Speaker Sounds Awful or Not Working at All Diagnose Speakers in Your Car or Truck

"Ah, don't do that." In this video, we're gonna show you how to diagnose the speaker system in your car. So, you're in your car, it's a nice day, you get the windows rolled down, you're listening to some tunes, and something doesn't sound right, whether it's in the front seat or in the back seat. The sound is just not all there. It doesn't sound whole. There's a number of different issues that could be causing this. So, let's go over some of them and figure it out.

Before we rip any of the door panels off to check the speakers, the first thing we wanna do is check the radio. The settings may be messed up, maybe you hit something by accident, maybe someone borrowed your car, or a kid was playing with it and changed some of the settings. Every radio is a little bit different. What we wanna do, is find where the balance is and the fade. On this radio, in particular, it is the sound button right here. And then, we're gonna scroll through. Sometimes you can find this in settings. So, here's the balance center. So, this is where we can go all the way to the right, that's gonna be all the right speakers, and then, you can also go all the way to the left. So, if this was on 12 to the left, then you're not gonna get any sound coming out of the right speakers.

Let's talk about the difference between balance and fade. Balance is gonna affect the sound from right to left, fade is gonna be from back to front. Using that method of testing, we can actually test each individual speaker without even taking anything apart. And the fader or fade, you can check the rear speakers. And check the front speakers. So if you wanted to test the individual speaker, and we wanna check the driver-side front door, we're gonna fade all the way to the front, and all the way to the left. Balance left and front. So that's just coming out of the left front speaker. So now, we can listen to this individual speaker, see how it sounds, see how clear it sounds. If it's not working at all, we know there's probably something wrong with it and we'd have to take the door panel off. But, it sounds good, and it's not crackling at all. You can also check the quality of the speaker. If the speaker was blown or starting to deteriorate, we'd hear some noise that we don't wanna hear, and it sounds great.

Now, let's go from door to door and check each speaker. Now, we're gonna do the same with this speaker, just take a listen, it is working, so that's good, and it sounds pretty crystal clear. This one sounds great also. You wanna keep in mind what type of music you're using to test the vehicle. You wanna use something that has a lot of low tones or high tones like what we have here. And, now we're going to the front.

And, now we're checking this speaker. And it sounds horrible. There's crackling, and squeaking, and buzzing, and it doesn't sound right. So, either way, we have to take the door panel off whether you hear something bad coming from the speaker, or, if we didn't hear anything at all if it was just quiet coming from the speaker, we're gonna pull the door panel off.

Sometimes you can look at the speaker and actually see something wrong with the speaker, whether it's cut or it's deteriorated. Over time, they deteriorate, you know, after about 20 years or so, you're probably gonna need speakers. If you find that one speaker looks like this because of deterioration, you probably wanna do all of them. If you visually can't see anything, obvious, wrong with the speaker, take the speaker out of the door and take a look at the connections. If there's corrosion in there, it's not gonna sound right. If there's corrosion in there, it may not even work at all.

Let's speaker out and see what we can find. Disconnect the connector. There could even be a loose connector. You could just try to exercise the connector a couple of times and see if the sound comes back. Visually take a look in there and see if there's any green. If there's any green, the connector has got to be replaced. It means moisture got in there, that's causing a bad connection. Same within the back of the speaker, check in there, see if there's any corrosion. This is what the speaker should look like all the way around, it should be a solid piece, not disconnected or cut like this one. So that's gonna change the sound. This one visually looks good.

Another great way to test this is, take a known, good test speaker and hook it up to the vehicle. Even if it's from a different car, you can sometimes get the connectors to work or even use some wire, get them to hook up. With the test speaker in there, it sounds great, so we know that's what our problem was, we just needed a new speaker.

Another way you can test just the speakers, I don't necessarily recommend this but you can do it, is take a 9-volt battery, put one side of the speaker on one, and the other one on the positive, one on the negative, and tap it. And this speaker is blown, so it's not doing anything. But this speaker right here, even though it's cut, the internals are still good. And you can see it moves just like that. So that moves in one direction, if we flip the battery over, it should move in the other direction. And it does. But, I don't recommend doing that too much, you just wanna try it real quick, it's a good way to test it.

If you're replacing these speakers with OEM speakers, you can probably get just one. But if you're replacing them with aftermarket ones, they normally come in a pair. And that's great because it's gonna sound better if you replace them in a pair or replace all four.

I hope this video helped you out and you enjoyed it. If you did, make sure you subscribe to our channel, ring the bell, turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our videos.