Sound System Cleanup

August 20, 2025

Making Pearline sound good when she’s not running.

When I’m driving with the tonneau top on the car, I have trouble hearing my speakers because they are under the canvas fabric. Due to poor choices I made in my teens and 20’s, I don’t hear most of the tones over 2Khz as well as I could 40 years ago. The baffling provided by the canvas suppresses those tones even more. I have the speakers in boxes because I didn’t want to mount them in the rear firewall. I’ve tried to avoid making cuts in the metal, although it may eventually come to that.

I decided to build a shelf that I could mount the speakers on. I used some pine 1x4 and I stained it to approximate the color of the tonneau. It certainly got the sound up closer. Too close, in fact. So, back to the drawing board. I’ve taken to rolling up and tucking the tonneau fabric behind the speakers.

I’ve since added a couple of tweeters in the front of the cabin. While putting them in, I took out the console and made the wiring to the amp in the trunk a lot cleaner. The tweeters add high tones in front of me, which helps some. I mounted them on the radio “blank” plate, so they are on the console and facing the driver and passenger seats. I have a trunk-mounted woofer, so I get all the bass I need, and more. I’m thinking to put a passive crossover into the speaker boxes to reduce the tones below 500hz. That should help make it less “boomy”.

As for source material, I have a bunch of playlists on Youtube Music. The problem with YTM, is they don’t have an equalizer that I can adjust the tones. I considered buying an EQ and may still do that. For the short term, I use an app on my phone for music that’s stored in memory called PowerAmp. It does a good enough job with playback and with a little effort, I can offload my Youtube Music playlists to memory so that PowerAmp can play them.

As I’ve tried to stay away from too many modern features in the car, I’ve avoided putting a stereo in the dash. All that’s there is that little controller which can be shoved up under the dash. The one thing I did add was a USB outlet where the cigarette lighter used to be. Also, I have the original Motorola AM/FM that I still intend to put back in that slot once I get the rest of the dash wiring cleaned up.