Lotus Elan Central

My SE came with a Pioneer Radio CD with 45w x 4 on the facia but I could never use it with any power or bass as rear speakers were 'shot'. (Look at photo to see that's the understatement of the year).
I suspect wet carpets behind the seats hadn't helped keep the paper cone dry and I got a sound like Barry White farting when I tried just a little bit of bass.

Saw these on fleabay and thought might be suitable replacements - worth a gamble at £27 for 4. (Now £30 for 4). www.ebay.co.uk/itm/170573438410?_trksid=p2059210.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

They are 80w, so I can't blow them with the radio, and have a polypropylene water resistant cone but being designed for marine and shower-room installation only come in white...
but a can of part used Satin Black spray soon sorted that out.

Just replaced my rear speakers with 2 of them. Screw holes are exactly the same but Lotus has one small spade connector and one medium, these have 2 medium, so snipped off small, crimped on medium and job done!
The original 'square with curved edges' grills were flat but these are slightly domed so paint may get scratched but .. BOY! DO THEY SOUND GOOD

When I replaced my speakers, they also had two of the larger connectors, instead of one small and one large. I don't remember which is pos and which is neg, but I clipped the correct one on the speaker down to the proper size for the smaller connector on the wire to fit it. More than one way to skin a cat, as they say. I find that speakers are something that you can take saving money on too far. Quality is very important. I have Blaupunkt component speakers in the front and two-way Clarion speakers in the back, along with an Alpine head unit and Alpine amp in the boot. The weak link in my system is the cheap subwoofer mounted in the hood stowage area. It's on my list of things to remedy.

tweetdriver63 wrote:When I replaced my speakers, they also had two of the larger connectors, instead of one small and one large. I don't remember which is pos and which is neg, but I clipped the correct one on the speaker down to the proper size for the smaller connector on the wire to fit it. More than one way to skin a cat, as they say. I find that speakers are something that you can take saving money on too far. Quality is very important. I have Blaupunkt component speakers in the front and two-way Clarion speakers in the back, along with an Alpine head unit and Alpine amp in the boot. The weak link in my system is the cheap subwoofer mounted in the hood stowage area. It's on my list of things to remedy.

Connection of speaker is not really pos or neg critical but you need to connect them all the same way, otherwise they cancel each other out a bit on the 'antinoise' principle so handy to keep to OE convention.
Reason I posted the info about those speakers is they are cheap, durable and, most important, sound good. Took a gamble and won so thought I'd share the information.

Now I've got some decent speakers I might fit a Blaupunkt unit I've had in it's box since 2008 - it has radio & MP3 player and is really light (850gm compared to 1300gm for radio/cd player) and 50w a channel. Plays MP3 files from SD cards or smartphones and a couple of large capacity SD cards will replace all the CD's that fill the centre arm rest storage space. I bought it as I found on an overnight blast through France to get to Monaco for the GP that my CD player spat out 'The Best of the Eagles' I'd been playing repeatedly and the display came up "TOO HOT". When driving at 140+ mph I'm a bit focused on the road so my reaction wasn't well considered and I'd never seen that before - I grabbed the CD between thumb and forefinger and left burnt flesh on the CD and ruined it. Think display should say BLOODY HOT - DON'T TOUCH ! I never realised how hot the laser cd reader made the disc. This was a removable unit, rather than face off, so I pulled it out and held it out in the airflow for a few minutes to cool it off. But it spat out another not long after and needed to be on radio for a long time before it would play CD's again. No lasers involved in reading SD cards so this unit should run much cooler.

Hey Lotusflasherman, I suspect it was the heat from the amp module the caused the problem, I remember old cassette tape head units would also cause the tape to get very hot. When you think about it, the unit is trying to pump out 4 x 40W in a pretty confined space with limited air flow. The MP3 unit will still get hot, but I suspect an SD card is a littel more heat tolerant but there will still hopefully be a thermal overload protection circuit in there somewhere.

Just my 2 cents.

Fetnas wrote:Hey Lotusflasherman, I suspect it was the heat from the amp module the caused the problem, I remember old cassette tape head units would also cause the tape to get very hot. When you think about it, the unit is trying to pump out 4 x 40W in a pretty confined space with limited air flow. The MP3 unit will still get hot, but I suspect an SD card is a littel more heat tolerant but there will still hopefully be a thermal overload protection circuit in there somewhere.

