Removed Door Panels for Speaker Upgrade - DIY Writeup

[djcwardog]

My 300a car had the base system. It had a woofer in each door plus a tweeter in the A pillar, and 2 woofers on the packages tray. I wanted to use a set of 3-way Focal 165AS3 as I love the way they have sounded in my other cars. These would definitely be rated a “DOES NOT FIT” by Crutchfield (due to the depth of the midrange) if they would ever do one of these newest Mustangs. Not to worry, I car crafted these into place! I only had time today to do my left door. Here are a few photos and details. It’s basically like we did on the S550, but remember that there is very little space behind the opening for the midrange mounted high in the door.

Pop out the small panel behind your door lever. That shiny bolt takes a 10mm socket. Do same for the switch panel (carefully pry it up with your plastic pry tool) and you’ll find another 10mm bolt. Withdraw both bolts.

You have a pair of 7mm screws aslong the bottom of your door panel. This one is out.

This is the other 7mm bolt, waiting for you.

Pry out the top of the A pillar trim panel. You have to rotate (twice!) that plastic retainer in order to get the panel out of the car.

Stock tweeter, unplugged. My new tweeter was much larger so I had to cut into that mounting ring enough to have what was left secure my new tweeter. NOT for the faint of heart!

My midrange was way too deep to fit in the shallow opening so I did two things. 1) I used a jigsaw to cut into the second (slightly deeper) metal of the door and then used a chisel to beat the cut pieces back enough to allow more room for the magnet of my new mids.

Using just two long sheet metal screws and a pair of 1/2” spacers, I got the mid driver in. Used some dynomat as an insulating ring arou d the driver to seal it.

All this trouble just to now see an aramid fiber midrange where there was nothing….worth it!

There’s a nice “shelf” in the door just below the woofer opening. I used dynomat to secure my 3-way crossover there. To wire this up: pop in the rubber boot where the factory woofer plug is found. Push that wire back through the door Opening, then pop the boot back into place. Use your Metra speaker plug to feed the signal FROM this harness INTO your crossover as the INPUT. Run new wire from crossover to all three drivers. For the tweeter this means running speaker wire back from door into body of the car and up to the tweeter area.

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[djcwardog]

Here’s a view of the window switch area along with the midrange speaker opening. Look how close that deeper panel is to the face of the door.

This piece was down tight! New car…

I think that the 9 and 12 speaker cars have a mounting bracket that goes here to offset the stock midrange out a bit. Not having that bracket, I had to come up with my own way to do the same thing! That square black piece of foam was stuck over the midrange opening to seal that area in this 300a car.

 

[Dave2013M3]

I think Ford still EQs the bass out of them. With Forscan still not quite supporting the S650 yet you may not notice that much of an improvement.

 

[djcwardog]

Good point and I plan to eventually code out any EQ in the head unit to use my AudioControl DSP amp in the car. I dropped the forscan folks a line to ask about adding our cars to their working list. Haven’t tried to connect for two weeks now though. If they EQ out the front door bass in a base car with just the 6 speakers I’m not sure where they would expect the bass to be? Rear deck doesn’t seem to have any bass either and those are still the stock speakers.

 

[Q6543]

Awesome write up, I’ve been looking into just doing the zenclosure box and 2 10s.

 

[Gregs24]

Good point and I plan to eventually code out any EQ in the head unit to use my AudioControl DSP amp in the car. I dropped the forscan folks a line to ask about adding our cars to their working list. Haven’t tried to connect for two weeks now though. If they EQ out the front door bass in a base car with just the 6 speakers I’m not sure where they would expect the bass to be? Rear deck doesn’t seem to have any bass either and those are still the stock speakers.

Forscan is a Russian project. Sanctions apply to Russia so this may well be having an impact on their ability to get access to 2023/2024 MY Mustang data?

 

[steveo1960]

Fantastic write up ! FWIW I have a set of Focal monitors in my project studio.

 

[ShaBoingBoing]

Doing the lords work. The bass on these speakers is buns.

 

[Martin1977]

Does anyone know what size the rear deck corner speakers are? I'm looking to replace mine. Same size as in 2023?

Crutchfield hasn't updated for the S659 yet...thanks fellas!

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