The Upstate Life

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

We've Got Sound Issues

So the factory subwoofer in my Toyota unexpectedly blew Monday morning. How do I know this? It was buzzing profusely while listening to talk radio. Anyway, this sucks because I have never set the bass setting to anything above +2 and have very rarely blasted the stereo. In fact, I can't even recall turning the volume knob to anything more than halfway. After doing some research, it turns out that this specific made for Toyota JBL brand subwoofer has a tendency of failing regardless if you neglected its capacity or not. In fact, it seems like almost everyone that's owned this car with the JBL system installed has had the subwoofer fail at some point during their ownership.

Now that my sound system has been robbed of its lower sound frequencies, my commute to and from work has lost some life to it. Listening to Lupe Fiasco with the bass set to -5 is a travesty to say the least. I have to skip Interpol's "Evil" every time it shows up on shuffle while listening to my iPod because the bass line creates a disturbing rattling noise that makes me want to lunge toward the trunk where its located while driving and smack the damn thing. So, how would I go about and remedy this problem?

One thing I found is that since this speaker is a part of a proprietary audio system, I would have to get the same exact model from a Toyota dealer in order to replace it. Cost? Over $200! For some odd up reason, this woofer uses 3.7 ohms and 26 watts, which is arguably one of the weirdest electronic requirements I've seen since most speakers employ 4/8 ohms and 50-200 watts. A few people on this forum suggested bringing the damaged woofer to a speaker repair shop and having the technician refoam the speaker. Not only am I unsure how much that would cost, but I would also have to remove and reinstall the speaker from the trunk as well. I don't see why I can't do what this dude did and replace the damaged speaker with an 8" Kicker that I can just get from an eTailer. I mean, would it really damage the audio system if I install a subwoofer that uses different wattage (and 4 ohms... it's only a .3 difference... c'mon!) than my old one? I need this fixed ASAP. Bass-less car rides are no fun.

Posted by Brett at 5:07 PM |