Just my 2 cents.

Agree that having Volume right up for a couple of hours would have generated a lot of heat but unit was single CD player so I'd played the same CD repeatedly. It wouldn't play another (cold) CD for a while but was OK playing radio at same Volume so seemed to be CD related. Can't help that CD slot is at top of unit so sits on top of amp, and we all know heat rises. Could be the internal protection is in the disc player and gets the disc out before it softens enough to damage it - and wouldn't accept another because it was still too hot in there. The MP3 unit is just a single pcb across the base of the unit with the power transistors on a cast aluminium heatsink across the back and the rest of the box is empty. So little in there I'm wondering why they charge so much for it. The MP3 slot is upright on the RH side of the face so couldn't be further from the heat.

Just to say that I bought 4 of those speakers and have now fitted the other 2 into the doors. Needed just a slight trim of the plastic inner housing to get them in but they fit well behind the door cards.
I won't need a car wash again - just put the radio on full volume and car will shake the dirt off...

Hahaha!

But how does it sound? Or is it all just rattles

HJ2 wrote:Hahaha!

But how does it sound? Or is it all just rattles

Sounds very good to me, but my hearing is 'low-fi' not 'hi-fi'.

My door speakers were in a bad way too. The paper cones had lost the outer ring too so no wonder any bass had them all sounding like a fart. Water resistant polypropylene seems a much better idea and those were so cheap!
In an Elan with the hood down there's going to be a lot of background noise so being able to crank up the volume without distortion will be good. I've got a lot of background noise anyway as I suffer from tinnitus (permanent ringing/hissing in the ears) that's due to having such a good time many years ago. I used to watch Messrs Hendrix, Clapton & Townsend using banks of Jim Marshall's 100W amps and come away with my ears ringing for a few days; and drove very noisy race cars that had the same effect. Unfortunately that ringing is now permanent so silence is not something I enjoy. Need a bit of volume to enjoy music and they do it without any rattles or farts ...

lotusflasherman wrote:They are 80w, so I can't blow them with the radio

Yes you can & it is almost as easy as having too much power.
You can easily blow them by 'clipping'. This is when you push up the volume beyond the limits of your amplifier (or amplification stage of the head unit).

rip wrote:

lotusflasherman wrote:They are 80w, so I can't blow them with the radio

Yes you can & it is almost as easy as having too much power.
You can easily blow them by 'clipping'. This is when you push up the volume beyond the limits of your amplifier (or amplification stage of the head unit).

ermmm, No, I can't. I'm not using a guitar amplifier with 'overdrive', which is in effect controlled distortion that amplifies a sine wave so it clips the top to become a 'squarish' wave and not to rms values.
The spec for audio amplifiers like car radio is same as speakers, i.e to same parameters, so if radio is quoted as 50W output and speakers as 80W it will be OK... trust me!

Phil (Electrical Power Engineer, IEng MITE and all that bollocks that means I know what I'm talking about, usually!)

Hi just to say that speakers are positive/negative connection critical, if you don't get it right, the the cone will move forward instead of backwards.

Best Regards
Chris

chrisP wrote:Hi just to say that speakers are positive/negative connection critical, if you don't get it right, the the cone will move forward instead of backwards.

Best Regards
Chris

But doesn't really matter which is which, but very important that they are all the same, otherwise some are producing noise and others anti-noise...
Lotus speaker loom & OE speakers had different size spade connectors so impossible to get it wrong but speakers I fitted had same size so have changed them and error is now possible.
Phil

lotusflasherman wrote:

chrisP wrote:Hi just to say that speakers are positive/negative connection critical, if you don't get it right, the the cone will move forward instead of backwards.

Best Regards
Chris

But doesn't really matter which is which, but very important that they are all the same, otherwise some are producing noise and others anti-noise...
Lotus speaker loom & OE speakers had different size spade connectors so impossible to get it wrong but speakers I fitted had same size so have changed them and error is now possible.
Phil

That's why I clipped the ones on my speakers to match with the wiring harness.