Installed Infinity PR6500CS in 2004 GT

[KJones]

This speaker fit perfect into my Vibe, tweeters, crossover, and speakers. used stock covers, and other than drilling some mount holes no body mods needed.

Apologies in advance, no pics at this time, but here is the detailed step by step.

My Vibe has the 6 speaker system, the one with tweeters in the front doors but no boom box. Didn't replace the radio.

Ordered the speakers from Crutchfield, came with Metra 82-8148 speaker adapters, a pair of adapter plugs (Metra 71-035LC ), and their installation sheet for the Vibe. Sale price was $104.

Other materials were:
Around 12 foot of wire, I used 6 black and 6 red 16 gauge (I think), if you use paired speaker wire you need around 6 foot
12- 16-14 spade lugs (mine just fit the little crossover, under 1/4" width slots)
2- 16-14 .187" female disconnects
2- 16-14 .110" female disconnects
4- 22-16 (removed) splices*
6- 1/8" self-tapping screws (to mount the Metra brackets, didn't use the nuts/bolts supplied)
6- 1/8" washers
2- 6-32** x 3/8" tapered machine screws with matching nuts and lock washers (I splurged for stainless)
2- small cable ties

note that I used what I had, would have preferred white vs red wire or paired speaker wire
also note that I crimped my connections
* since the Metra adapter plugs have to be re-terminated with spade plugs I used the better-insulated disconnects I cut off those plugs to connect to the tweeter, requiring the (removed) splices. You may prefer to just run clean wires and would then need to double the number of disconnects and eliminate the (removed) splices.
** better double check this size, just take the little cup to the local hardware store

Tools:
Phillips screwdriver
Electric drill, 1/8", 1/4", and 5/64"* metal drill bits
Clamp/vise to hold tweeter bracket for drilling
Flat screwdriver or panel removal tool
Wire crimp tool
* CRS hitting again, just check the 5/64 bit against the little tweeter cup screw to make sure it will leave thread space.

Since this setup has the tweeters and a crossover, a fair amount of extra wiring was needed. Accomplished this all in the door. The small crossover and the tweeters with this speaker fit in the panels without any modifications - lucked out!

Other posts outline the panel removal quite well, to recap: Pry off the tweeter cover from the top so you don't break the tab on it's bottom; Pry off the window switch panel also from the top for the same reason; Remove the screw behind the a little cover under the door latch lever; Remove the screw in the bottom of the door handle "cup", and remove the cup; Starting on the bottom pop the door "pins", then do the sides, finally with the panel only connected along the top edge lever it out lifting the back free and then the front.

Next I disconnected the tweeter wire from the harness connector and removed the bracket (2 nuts). The tweeter is attached by a screw and a cable tie to the bracket, just cut the cable tie and then remove the tweeter. Out of the many tweeter connectors supplied by Infinity is a simple cup back with 3 holes in it. The middle hole of the cup is screwed into the bracket which centers the tweeter, and then you turn the cup until the 3 holes line up horizontally with the bottom of the bracket. One of the other 2 holes will now be where you need to drill a 1/8" hole into the bracket. Use one of the screws provided by Infinity to screw the cup into this hole. The 3rd hole misses the bracket, but 2 screws should be fine. Then mount the tweeter into the cup (the wires on the passenger side were kinda tight for me, but I noticed I didn't have it quite level either which may have hurt (or helped?) so you may want to check before drilling on the passenger side to make sure you can get the tweeter wires through the back of the mounted cup and mount the tweeter (push and turn) when it is positioned on the bracket. Cable tie the wires and bolt the bracket back on the door.

