Car Speakers Explained 

Car Speakers are arguably the most integral part of a Car Audio system. Good quality speakers can bring life to a tune, enabling you to hear new parts in a tune you may not have experienced before. Poor quality car speakers can render a great tune unlistenable.

Car speakers are mostly identical to any other loudspeaker design, with key components specialized for use in mobile environments, and generally serve an identical purpose. One major key design difference is multi-axial mounting (this means more than one speaker with the same source point) of different types of loudspeakers in the same footprint, such as a tweeter directly mounted over a mid woofer. Another key difference is non-circular cone shapes, such as square, oval, or even triangular. Both of these features reflect a significant reduction in space and size that a speaker may occupy in a vehicle cabin.

Material construction may also include more exotic and durable components more suitable to mobile use. Marine speakers may have coating for corrosion resistance. Cones may be coated with a substance to resist expansion and contraction under extreme vehicle cabin temperatures, known to reach 140 °F (60 °C) in the sun.

Before stereo radio was introduced, the most common speaker location was in the middle of the dashboard pointing through perforations towards the front windshield. In most modern applications, speakers are mounted certain common locations including the dash board, the parcel shelf, the kick panel (located in the foot-well below the A-Pillar) or the doors.

Sometimes tweeters can be located in the A-Pillars too. In the case of some higher end car audio systems, installed in luxury cars or after market systems, several speaker locations can be used at once for just the front left and right channels. In the case of subwoofers, mountings are usually under the seat or in the boot. Each position has certain strengths and limitations from both a quality of sound, stereo image and a vehicle manufacturing point of view.