Speaker Placement Considerations

A component system gives you the ability to place the woofer and tweeter separately in your vehicle interior. This can be good or bad, depending on how it’s done. As a general rule, the tweeters should be placed relatively close to the woofers for best tonal balance and most coherent imaging (the closer, the better). Any separation greater than 8 inches (20 cm) is likely to result in degraded sound quality.

Avoid placing tweeters where they will be blocked by objects in the interior of the car (including seated occupants). When selecting a mounting location, look at both sides of the car to make sure that this location is clear on both sides.

You can always experiment with tweeter placement before committing to a final mounting location. Simply connect the rest of the system and allow plenty of wire length for the tweeters. Using Velcro® or similar material, attach the tweeters in different locations until you find the one where they perform best.

Woofers will usually be placed into factory speaker locations. If you have some woofer mounting flexibility, keep the following in mind: Lower mounting locations, such as the lower front corner of a door or a kick-panel provide the greatest path length distances for the sound emitted by the woofer. For this reason, they are generally more desirable than higher mounting locations. Higher mounting locations often result in extreme near- side soundstage bias which compromises the stereo listening experience.

6 JL Audio - C5-525 Owner’s Manual