Can you tell me which models you got for front, sides and rear, please, as that's the next job I want to do?
Any modding, or did they fit straight in?
This is what I bought. For the fronts, Focal ISS 170. For the rear/roof deck, Focal ICU130.
The ICU130s were a like for like replacement, I don’t recall any tricky bits fitting them. Made a huge difference on their own.
The ISS170s are brilliant but getting them to work well was a lot of effort. I’d go as far as saying that if sound quality matters to you, don’t change the front speakers unless you are going to change the NIT.
The problem is the strange wiring of the front speakers. The mid range and tweeters are separate components, which is why I bought component speakers to replace them. However they don’t work with a conventional cross-over. A single channel drives both speakers. As far as I can work out, the sound is balanced by having a high pass filter on the tweeter and by the NIT producing a limited dynamic range.
Replacing them with decent speakers greatly improves the overall clarity and depth, but because the full range is driving both the mid-range and tweeter, the high end frequencies are twice as loud as they should be and quite distorted.
I partially solved this by taking the high pass filter off the old tweeters and attaching them to the Focals. It made quite a difference to the top end but the bottom end was pretty terrible, in contrast to the rear speakers that sound great. This set up worked OK for me, much better than OEM speakers, but still disappointing to me.
I tried putting Focal cross-overs in, and also just disconnecting the tweeters entirely. Unfortunately my NIT detected the impedance change and cut the sound completely, as others have found.
The problem really is that the original speakers are terrible, and the NIT has been compromised to avoid making them sound even worse. Which is why I decided to upgrade the lot in the end.
All IMHO by the way, sound can be quite subjective.
This thread is old but very helpful:
Spyder Speaker Solutions and Installation Instructions...
www.maseratilife.com
And this one from this very forum:
And here is a previous post I made about transferring the high pass filter if you decide to keep the NIT.
A bit of an update on my Focal component installation. I found the sound was not pleasant coming from the tweeters - too much high end overall and tiring to listen to. I realised that with no crossover, the tweeter was being driven by the full dynamic range rather than just filling out the detail at the top end. The only way to make it bearable on a long journey was to set the high end to the minimum on the equaliser.
I tried some Focal crossovers but I had the same problem I’ve read about elsewhere, which is that some crossovers upset the NIT which then shuts off the sound completely.
Fortunately I’d kept the old tweeters and noticed the 2.2 microfarad capacitor which acts as a high pass filter.
I removed it and soldered it to the Focal tweeter, in line on the positive terminal (any auto electricians probably want to look away now). I glued the capacitor to the speaker mounting.
I’ve tried it out and it sounds much better. I’ve got the equaliser set back to flat.
No doubt if I knew anything about what I was doing I’d have sorted this out a long time ago, but I thought my experience might help someone else.
I found this helpful page with a bit more information about capacitors as high pass filters.
Car Audio - Speaker Crossover Chart and Capacitance vs. Frequency Calculator(High-pass)
Use this JavaScript calculator to determine what value of capacitors you need to use for a crossover design.carstereo.com
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