slabsquathrust

So I have a quick question. I have a crackling speaker in the front divers side door. I understand a new head unit and amp would make a massive difference in the overall quality of the system. However, I don't want to spend the money currently on such an upgrade. It is the bose system and from what I have read online, the speakers have an impedance of 2 ohms. Most aftermarket speakers have a 4 ohm impedance. Should I be able to swap in these 2 ohm aftermarkets without any issues? I figure the only loss if I went with 4 ohm ones would be a volume drop. It would be nice to avoid this. Anyways thanks for the input.

nm3210

Let me take this time to say that when a speaker is in a vertical position for a very long time, the spider holding the voice coil into place will start to sag and might eventually come in contact with the magnet make the awful scratching/crackling noise that you might be hearing.

My car (front driver's side) was starting to sound worse and worse over the course of a year or so and eventually I decided to buy another used speaker off ebay (same year, so still some 13 years old). It sounded good for about a day or two but then started to make the same exact scratching noise that I heard from the original speaker. For a while I would just quick take off the door panel (I got good at it) and stick my finger in there to push the voice coil up a bit to make it go away for my short ride to work. Eventually, however, I finally thought about the fact that it was perhaps the spider sagging (which was the premise of this story) and that I should just flip the speaker upside down. I was initially worried about whether the cable/connector would reach and if I'd have to do some minor soldering, but it turned out that there was the perfect amount of wire to plug it in with the connector facing down (who knows if they actually had a 'proper' orientation at the factory, however). So low and behold it worked and has been sounding perfect for a few months now (and I still have that extra speaker). There's probably only a small chance that this will solve your problem, so I'll at least try to answer your questions.

The 165mm/6.5" Bose speaker from my 1999 Audi A6 that I'm holding in my hand is indeed 2Ω (just to confirm the entire premise of your post). Generally amplifiers are happier with a higher impedance speaker (doesn't require as much current) so unless the amp they're using in there is something really [really] crazy you should be fine as far as driving a different impedance speaker for an extended period. As for volume, it really would depend on a lot of factors in the speaker and actually, just the sensitivity of the driver itself would really cause more volume 'problems' than just a mismatch of the impedance. If I were you I would obviously first try the retarded flip-the-speaker-upside down, but then I would probably just buy a pair of speakers and replace both drivers and passenger side with whatever driver you want that fits. If you just want a non-crappy speaker, buy something cheap, but if you really care about sound quality, look around the $100/pair mark for a decent set of speakers, anything more than this and you're going to reach the point where the head unit sucks too much and you won't notice anything different (speakers have generally reigned king of diminishing returns, anyway, you should usually just buy at YOUR pricepoint not what the market is trying to sell you).

If I have any of the minor electronic comments incorrect, just call me out - it's been a few years since I've really had to deal with this stuff on more than an occasional level.