Featured Subwoofer wiring - low volume (help!)

[Lex08]

Hello, If someone could please point me in the right direction that would be awesome.

So, I have a 2013 RX350 and the factory trunk subwoofer started rattling. I thought it may have been blown so decided to buy a new one. I checked Crutchfield and chose the Pioneer TS-A2000LD2. I took out my old subwoofer (side note - I expected to see a blown speaker but it actually looked in tact).

The problem I'm having is my old subwoofer had two wires and a plug which plugged into the subwoofer. The new subwoofer has four pos/neg terminals (two on each side).

I've never worked on car audio (just old house speakers growing up). I figured I would splice the wires (not removing the plug just yet) and see if I can find the correct combination. No matter the combination I choose the sound out of the new subwoofer is a loooooooooow muffle of base (barely hear it) - and when I increase the volume the sound system abruptly shuts off. I have to restart the car for the audio to work.

What am I missing? I bought new speaker wire and tried all different combination to the new sub (parallel and series). Is there not enough power? How does it work when you have a subwoofer which was a plug but now requires just wires?

Can anyone let me know what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks in advance!!!

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[mahc 10+ year member]

You should always find out what happened to a defective driver before replacing it or else this most likely will happen again. Sounds to me like your factory amp is the problem. Use a multimeter to see what readings your factory sub gives.

 

[RobGMN Premium Member]

Looks like you are replacing a single voice coil driver with a dual voice coil unit.
You're basically running your 8 cylinder engine on 4 cylinders right now.

You can either hook up both coils in parallel, or in series. Your goal being to match the impedance of the original speaker. In parallel will effectively halve the impedance of each driver; in series will double it (not exact, but close enough).

Does it have any markings on it? Someone else here may know the factory specs of that driver and be able to chime in.

Safest guess is is that the original is 4ohms (the old "standard" in car audio), so you'll want to wire both voice coils in series to get ~4ohms.