The title just about says it all. I'm about to junk my car and thought of salvaging the speakers to put them inside my home. Can home speaker wires from the amp be attached to a car speaker's harness (with or without an adapter), or can you take the harness off and figure out which wires on the speaker to attach raw? Car speakers seem to have more than two wires; what are the extras for?

First two hits in a Google search on "coaxial speakers":

http://www.caraudiohelp.com/coaxial_...l_speakers.htm
http://www.caraudiohelp.com/newslett...components.htm

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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Make sure your home system can handle the probably-lower impedance rating of those car speakers. Car speakers are usually 4-ohm, while home speakers are usually 8-ohm. I think most haome systems cannot deal with 4-ohm impedance. (Crutchfield FAQ :: Impedance)

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That leads straight to the other question, about the other way to do it: car amp with the proper resistance, run on household power. But is there any such thing as a power adapter to run automotive electrical gadgets in a building?

I've seen car amps run house speakers. (both in a car and in a home) It wasn't a long term solution, and I never knew how long the system lasted.

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Sure you can,I took some spare speakers I had & put 'em in these & hooked 'em up to use on my deck.
I have an old beater Jeep ('77 CJ-5) that I can throw 'em into,since I don't want to leave speakers in it I just bungee 'em in & hook up the wires.

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I had a '65 Ford wagon with a nice stereo but no speakers. I took a pretty good size pair of cabinet speakers and stuck them in the back seat (buckled in for safety of course). Awesome sound. Lasted as long as the car did (about a year).

Got some funny reactions picking up hitchhikers, especially if they had to crawl in between the speakers.

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Yep,there sure is.

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Certainly!

If the speakers have their own enclosure, you should be fine. If not, if they're door mounts, for example, you may need to design/build an enclosure.

Also, since they're 4 ohms, they'll yank twice the power from the amp at the same knob setting as would regular 8 ohm home speakers, so you may wish to turn down the volume. With today's modern amps, however, it's highly unlikely you'll blow anything, due to the protection circuitry.

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No need to do that,see my link above.

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There is no such thing as "regular 8 ohm" home speakers.

First of all, you can find "regular home speakers" with nominal impedances of say 2 to 16 ohms. 8 is quite common, recently you find an awful lot of 6 ohm as well. 4 ohm is also quite common, 16 ohm is rather rare.

Any home amplifier should be able to feed speakers from 4 to 16 ohms, even if it states "8-16 ohms" or something like that on the back.

A lower impedance will demand more power from the amplifier, so you have to make sure your amplifier can deliver enough power in a stable and undistorted way. If not, the sound will be bad, not loud enough for your taste, or may damage the (overheated) amplifier.

Second, the 4 or 8 ohm is just the nominal impedance. Impedance changes with frequency. Most speakers have quite some impedance dips. Your amp should be able to handle these as well. 4 ohms nominal is nice, but if it has a dip to 1.2 ohms, you'd better have a stable amp with a good power feed.

Third, when connecting multiple speakers (separate outlets for tweeters and midlow, as seen in some coaxial car amps or biamp compatible cabinets) to one amp, take care! Of course you must take care not to short things out, obviously. But also look at the total impedance. Connect 2 8 ohm speakers simply in parallel, and your amp is loaded with 4 ohms effectively. You must realize that and take it into account when connecting your system.

Fourth, each speaker has a sensitivity. Normally expressed as the sound level in dB (audible dB as far as I know) at 1 meter from the speaker for a frequency of 1 kHz with 1 W fed to the speaker. Low sensitivity speakers need a lot more amplification than high sensitivity speakers for the same listening level. Note that low or high sensitivity says NOTHING about the quality of a speaker; it is a result of the design of the unit, filter, but doesn't indicate anything on dynamics, detail, or power handling capacity of a speaker. An example as an indication: 85 dB/w/m is low sensitivty, 93 dB/w/m is high sensitivity. Where you draw the line in between is up to you .

Now which amp is good for 4 ohm car speakers (assuming the impedance of the connection of the total of car speakers to be used is 4 ohm):

*make sure your amp can deliver the power you want to have at 4 ohms, at 8 ohms (with the sensitivity of the speakers and the volume you want, you can calculate the required watts output from the amp). Only with a very potent power feed system, an amp can double its maximum delivered current from 8 to 4 ohms. Most amps have a maximum power rating at 4 ohms very close to the one at 8 ohms, so that one is a good indication.

