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What spent for his upgrades would have likely cost Ford $100 en masse to upgrade and do the stereo even a lot better. I went over the top on my stereo and don't really regret it, but this thread shows that someone can upgrade just the speakers and make a big improvement. I would venture to bet they pay no more than $5 to to $10 each for the junk paper speakers they put in the trucks. For the price, especially a Lariat or Platinum, it is a laugh at what they put in for stereos. Likely one of the best and quietest cabins on a vehicle. As much as I don't give Ford a lot of credit for the Lightning because the SW and GUI experience is so bad, it truly is a very well built truck. I think that is a point missed and likely wrong. Just some thoughts from your friendly neighborhood audio human (yes, it is a fun day job!). I have to confess I have thus far stuck with stock speakers for my vehicles, a listening room a vehicle is not! Better speakers, if implemented correctly, can be the solution, but if you have not always give EQ a shot first, you may just save yourself some money.Īs a caveat a speaker system is more than the sum of its parts it is just as much art as it is science, within reason I will often take better implementation and tuning over better components ideally I like both, but I have certainly heard my fair share of expensive items that were not well implemented, some clever DSP work and tuning/toning can often make the most out of systems which have less than stellar components.
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Transducers, be those speakers or microphones, are the most inaccurate part of the audio chain, and upgrades here will yield dividends over anything else. It wasn't incredible, but it was listenable and the music was again enjoyable. I remember one vehicle I drove that had a horrible Bose system in it, I found It wasn't at all bad once I pulled the bass back almost all the way, pulled back some of the tinny treble, and added some mids these moves "flattened" things out some, and that was with the basic fixed EQ in the car stereo. For example many vehicles attempt to exaggerate the "bass" on small speakers that cannot adequately produce low-end, resulting in some gross low-mids (yug!) pulling back some of the low-end is helpful in these situations. I have found with many vehicles that when the sound is less than ideal that some subtractive EQ is a good place to start. (dash speaker - I have an extra if someone wants to make it worth my while to send it their way) The sub fits perfectly in the existing spot and is only attached with command hook Velcro. Sound Good Stereo has a lot of great options as well, but those were out of my price range. Most came at the recommendation of provobeast. I strongly recommend buying a good trim kit instead of using pliers and screwdrivers. There is a rubber grommet that allowed me to route to the 12 V battery.
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I poked through the ‘firewall’ under the drivers side steering console. I ended up running wiring under the drivers side door channels for the sub control and power. I also had to ‘hard wire’ the center dash speaker. The 4 door speakers and sub have adapters (links provided). There is no aftermarket harness for them. The tweeter factory wires were extremely small and hard to join with the speaker wires. I broke a few clips when removing certain trim pieces along the way. The trickiest parts were running power to the 12 V battery from the rear seat area for the sub and replacing the A pillar tweeters.
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I had to figure out the sub replacement and center dash speaker on my own. I also want to shout out provobeast on YouTube ( ) for a complete walk through of front/tweeter/rear speaker tutorials. I want to shout out soundgoodstereo for the plug and play sub adapter, sub block plate, and front/rear door block out plates. It is so much better.Ī couple of clarifications : 1) I have never worked on car audio before 2) I am a strong believer in YouTube university 3) I am pretty handy 4) I have had to figure out a lot of electrical gremlins in boats so I was not too worried about doing this. BTW the B&O 8 speaker system is complete garbage. I was initially hesitant with such expensive truck but found the job to be easier than I thought (with help listed below). Total cost was under $1000 (more likely $850 but I didn’t track all of my receipts). I am not an audiophile, and listen primarily to Sirius/XM / Apple Music / Spotify. I am adding this content because most audio upgrades on this forum are multiple thousands of dollars. I did not upgrade the head unit for obvious reasons. After a lot of research on this forum, the other Lightning forum, and Youtube I pulled the trigger. I recently completed an audio upgrade which I started over the summer.