Replacing EX factory Speakers with Touring Factory Speakers

BobMcBob

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Hello everyone.

I had a question that may seem silly to most.

Would there be any benefit to taking out the stock EX speakers and replacing them the speakers from the Touring series?

I don't currently want to goto the expense of putting in a custom audio system and dice-up the wiring in my civic. I've had bad experiences before both "professional" and "my buddy's-friend's-uncle" installations before. I've installed speakers myself before but that was 20 years ago and these were drop-ins that didnt require anything fancy (line conversion, processing, etc).

I see that the stock EX speakers are Pioneer branded and the Touring speakers are Foster branded. I know that the Pioneer speakers sound good, but if I were to replace them would I see a difference in quality?

Another question I have would be for the Sub Woofer option; Would I be able to add the Touring Sub?

I'm not looking for booming sound, just a better low end sound and reverb from a sub. I've seen people do the tapping of the lines from the rear speakers to send signal to a sub, but again I have to run a power line across the vehicle and I would prefer to avoid that (and keep the trunk space).

Let me know how crazy and dumb this sounds, but if you can also provide me some feed back that would be great :)

Thanks.
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josby

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I believe that physically this is doable with the mids and tweeters. That is, the mounting holes and wiring connectors are likely the same, so it should be a drop-in replacement.

One potential issue is the location of the filtering capacitor for the tweeters on the EX. That is, the Touring has a separate wire pair from its amp to each speaker, and crossovers inside the amp send the correct frequencies to each speaker. The EX's headunit does none of that - it sends out four full-range signals to each corner of the car. The wire to each corner goes to both the mid and the tweeter at that corner. Somewhere in that path should be a capacitor that filters out low frequencies from going to the tweeter to keep from blowing it. I've seen some OEM tweeters where that capacitor is actually part of the tweeter. If that's how Honda does it, the Touring tweeter's not going to have that capacitor on it, and so you will blow it unless you manually splice one into the wire going to the tweeter. But if the capacitor is on the wire going to the tweeter instead, then no problems.

One difference is the Touring amp sends 45W to each speaker, while the EX headunit only sends 45W to each pair of speakers (mid + tweeter). I don't think this will really make a difference. Double the wattage only gives you 3 dB more volume.

You won't be able to add the Touring sub. The EX headunit doesn't have an output to drive it. And adding a Touring amp isn't possible because it takes a digital input but the EX headunit doesn't have a digital output. If you put the sub in, you'd need to add your own amp to power it - basically what you've seen other people do when they've added a sub, except you'd be powering a factory sub in the rear deck instead of one in a box. I'm also not sure if your deck sheet metal has the hole cut for the sub or not. And you'd need the plastic rear deck from a Touring with the sub grill too, probably.

Will there be any benefit? I haven't listened to both back to back so I don't know. If you can find the speakers used from someone who's upgraded their Touring, it could be pretty cheap to try it. But first see if you can find someone with a Touring who will let you listen to theirs. Ask to unplug their sub before you do to compare apples to apples. It's an easy clip to disconnect temporarily.
 
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