I have a 2005 acura tl, and I want to replace the rear deck component speakers with aftermarket speakers and replace the blown sub with another acura factory sub. Will aftermarket speakers sound better in quality compared to the premium TL ELS factory speakers, or should I just leave the factory speakers in there and replace the blown sub? I want to replace them with the aftermarket speaker but not if they sound worse than the factory ones.

 

If you get decent, properly matched aftermarket speakers that are similarly efficient (same volume with the same amount of power), they will sound better. I know the factory speakers in my '04 Accord had really tiny magnets. The polypropylene cones surprised me though, would have expected paper. Anyway, swapped them out for some Alpine 6 x 9 2-ways in the rear, and 6.5" 2-ways in the front. Still have the factory tweeters in the A pillars. Definite improvement in sound, bass is a lot more solid, highs much crisper. Well worth the money.

 

^^^ Cant compare the factory sound system on an 04 accord to a TL though. Yea the rear speakers are pointless to replace it would be a waste of money, it might sound worse than stock or if it does sound any better you won't notice the difference so it wouldn't be worth the money and specially time it takes to replace them.

 

Thanks for the replays. Still unsure about what i'm going to do. It would be good to go aftermarket and find 6x9 speakers that match the watts and RMS of the stock ones, but at the same time it doesn't make sense to upgrade to aftermarket if they are going to sound worse than the stock ELS speakers.

 

Exactly, your front speakers and sub are more important so thats where your focus should be.

 

Yep, upgrading the rears is pointless. Even after all of the stuff I've done to my audio setup, my rears are stock. At one point they had a 75w/ch amp on them and they sounded pretty good as long as I used a pretty high highpass filter.

Small magnets don't mean anything. Many use neo magnets for space and weight savings. I've seen subs with tiny magnets that look like they belong on a 4" speaker that sounded great and handled a lot of power. The main limitation on the stock speakers is the xmax. They were put on the Klippel and showed .5mm xmax each way. Mine bottomed after about 4-5mm total (both ways) excursion. Keep the bass out of them and you can feed them a fair amount of power and they sound decent doing so.

 

If you replace the rear speakers and sub, remember that the stock ones are running at 2ohm.

 

That's why it's important to watch efficiency. The stock speakers were more inefficient than I would have thought once they were tested. Most factory speakers are fairly efficient. If you threw something in there from the pro audio world, say 95db efficient, they would get more than twice as loud with half the power and they would be recieving about half the power if they are 4ohm.