Larger rear speaker?

[jaster]

It's difficult to get much sound out of 4" speakers. I found a discussion on the board where it was mentioned the stereo puts out 10W per channel. That's not a lot to work with but has anyone made a custom box for the rear so they could use 5-1/4 speakers?

[jaster]

Neil gave me a call and confirmed some of my suspicions. 10W isn't going to be enough to do much. Being a motorcycle, there's a lot of wind noise to overcome and there's no way to get descent sound out of any speakers. We discussed helmet speakers and intercoms which is likely what I'll end up doing.

[gearheadfla]

I have thought of a small amp but I worry that the alt. is already got enough going on.

[suzib6sw]

What may be an alternative is to add a speaker into the hump in the trunk.. This could be hooked up with a bass filter on to allow just the bass frequencies through much like a passive subwoofer.. Bass is non directional and only one speaker would be needed to complement the rears using the trunk as a resonance box..
A small power amp would also work if needed but serious thought would have to be given to swapping to LEDS for most of the bulbs to take some of the load off the alternator.

Cheers...

Pete

[Okie34]

Unfortunately, I found that helmet speakers for music were just to distracting. At least for me they are. Voice Communication is alright (probably from years of wearing flight helmets) but music being piped through was just to much for me. I use the front speakers and above about 50 or so, I'm really not listening anyway.

You can replace the speaker elements with better, more modern components of the same size though. The newer components in most cases will handle the load of higher wattage better and give better sound quality. Though on a MC, most of the sound gets eaten up with road/wind noise. Obviously MC's are not the best platform for musical quality.

When my Stock radio went south, I replaced with with a Marine (since stolen!) Radio that had fout 50 watt outputs. These worked out well as long as you didn't go full volume. Of course you lose the wired intercom and engine level volume control in doing that, but it was a major concern for me.

-- JD

[richardb, austin]

When my co-pilot quit riding with me I removed the useless rear speakers and I've "never looked back".