Use the 1/4" bit to drill the tops off the 3 rivets holding the main speaker (after disconnecting it from the harness). High speed and medium/light pressure will help keep the rivets from spinning. Use care with the front-most rivet as there is a wire bundle behind it! The speaker will drop when the rivet heads are off. You can pull the back of the rivets out - they have a plastic cover on the back, or probably just drill right through and retrieve them from the bottom of the door. I mounted my speakers into the Metra brackets before drilling although you could drill just using the bracket without the speaker in it (might be easier to juggle). The 3 rivet holes are asymmetric so matching the bracket is easy, but the speaker mounts to the bracket with 4 screws from the Infinity package so you need to make sure that the speaker's wiring tabs are near the small hole on the bracket that the wires will pass through. The rivet holes are big and probably not worth trying to use after you drill the rivets out, so I took the 1/8" bit and drilled 2 new holes spaced about 1/4" from 2 of the rivet holes, clockwise from holes on the driver side and CCW on the passenger side to get a bit of spacing from that wire bundle. After drilling those 2 I mounted the bracket using the self-tapping screws and drilled the 3rd using the bracket as a locator. Then put in the 3rd screw.

Next I mounted the crossover. There is an indentation next to the speaker towards its upper front edge sandwiched between the speaker and a door panel clip hole. The crossover fits very nicely there. I mounted mine with the input lugs towards the front/bottom and the speaker lugs towards the back/top, and pushed it away from the speaker towards the clip hole so that I wouldn't have to worry about the panel's speaker cover hitting the crossover. It sits nice and flat, and I used the crossover as my guide to drill 2 1/8" holes for the crossover (it has 4 screws with it but seemed like overkill to me). Used 2 of the classy hex screws to mount it.

Once the crossover is mounted you can eyeball the wiring. For the main speaker I terminated the speaker-side leads (.110 for black/negative, .187 for red/positive) but didn't cut the other end, pulled the speaker off, ran the leads through the little hole in the Metra mount and connected the leads to the speaker, remounted the speaker, and then eyeballed the length by running a neat loop that exited the speaker mount, wrapped around the crossover from bottom to top, and made it to the lugs for the speaker. Then I cut the wires and terminated them with the spade lugs and connected them to the crossover.

For the main input you use the Metra adapter and connect it to the original main speaker connector. The connectors will end up right next to the crossover, away from the speaker side. Then make a neat loop right next to the one from the speaker that ends up at the bottom of the crossover where the input lugs are, eyeball the length and cut the wire from the Metra and terminate with spade lugs and connect them to the crossover - save the cut off wire with the connectors.

For the tweeter I ran the wire along the bundle from the electric mirror that runs next to the crossover, under the vapor barrier towards the center of the door to where 2 wire bundles meet and the main speaker wire come out of a bundle, then along that speaker wire to the crossover lugs. So, connect the cut off ends of the leads you saved from the Metra adapter to your black and red wires (match to black/black and red/white) with the (removed) splices, connect them to the tweeter, eyeball the length of the run described before (I lay the wire right where it will run), cut and terminate with the spade lugs, run the wires under the vapor barrier, between the bundles (the 2 bundles make an "X" so I went around the middle of that "X") down to the crossover and connect them.

Reverse the order of operations to remount the door panels.

That's it, honestly I was having a bad day when I did the first speaker and took most of a day to do it, but the second one went in in an hour so figure 2-3 hours since you have my cheat sheet now. Crutchfield's installation sheet didn't help much - there are better door panel removal guides on this list and they also don't cover tweeter or crossover details at all, nor specifics on what wiring you will need or extra hardware.

Hope this helps someone out there. I may post it on Crutchfield's site too.

KJ

[Sonders]

Great write-up. I'll be sure to reference your post in my near future Alpine speaker install in my doors. I've been wondering about the actual wiring of the tweeter with the moon&tune audio package. I was assuming I would use the factory wires for tweeter to connect to my Alpine tweeters since the speakers are being filtered at the amp, but I see that is not the case.

[KJones]

I'm not sure how my 6 speaker system may differ from the Moon & Tunes. Obviously mine doesn't have the subwoofer but there may be differences in how the tweeter was wired and/or filtered.

[Sonders]

Your system is the same as mine; the moon&tune sub was optional in 03-04.
Mine doesnt have sub either. I thought I read on the site that the signal filtering was done at the amp then sent to the speakers seperately. I could be wrong though. I guess I can try hooking mine up both ways.

[Derf]

The filtering is done at the amp. The rear door speaker amp input is used as signal for both the sub and rear doors. Internally the amp filters the audio to low pass for the sub, I have never found specs for the filtering range. When the cold breaks I may see if I can at least get a guesstimate of the filtering.