A good customer called us on the phone and told us they had recently bought a new 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee. I told him I really liked what they had done with the redesign. He then asked me if I had listened to the stereo system in one of the new ones yet. I said no. He then went on to explain that he loved almost everything about his new vehicle, except the sound. I asked him to bring it by so we could sit in it and listen to it together. When he arrived I went out to his vehicle. He had the fully loaded model with the 9 speaker 506 watt system with the All-Gig navigation system. And then we listened. It truly sounded bad. Not average. Just bad.
So I told him I needed to do some digging on this new system and then I would make some suggestions. While he was there we took the vehicle into the shop and removed one of the front door panels so we could see what they did for front speakers. After doing some research, I came to the conclusion that all it needed was a really good pair of front speakers and the system should sound good. We suggested that the customer buy a set of German Maestro Epic series front speakers. The EV6908 speakers include a 6×9″ woofer that fit right into the factory woofer locations as you can see from the picture. We installed the new tweeter in the factory locations at the top of the door. We then installed the new dedicated crossover network that divides up the musical frequencies and sends it to the speaker best suited for that duty. In simple terms the lower frequencies go to the woofer and the higher frequencies go the to tweeter. What a difference this made! The truck already had plenty of output and now it had incredible sound quality to go along with the output!
The customer was thrilled with the sound. He had a grin from ear to ear when I gave him a demo. While we had it in the shop we also installed a Nav-TV All-GIGHS. This device now allows the customer the capability to access his navigation system or his phonebook while he is driving. It dramatically improved the functionality of his navigation system. So as you can see, you do not always need to start from scratch to improve the quality of your sound system. Some times all it may need is a good set of speakers.
