Car Stereos: Rear Speaker install in 99 Grand Am with the Premium system, infinity kappa, premium sound system

Question
Brian,

I have the '99 Grand Am SE2 with the Premium sound system that was offered before it was replaced with Monsoon.  I'm trying to replace the rear 6x9's.  I picked up some Infinity Kappa 692.7i's for this because I found out the hard way that the rear speakers were bi-amped, and I didn't want to mess with bypassing the amp to use standard coaxial speakers.  I'm having trouble matching Tweeter + and - correctly and Woofer + and - correctly for each speaker.  The speakers have 4 wires each going to them from the factory harness.  Would it be obvious as far as sound quality if the + and - were mismatched?  Is there a method to 'test' for something like that?  Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance

Answer
Hi Chris,

If you reverse the positive and negative connections on a speaker, you're not likely to harm anything; just the sound quality will suffer.  There is a way to test the polarity of a speaker provided that you can observe the movement of the cone--that means you could determine the correct positive terminal for the woofer portion of the stock speaker, but probably not the tweeter.  Hopefully knowing the polarity of the woofer terminals will help you figure out the tweeter terminals as well.

Take a 1.5v battery (like a AA, C or D cell) and tape a piece of wire to each end.  Touch the wires to the positive and negative terminals of the speaker, and watch to see which way the cone moves.  If you have the positive wire from the battery touching the positive terminal on the speaker, the cone will move away from the magnet.  If the positive battery wire is touching the negative speaker terminal, the cone will move toward the magnet.

Personally, I think I'd bypass the factory amplifier--especially if you've installed an after-market head unit in place of the factory radio.  The amp's location, under the liner on the left side of the trunk, makes it very easy to bypass for the rear speakers.

Hope this helps!

Brian