I just received my first empeg player today (I'm very happy!) And I am redoing my entire audio setup in my car now. I purchased new speakers, an amp, and subs. I am figuring that I will have to replace the speaker wires anyways in order to connect the amp up the right way. But does anybody have an idea of how much longer will this take me to do?

Unless you are driving huge amounts of wattage into gigantic speakers, the factory speaker wiring is probably just fine. The only place you would need to run new wires is where you need to get the speaker signal routed from the amp up to the factory speaker wiring harness.

Some people even do a piggyback trick where they connect the amp from its location in the trunk directly to the rear speakers, then use the factory rear speaker wires to get the front speaker signal up into the the dash so they can daisy-chain them into the front speaker connectors. That way, you only need to run power/RCA/ampremote back to the amp. Although there is a lot to be said for running extra wires back to the trunk while you've got the car apart anyway.

Yes Im pumping 100 watts to each speaker up front and I would be a little worried trying to use the stock single strand copper wire to transfer that amount of juice.

Anyone got a bright way of identifying the + and - of the factory speaker cables without pulling the car apart? On my motor the colour coding does not seem to conform to a consistant standard......

Small battery (1.5 to 9V) When positive battery terminal is connected to positive terminal of speaker - and negative to negative, speaker cone should move out. Might be hard to tell if you have separate wires for tweets though...

It doesn't really matter if it moves in or out, as long as you're consistent about it...

/Michael

It doesn't really matter if it moves in or out, as long as you're consistent about it...

And that's the trick. If you get it wrong for just ONE speaker, phase cancellation will make your bass sound like utter crap. It'll be like someone removed the woofers from your speakers.

The proper way to determine the speaker polarity in a factory install is to:

- Get a proper wiring harness for your car which will have the wires already labeled for you.

- If the color coding of the wires at the actual speaker locations is different from what's at the harness, then use a multimeter to test continuity between the harness and the speaker location.

Im pumping 100 watts to each speaker up front

Don't confuse maximum wattage capability of the speaker with how many watts you will actually be sending to them.

If you have two (or more) speakers up front, and are actually sending 100 watts to each one, you will be completely deaf in very short order, unless the speakers are monumentally inefficient.

Probably 15--30 watts is as much power as you will actually be sending to them.

tanstaafl.

Well I have a pair of MB Quarts components up front which are rated at 120 rms not peak and my amp a JL 500/5 is rated at 100 watts to each speaker rms. With that said I know I never push 100 watts to each of them Im sure but they can get pretty damn loud and I just feel better pushing all that power through more than a single stand of copper Im sure it has some positive effect

How much longer is not easy to answer but if you are putting your amp in the boot and your battery is under the bonnet you will need to run a power cable and also you will need to run some RCA cables from empeg to amp as well from inside your dash then once you have the car in bits it will not take a huge amount of extra time.

Installing stereos is quite a mechanical process running all the cables.

On my car the RCAs run down the left side of the car under the carpet going back to a amp with a sub out the front channel speaker cables come up the right side of the car along the sill and then to the speakers at the door. Also on this side is the ethernet cable to the back where the wireless goes.
The rear speakers is a very short run from the amp up to the speakers at the rear.
The sub lives in the boot.

One top tip is think of what your ultimate goal/system is and run all the cables before hand for that end and whenever you do an upgrade the cables are waiting for you.

So to answer your question i would say yes upgrade your speaker cables.

Advantages are better sound ( in theory), also less messing around extending cables down to amps, no need to chop off plugs when you come to sell the car as trust me you'll sell the car before you tire of the empeg, mine is on it's second car that said the amp is on it's fifth car.

I definitely will change the wires out now, the main reason is that I have to trace all of the wires now. The diagrams on the Internet and wiring harness are different from the actual colors and wires in the car. The diagram says that there shouldn't be a wire in one location and there is. And some of the colors are different.

And I don't plan on selling this car for another 10 years, and by that time I might as well just keep it. I do my own work on it, and I replace parts before they go bad. I am fighting against some rust that built up while it was in Michigan, but now it is in Arizona and it shouldn't rust anymore.

I'll post some pictures of my installation job when I get done. It is a very crazy install. I've had to use metal files, coping saws, and drills in order to make it fit. Has anybody else made their empeg fit in a Saturn?

Yeah my daily driver is a 99 SL1 so it has the nice system in it.

Do you have the empeg in your Saturn, and did you find that the wires are not labeled correctly? Did you have to cut any metal out of the supports to make the opening deep enough?

I will set up a website next week once I finish this install (Hopefully), you will see what pains I have gone through to get this into my 95 Saturn SC2. But I know that it is worth it.

Welcome to AZ.

We'll bake that rust right off.

A lot of car speakers are actually pretty high efficiency, in the low to mid 90s. So actually i would disagree that it's 15 to 30 watts going to those speaks, it's probably more like 1 to 5 watts.

Calvin