HELP!!! SPEAKERS

[lbMK2]

Hi, I've got two problems...

My car is a 54 plate MK2 Clio Extreme 3...

Firstly about 4 months ago I went to halfords and bought the aftermarket SONY MEX-N4000BT head unit which I had installed. Basically I want the stalk controls for the volume etc to work, does anyone know what cable adapter I would need????

Secondly about 3 months ago I bought the Pioneer TS-Q131C - 13cm aftermarket speakers (2 tweeters & 2 door speakers). I fitted them myself and they worked perfectly. I haven't passed my driving test yet so the only time my car is getting used is at weekends sometimes when my dad picks me up from work. All has been fine for months, then this weekend when I got in my car, only the tweeters are working... neither door speaker is working. I have just taken the car back to halfords to check that it wasn't an issue with a loose connection on the head unit, which it isn't.

They said that it could be a couple of things... Firstly a loose connection going to the door speakers (I'm going to check this on my day off). Secondly (bare with me I don't really know what I'm talking about) they said the head unit only sends out one frequency, then it goes to a splitter box which sends high frequency to the tweeters and low frequency to the door speakers, so it maybe that the splitter box thing has gone wrong. Thirdly obviously it could be the door speakers have simply broken.

Now I find it very had to believe that this splitter box thing could have gone wrong, like I said my car gets used about once a week... So one weekend everything is fine, the car sits there for a week and then the next weekend the door speakers don't work, so the splitter box has amazingly gone wrong when being unused during the week??? Surely that can't be right/happen???

Does anyone have any ideas? To do with anything I've said, a possible solution, previous experience, the location of this splitter box??

Any help would be great because I'm getting tired of not knowing, cheers guys.

 

[Steven103]

Stalk controls require a little box of electronic magic (Clio Mk2 specific, also depends on the original factory stereo fitted) & a patch cable (they all look the same, but you need the Sony one). I'm assuming your headunit supports stalk controls (99.99% it will, but I don't care enough to check ) You could PM MT_Audio on here (trader) if you want the right bits hassle free. Otherwise look on ebay, caraudiodirect, caraudiosecurity etc for a steering control adaptor and hope the descriptions are good enough to pick the right one.

R.E. the tweeters not working. If it was a loose connection on the headunit then the tweeters wouldn't work either as the high/low frequency split happens after the headunit. IME the speaker connectors that Renault use are pretty poor and you can give them the slightest nudge and that will break the circuit hence no sound. The wiring also seems fairly susceptible to catastrophic corrosion (water gets on window, you wind window down/have a knackered seal and all the water drips on top of the speaker mounts/wiring etc). Seems odd that both woofers would fail at exactly the same time though, have you checked you haven't done anything silly with the headunit? (e.g. on my Alpine passengers are always accidentally changing the balance/fader instead of the volume)

If you do find corrosion/breakages, don't buy Halfords' own speaker wire as it's just as bad. Buy some nice thick stuff with decent shielding. And use decent shielded crimp connectors as opposed to solder & heatshield.


P.S. if you can stretch the wire enough, you could even plug the tweeter/woofer into the woofer/tweeter wiring to check whether it's the speaker or wiring. This is a really easy way to check if it's the speaker or the wiring. The high/low frequency splitting doesn't really matter because of the way it's implemented on your particular speakers.

 

[lbMK2]

Stalk controls require a little box of electronic magic (Clio Mk2 specific, also depends on the original factory stereo fitted) & a patch cable (they all look the same, but you need the Sony one). I'm assuming your headunit supports stalk controls (99.99% it will, but I don't care enough to check ) You could PM MT_Audio on here (trader) if you want the right bits hassle free. Otherwise look on ebay, caraudiodirect, caraudiosecurity etc for a steering control adaptor and hope the descriptions are good enough to pick the right one.

R.E. the tweeters not working. If it was a loose connection on the headunit then the tweeters wouldn't work either as the high/low frequency split happens after the headunit. IME the speaker connectors that Renault use are pretty poor and you can give them the slightest nudge and that will break the circuit hence no sound. The wiring also seems fairly susceptible to catastrophic corrosion (water gets on window, you wind window down/have a knackered seal and all the water drips on top of the speaker mounts/wiring etc). Seems odd that both woofers would fail at exactly the same time though, have you checked you haven't done anything silly with the headunit? (e.g. on my Alpine passengers are always accidentally changing the balance/fader instead of the volume)

If you do find corrosion/breakages, don't buy Halfords' own speaker wire as it's just as bad. Buy some nice thick stuff with decent shielding. And use decent shielded crimp connectors as opposed to solder & heatshield.


P.S. if you can stretch the wire enough, you could even plug the tweeter/woofer into the woofer/tweeter wiring to check whether it's the speaker or wiring. This is a really easy way to check if it's the speaker or the wiring. The high/low frequency splitting doesn't really matter because of the way it's implemented on your particular speakers.

Thanks for the reply mate, it was a great help, I've gone ahead and ordered the parts I need R.E the stalk controls.

R.E the speakers, do you know where the splitter box is?

Regards.

 

[Steven103]

As I eluded to at the end, with those speakers and that car there is no "splitter box" (or "crossover" to use it's more common name).

The "full range" signal (I.e every frequency) leaves the head unit through LF, RF, LR and RR channels. Somewhere under the dash the LF and RF split into door & tweeter looms. This is nothing more that two wires spliced together. There is no filtering of frequencies. At this point both parts of the loom have the full frequency range signal.

This is why we know it's not a crossover issue. Because you have no crossovers.

The woofer receives and attempts to "play" all frequencies. The tweeter receives the full signal too, but has a "high pass filter" integrated into the speaker itself so only plays the higher frequencies. This is called "inline filtering" and is quite rudimentary hence it is used on the standard speakers and relatively cheap/simple aftermarket ones like the pioneer. To be fair to the pioneers, the whole point is that they are easy to install, whereas if they were sold with a proper crossover (a proper box requiring you to mount it somewhere and run additional speaker cable through the car) then it would not be a straightforward install.


I guess all that was really unnecessary. The point is the problem isn't a "splitter box" because you don't have one, but I suppose I see where the Halfords guy was going... The problem can only be after the RF & LF splits into 2 looms and since the tweeter works then it's obviously either head unit (unlikely that yours is advanced enough to contain relavent functionality) the woofer wiring, woofer or actual woofer connector. Which is easily tested by swapping one for a known good speaker, e.g a pioneer tweeter or even original Renault woofer/tweeter.

You'll probably take the speaker out (2 min job now you've done it once) and find the connector has fallen off or has got snagged by the window glass and broken etc.