Anyone have 4x6 plate speakers? Do i need crossovers?

are they mounted right? do they still pop if they are not mounted in the car?

never heard of base blocker

i find it hard to believe that a new set of Polk speakers don't sound great right out of the box..........

is the impedance correct?????

do you have a home unit that you can hook the speakers to???

Speakers crackling/popping with only a small amount of bass are blown speakers.....sorry. I'm 95% certain a brand new set of speakers wouldn't do that.

"bass blockers" lol... what ever happened to calling them a filtering capacitor...guess it sells better to the dumbass teenagers.

I like Mudbilly's idea, to hook them up to a home stereo. Just pull the speaker wire from the back of your home speakers and connect it to the Polks. If they check good then the prob's in the car install.

I would definitely not use the OE speaker harness. You don't need to use Monster Cable or anything (although that's what I do always use, but I would use at least a generic 12 gauge speaker wire.

For that matter, I would never run a speaker off the head unit. You might as well keep the Pioneers.

Amps don't have an impedence rating per se. The lower the impedence, however, the more current you need from your amp to keep from getting clipping. Clipping is when the amp doesn't have enough power to reproduce the sine wave form that the music source is putting out; it chops off the tops and the bottoms. Picture the difference between trying to blow into a straw and trying to blow into a 2" pipe. That out of breath feeling you get with the pipe is the same thing your amp is feeling when it's trying to drive into a sub-4 ohm load. (4 ohms is the std in car stereo.)

Anyway, I'll bet anything the Polks are fine, that you've got a prob with your wiring, you just didn't know it until you stepped up to a speaker with some accurate reproduction abilities. New speaker wire should fix it, but a separate amp will make the Polks come alive.

A "bass blocker" sounds like what used to be called a high pass filter, i.e., an electronic device that only lets frequencies higher than "X" Hz pass through it. A cross-over is more complicated; it serves the function of a high pass and a low pass, but it has to have a blend in the middle. How it does all this is a question for an electrical engineer, which I am not (liberal arts major here). I would say no, you don't NEED one, but your system would sound better with one.

A "bass blocker" sounds like what used to be called a high pass filter, i.e., an electronic device that only lets frequencies higher than "X" Hz pass through it. A cross-over is more complicated; it serves the function of a high pass and a low pass, but it has to have a blend in the middle. How it does all this is a question for an electrical engineer, which I am not (liberal arts major here). I would say no, you don't NEED one, but your system would sound better with one.[/QUOTE]



This is exactly what a bass blocker is and you can probably get them at a local stereo shop and skip the shipping. There are different size blockers for different speakers sizes. They don't block all bass. If you buy the right size(freq.), they will only block the bass that your speaker wasn't designed to produce and it will use the power more efficiently to the range it was intended. A 4" woofer should not be expected to produce tones that a subwoofer would. With blocker you can also run them louder before they will distort.

Think of them like a rev limiter, you can run a motor to 10,000 rpm but it's going to sound like hell and it's not going to last long.

Here is another thing, some high end speakers have an operating range, if you will. They need a certain amount of juice to work right. If the head unit doesn't have enough wattage for a certain speaker it will sometimes produce the noise that you are describing.

Bass Blocker is a brand and its been around for over 10 years.

There is nothing wrong with the speakers as I have used/sold Pioneer,Infinity,MB Quart etc. They will all do the same due to the amount of excursion on that itty bitty so called woofer. I usually cross them over at about 400-600 Hz, but i run them through a amp with a built in variable crossover. The factory wiring will have nothing to do with the ohms the speaker is at

The crossover is probably just to the tweeter. Look at the where the wires connect to the speaker. If the wire goes directly from the tab to the woofer there is no crossover. If there is a little diode on that wire, then it does.