*make sure your amp can handle a 4 ohm impedance AND the low impedance dips in the frequency response of the speaker. Get the specs on the impedance of the speakers including the dips. Compare the lowest speaker impedance with the damping factor of the amp. The damping factor (a.o.) dictates which is the lowest load impedance it handles without going into protection or being damaged.

*make sure your amp does not heat up significantly more than normal loaded temperatures when using the car speakers. If not damaging the amp immediately, it does reduce its life. To judge this, you must know how hot your amp is allowed to be within specs. Some amps are supposed to remain cold, some are supposed to get so hot you cannot touch their outsides.


All that said, if you have a decent home amplifier with a bit of power in it (I consider 60W RMS per channel at 8 ohms, under serious conditions so no 10% distortion measurement, a decent amplifier), it should be able to handle the 4 ohm car speakers unless these have horrible impedance dips. Car speaker sensitivity normally is quite high IIRC.

And that also said, I suggest you build very sturdy cabinets for your speakers (20 or 25 mm MDF) of sufficient volume and using a program to desig a good cabinet. If not, the speakers will never sound as good as a proper home speaker system. The average car speaker isn't known as being particularly good in sound quality. But you sure can have loads of fun with it, and in a proper cabinet good car speakers can give very nice sound!

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At the moment, I use low sensitivity 4 ohm nominal home speakers, with a dip to 3 ohm. These are hard to power properly. So you can imagine that a similar car speaker is equally hard to power well. For my speakers, I needed loads of power and stability. In fact, one of my current amps is so stable it didn't even go into protection when short circuiting an outlet! (damping factor indicates 0.08 ohms outlet impedance, so you need to have a very clean short circuit to go below that ). And even this amp does not double its power capacity from 8 to 4 ohms, as it was not designed with this in mind. Still, 100W per channel (RMS, 8 ohms, 1 Khz, 0.07% distortion) as one of the 2 similar power amps I use is "quite enough" even if that 100W does not double at 4 ohms indeed . I estimate one of my amps at 2*108W at 4 ohms, the other at 2*100W at 4 ohms, both at 0.07% distortion. One of them feeds the low and midlow speakers (both 4 ohms). The other one feeds the tweeters (4 ohms) and the supertweeters (8 ohms). (for the insiders, it's a passive bi-amping system, so both amplifiers amplify the whole frequency spectrum.) At about 85 dB sensitity, this is plenty of power (and I mean PLENTY ) to get all the volume and dynamics I ever want, plus loads of headroom. You must realize that even with this low sensitivity, I only ever use 5W per channel continuously at max, and then it's so loud you want to run away at times. 60W, 100W, 200W, 1000W if you want... in a home system it's nice for headroom (needed for dynamics), stability, keep the amp from running at max etc, but it really is not needed as continuous power.

Moral of the story: both home and car speakers can be difficult to power. You have to check some things beforehand, and then just test it. Test safely: begin with low volumes, play for quite some time, check for audible distortion and monitor the temperature of your amp!!

And if the sound of the car speakers doesn't suit you, stop using them and search for a system that does suit your taste. A good music system -it doesn't have to be esoteric or really expensive, just enjoyable- is important.

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Yes, but you have to remember to bring some part of the car in that has a particularly offensive rattle when the speakers are turned up so you can get the full effect. Also it helps if you overdrive the speakers so hard that everything sounds like mush-mush-mush. And be sure do this in the central unit of an apartment complex, so everybody around you can enjoy the sound.

Ahhh, there's nothing like a good stereo!

I think I just learned more about speakers in five minutes than I have in my whole life to this point.

What an informative reply -- this helps me in an unrelated situation in fact. Thanks Nicolas.

Q: Can car speakers be used in a home system?

A: Yes, if you're already deaf.

Q: What?

A: Yes, if you're already deaf!

Q: What?

A: YES, IF YOU'RE ALREADY DEAF!!!

Q: What?

A: BANANA ISSUE!!!

(In 1973 National Lampoon had an issue called the "Banana Issue" that featured a parody of Vincent van Gogh's self-portrait with a banana stuck in his ear on its front cover.)

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Oh well, it's a hobby .

Just got the money together to get my second power amplifier repaired so it can be used without risk in my setup.

Do note that I do not have 400W power amplification to kill my neighbours; I don't play particularly loud. I use it because these amps are very good at any volume, offer loads of headroom for dynamics, and closely related to that: when it needs to be loud, they can be loud. And, as said, I have difficult speakers which need a very potent amplifier to be used to their full sound quality potential.

