingering issue is that resonance inside the dash is making it hard to hear some voices (mainly on newscasts and similar, music is fine). My suspicion is that the factory dash speakers had a much higher crossover frequency than the aftermarkets do. I am looking into some of those foam speaker baffles to try and solve the issue, as per some RAV4 World users with the JBL Premium system they do help.

 

Final update on this one:

After a lot of tinkering with diagnosing the resonance issue, I narrowed it down to the front door speakers and not the in-dash speakers. Finally, the missing piece of information came up when reading a post by @Elektroingenieur about the JBL system information over here: Any info on JBL speaker system specifications and amp install? | PriusChat.

The long and the short: the front door speakers are SIX Ohm, not FOUR Ohm. In other words, the new 4 Ohm speakers I installed were being overdriven, causing the overabundance of bass. So I took a quick trip to Fry's, and picked up two of the following:



2.2 Ohm resistor with 25W rating. I installed them in-line on the white positive lead to the speakers, secured them to the back of each speaker to prevent flopping and potential damage, and reinstalled both speakers. Powered on the stereo system afterwards, and voices were back to normal with minimal effect on music.

Still very happy with the new sound, and very happy that this project is now complete.

 

You should be able to do the door speakers without too much fuss, so long as you're able to use a trim puller tool and drill out the rivets in the doors. The dash speakers are more complex and will require some wire cutting and/or soldering.

I highly recommend reading Orangebang's writeup in my original post above to see the entire process on a non-JBL system, and then you should have enough information to make your decision. The stock speakers don't have much in the way of a magnet for a driver, so there will only be so many adjustments you can make before needing to step up a modest notch or two on the speakers.