Hey guys/gals

I have know very little on electronical terminology and knowledge ( I still think electricity is witch craft )
Anyways, my speakers blew out(MY 00) so I went a head and removed my door panels and continued to remove my speakers.

My speakers had four wires running to the back of it. They were simply removed and the process of purchasing a new one to replace it began. The only problem is that the new one I purchased only had two prong thingys for me to plug the wires into. This created sound that was similar to really loud head phones. I returned it to best buy and asked them for something with four prongs or plug ins. They had no clue what I was talking about....................

Can anyone please assist me on this?

 

Ok, so I feel compelled to explain a bit about how speakers work in a nontechnical way to expose that it's not a mystery!

On a simple level, a speaker is an electromagnet, so it's a chunk of metal that turns into a magnet only when you are actively feeding it electricity. To get sound, which is really just vibrations at different cyclic speeds, you feed the electromagnet pulses of electricity, so it produces pulses of magnetic force that move the speaker to produce pulses of vibration, or sound.

To get electricity to move through something, it has to go in and come out. That's what the (+) and (-) denote. Electricity flows across those two and completes a circuit. (IIRC it always flows from (-) to (+), but it's never mattered to me so I might have that backwards.) It really wants to move from (+) to (-), so it can be harnessed to do work--in a way, you can think of it like water turns a water mill.

The reason they are looking at you funny at Best Buy is because for a speaker to work, you should only need two wires, a (+) and a (-) wire. If you have more wires than that, I would suspect they have two speaker inputs at the same location. The new speakers will most likely not have 4 input wires, but 2 only. There's nothing wrong with that itself. Sounding like garbage is a problem though, so there might be something else wrong.

Can you take a picture of what you're talking about? The four wires, the new speakers, and how you have them connected?

 

What speakers are you replacing? what color are the wires (just curious)

 

Sounds like your old speaker had an external crossover, which sends the high frequencies to the tweeter and the low frequencies to the woofer. That's why there are 4 wires. You probably hooked up the wires for the tweeter to your new speaker and it only played the high frequencies; that's why it sounded like headphones from afar. While you may be able to find a replacement speaker with separate tweeter and woofer inputs, chances are it won't be matched to the crossover you already have. If you're lucky the crossover is already mounted in the door and easy to find. If you can trace the 4 wires to a box on the door, remove that box, discard those 4 wires and use the 2 remaining wires that run from that box (they should run into the door's/car's wiring) and connect those 2 wires to your speaker.

If you can't find where those 4 wires go, since you admittedly don't know too much about these things, I think you'd be best off just taking your car to Best Buy or whatever and having them locate the crossover, removing it and replacing the speakers.

 

Tell us what's installed in the car currently. Newer cars would have door tweeters seperate from the woofers in the door, and it's possible (I never had a 00/01) that it's prewired for that, and thus, has four wires in the door woofer plug (two are input, two go to the tweeter). It should not have that setup for an 00/01, but I'm not 100% sure how the factory wires were on those years.

If you have aftermarket gear, than you likely have a passive crossover, but that wouldn't make sense to have the four wires at the main plug. Perhaps a previous owner installed factory tweeters from a later MY?

Also, what speakers were you putting in? Pics and more information would help out.