I'm slowly making progress in my goal of surround sound in my Ford truck.
After replacing the stock door speakers, I mounted the Pioneer satalite speakers. The two rear ones are on top of the plastic pillars at the rear of the truck. The U shaped mounting bracket makes installation a breeze. Initially I did the same with the front speakers but didn't like the look of it, people thought that they were cameras! I had toyed with the idea of installing speakers inside the top of the front doors but that would have been a difficult task due to the air ducts inside that part of the door. With the alternate mounting bracket I was able to attach the satellite speakers high up the doors. The Instruction Sheet for the Pioneer speakers is in Japanese, but at least you have the pictures to help guide you. I wanted to run some decent gauge speaker wire from the amp to the speakers. It was a breeze with the rear doors but difficult with the fronts. Most of the internet advice was to just use the factory wiring. That advice won't work if you want to bi-wire. I ended up drilling a new hole through the chassis/door frame and then cutting a slit in the rubber boot at the door side of the main wiring harness. I will show pictures latter. For my initial testing I connected 60 µFd capacitors in series with the satalite speakers.
listening tests were promising BUT. I was never a fan of the JVC deck that came with my used truck. Aside from the lackluster sound quality that it produced it has another problem. When the truck is running and in any gear but Park there is an audablehum/buzz coming through the speakers. That problem was not there when using the decks own built in amplifier.
Then as a test I connected my Pono player directly to the car amplifier, it sounded fantastic! Next I substituted my Sony MEX-DVD2000 for the JVC and that nasty hum/buzz was gone. Sound quality is much improved over that of the JVC as well. I have ordered a new DIN Radio Dash Kit. The JVC is a dual space unit with a touch screen, the Sony is a "normal" single unit, so the Sony is currently laying loose as I have no means to properly mount it.
I love the Sony deck but it is still far from perfect. I always knew that it wouldn't play DVD-Audio discs but it won't play PCM encoded DVD-Video discs either. It will show them playing but no sound. Discs that use DD or DTS do work. I'll have to rethink my intention of making PCM audio DVD discs for the truck I guess. They do play fine in the JVC deck.
The Sony MEX has Dolby PLII decoding built in but (sorry Midi) dolby decoding of stereo just doesn't cut it! I actually prefer dual stereo! The next step after actually mounting the MEX deck will be to add the Roctron decoder.
