Aftermarket Speakers - Butchered OE wires.

Hello all. I've got something I wanna get off my chest; I may have f'd myself and screwed up my 2017 Tacoma TRD Sport's audio system.

It started about 6 months ago; I wanted to upgrade my audio system but was too nervous to get into it myself.

(My mechanical skill consist of everything excluding electronics)

Anyways I took to a Car Toys and the extremely charismatic salesmen sold me on some Jbl Audio tweeters and Kickers for the front. Said they were great blah blah I was a sucker and spend about $600 for them to install them.

I got back into my car and blasted Jimi Hendrix all the way home. The speakers were.. maybe a little better than stock but not six-hundred bucks better. Also there was an occasional popping sound. Anyways; after losing sleep over the deal and being very dissatisfied I decided to take matters into my own hands.

There's a thread on here that went into detail about the best and minimally invaisive way to upgrade Tacoma audio. I followed it to the T removed the door panels, purchased the exact same hardware everything; although during the install I ran into a few issues.

The crutchfield Kickers that the thread recommended came with OE connection adapters; I guess for whatever reason I assumed car toys would use the same OE adapters. They did not. When I took the JL Audio speakers out that they had put in, there was a rats nest of wires and splices and etc etc.

But it worked, so I just spliced the Crutchfield Speakers in to replace the crappy JL Audio ones.

It worked good for about 3 months but the popping started getting worse, and now the kicker in the passenger door sounds totally blown and has no low end and sounds like it's playing through static.

I'm hoping maybe there's a loose connection in there I can just clean up a bit and be on my way, but knowing that they hacked and slashed up my OE wires I can't stop thinking about it... I'm not sure what I should do... Any advice would be greatly appreciated, sympathy is fine too, or just tell me I messed up and should have left it alone..

 

replace the factory stereo.

put in an an amp.

run new speaker wires from teh amp to the speakers.

thank me later

don't hack wires, use proper adapters. wire hackers are worse than people that cough on a plane without covering it.

if you are really crazy, assuming you paid by CC, submit a dispute. if nothing else, they'll get notice from your CC company

 

I do still have the factory speakers; The thing is I don't know if I can fix what they've spliced already. Would I have to buy a new wiring harness and re-run everything from the head unit?

 

if they hacked the OE wires in the doors to install the speakers, then you are screwed on going back to OE speakers.

any pics of what they did in the doors?

 

I don't have any pics on hand, I'm probably going to take it apart this weekend.

 

you really cant take it back to Car Toys now as you have replaced the speakers. Best bet is to tackle it yourself or take it somewhere else that is trusting and install them.

 

Yeah.. I just want a clean wire setup so I don't risk blowing the speakers again. The ones I put in sounded good I just can't wrap my mind around why the wires are all messed up.

 

That's the #1 reason I refuse to allow any of these types of audio stores touch any of my vehicles!!!!! Always go to Crutchfield! They provide harnesses that plug into the factory wiring, so you don't chop anything!!!!! They also provide a nice instructional manual to walk you through the process for your specific vehicle.

Once again, you don't butcher your wiring harness!!!!!

 

Yeah I've definitely learned my lesson there. I just don't know if it's possible to undo it, or if I'm just stuck to try and make what I've got work

 

The best and smartest thing I find I did was take the advice from a few on here and bypass all the oem speaker wiring buy a nice amp and run brand new speaker wire straight from the amp to each door speaker and tweeter. It may sound like a pain in the ass but it’s really not that bad to do. Bypass the oem wiring for speakers. Only use the power and ground if you’re going to keep the factory head unit. That’s my advice after screwing up several times on my own then finally listening. 2nd best decision that I feel I made was replacing factory head unit with low level signal

 

That sounds like good advice. So if I do get a new head unit (currently it's the stock entune one) what would be your recommendation? Also I'm not super savvy on the electrical stuff, but is there a thread that had instructions on how to replace all that? Thanks for the advice.

 

depends on budget and what you need/want

if you do go aftermarket HU/amp, i also recommend sound deading the truck. i assume the 3rd gen is an easy to take apart as the 2nd gen.

 

Yes that depends on what you’re able to spend and what features are most important to you. Me personally got a nice KENWOOD without navigation bc it’s got CarPlay which displays navigation from my phone through CarPlay. I think I spent $450 on head unit and I bought the maestro rr to retain steering wheel controls and oem usb and Sirius xm radio so ive got around $750 in all for replacing of headunit after wire and cables plus maestro and harnesses for it to retain the features I wanted to keep. You can find all the speaker cable Amazon at fair price and I’d personally recommend ofc pure copper. 50 ft should get you done if 14-18 gauge speaker wire but I’d probably get 75 foot just in case. I used postta ofc and knu concepts power and ground wire all ofc. The 4 gauge knu concepts amp kit I bought i feel was really good for like $60 it comes with 17 ft power cable 4 ft ground a fuse block a 60 amp fuse and remote wire plus some ofc rca patch cables to use and even some nice 12 gauge speaker wire I ended up using for my sub bc I liked it so much. This is just what I did. There are cheaper options from KENWOOD alpine pioneer and Sony out there too that are high quality head units that come with built in amp and low level signals. Some even come with a form of DSP and time alignment built in to it

 

If they just cut your speaker wires, doors and tweeters, it’s not that big of a deal. Just go in and tidy everything up when you put new speakers in. You really don’t need to replace the head unit unless you want CarPlay. There is no point. The HU puts out a really clean signal all the way to max volume. Put that money towards a new amp, don’t go cheap on the amp. Get one that has a DSP built into it like a Audiocontrol, kicker Q class or JL vx. Running new speakers wires is optional not necessary.

 

this is all true and not a bad idea neither I was only giving my opinion OP.. if you go this route I’d definitely put money toward a high end amp like JL Audio XD HD or VXI for dsp built in(you could also get the same things for same money maybe a little less with an XD amp and twk fix 86 later if you decide you want more control)or an audio control amp with built in dsp if you’re wanting to tweak it for best SQ.