I'm having some issues with my driver's side door speaker not always working. There's always sound coming out of it, but you can only hear it if you adjust the balance so that all the sound goes to the left, but even then the volume it's producing is not as loud as it should be (I'll put volume on 20, speaker sounds like it's on 2). On hot days (90+ degrees) the speaker will sometimes work at 100%, but hitting a bump in the road will usually turn it back off.

A couple people have told me it is probably the speaker wire so I took the speaker out and cleaned off the connections as well as stripping some of the wire so that it could make as clean of a connection as possible but that did nothing except waste an hour of my life. I also cleaned the connections of some box looking thing inside the door panel that had all the wires connected to it (it was clear, had a bunch of connections on it, and had two rolls of copper wire and a big fuse inside it ).

So at this point I'm stumped, if the speaker will work every once in a while, the speaker wouldn't be busted would it? And what other connections could there be? The only two wires I saw leading to the speaker were the ones between the clear box thing and the speaker itself. Anyone got any ideas? I'm going to be selling the car within the next 2-3 months, so temporary solutions are also welcome haha. Thanks.

 

You didn't mention the car had after-market speakers, but maybe you didn't realize that. The clear box thingy is the cross-over, which is not stock. Also, the factory speakers have a plug-in connector so you couldn't have cleaned the wires.

My guess is the speaker itself is bad, which is easy to verify by swapping it with the one in the passenger door. And yes, it is very common for a bad speaker to "sometimes work". Usually what goes bad are the tiny lead wires that go from the terminals (where the wire connects) to the voice coil inside the speaker. Those wires are constantly flexing as the speaker cone moves and they can sometimes break and just barely touch each other. But a bump can make them connect better, or worse, causing the intermittent issue.

My second guess would be the cross-over, which could also be swapped, but since it has no moving parts it's less likely. If you have the stock speakers you could try putting one of those back in, but I'm guessing you don't.