Even with cheap speakers, you can often clearly hear better control and dynamics when using a more powerful, more stable amplifier at the same volume.

Now one piece of personal advice: don't spend more than 25$ in making your car speakers suitable for home use, and only do that if they're good quality. Why? For 50$, you get yourself a far, far better pair of second hand speakers from Ebay or the local real-life variant of that. Watch out for rotten woofer rims (especially with foam rims), but other than that most speakers are OK. Depending on your demands (taste of music, desired volume, etc) I can give some tips on good second hand speakers in different price categories. But again, for 50$ you buy truly "excellent" sounding speakers compared to the average car speakers (yes, even when it's "sony Xplode" ).

The sarcastic comments in making sure things rattle along, clip like hell etc do have a message in them: if that, erm, noise, is what you like in music, you won't get it when putting car speakers in nice home cabinets. Because what you hear in your car when cranking the volume up, is more distortion than signal. Hard to simulate in your home, but I don't know whether that's a bad thing . I personally prefer signal over distortion, but of course I too have my personal taste and I can't claim that 100% fidelity is the optimum for my taste.

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OOH! One more important thing about car systems!

When you have a somewhat more advanced car audio system, chances are it uses the following setup:

preamp - active filters - multiple power amps -tweeters, woofers, etc

However, your normal home system does not have active filters. The whole frequency range is amplified in the power amplifier (separate or more common part of the integrated amp), and the whole frequency range is sent to ALL speakers. The reason behind this is that normal home speakers have passive filters in the speaker cabinet. These passive filters make sure that for example a tweeter is loaded only from 4 kHz up, because a low frequency signal might kill the tweeter.

So in short: check whether your car speakers have their own (passive) filters on board. If not, no prob if it's just one unit ("broad band": it can handle the whole frequency range). If the car speakers contain spearate woofer and tweeter (and possible other units): check whether they all can be fed with the full frequency range! Probably not; in that case you'd have to build passive filters yourself. In that case, it's easier and cheaper to get a nice pair of home speakers from ebay .

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Let's make a distinction here Nicolas: Home & car speakers have either crossovers,which divide the frequencies & send them to the different speakers or bandpass filters,a cheaper system that merely stops low frequencies from going to the mids & highs.
I've replaced bandpass filters in cheaper speakers with actual crossovers (you can get them at Radio Shack for about $20,2-way & 3-way & it's easy if you know how to solder) & the sound improved markedly.
Adding insulation to a cheap speaker can clean & tighten up the bass quite a bit.

Of course the really expensive way to do it is the way us musicians do it in our PAs,have electronic crossovers feeding seperate amps which in turn power separate low,mid & high speakers.

(At least that's the way I use to do it,I'm too old & lazy to haul all that junk around anymore,the places we play don't need that much power & modern small systems are really good these days )

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I disagree with your distinction, not because it is factually wrong, but because it doesn't mention the essential difference between passive and active filtering.

All applications are "filters". A "crossover" means in essence a low pass and high pass filter, of which the crossover point normally can be set. This can be both active and passive, but a continuously variable crossover point normally only is found in active filters (or crossovers, whatever you want to call it). The Tannoy supertweeters have a passive high pass filter, which is variable in a few discrete steps. You also have more advanced "crossovers", but I don't like that name. What it is is a low pass filter, one or more band pass filters, and a high pass filter, of which again often the crossover points can be set. Again these tend to be active filters. Passive filters tend to be found in the speaker cabinets, fixed ans specific for the speakers used in the cabinet only. At most (except for the tannoy supertweeters, as mentioned), they have relative volume regulators, but no variable crossover frequency.

Active filters work at line level (ie, before the power stage); the so called "crossovers" normally fall under this.

Passive filters work at output level (ie, after the power stage); these are simple combinations of resistors, capacitors and coils, whereas active filters are complex digital tools.

One can further distinguish filters by the steepness: 6 dB/oct, 12 or more. This indicates how soon a filter kills frequencies below (for a high pass filter) the crossover frequency. I'm not too much into active filters, but as far as I know this steepness info doesn't count as much for active filters as it does for passive filters, because they work with a completely different principle, and as such do not show a simpe sloaped frequency response. AAIK, active filters are more precise, because they really let go only the desired frequencies and kill the rest, where a passive filter tends to have a not so steep slope and its crossover point hence is only an indication of what is passed and what is not, but not a true gate.

NExt to filters, one also has the mentioned volume dampers. These are normally series-parallel resistors, chosen such t