Honda Door Speaker Swap. CR-Z, Civic, Fit/Jazz

This is to show you how to use the factory speakers in your Honda to make spacers for new speakers while maintaining window function. This is primarily for the CR-Z, but most Honda's use the same speakers. I was cautioned that without spacers, I would have to purchase shallow speakers or use a spacer. Most non-specific spacers do not fit inside the door panel, so I destroyed my factory speakers to make spacers out of them.

Here is what you need if you want to go through with this.

• 2 Honda factory speakers (one for each door or rear side panel)
• 2 new 6.5" speakers with a depth of 2.2" or less (I used Cerwin Vega XED650C speakers, since I know the brand to be good and they're not expensive)
• wire cutters
• a box cutter, razor, or sharp knife
• gloves
• face shield or eye protection
• bench or angle grinder
• drill
• screws
• mounting tape
• wire crimpers and connectors
• instructions on door panel removal (for the CR-Z, this can be found by searching door handle replacement on YouTube and probably a few other places)

Destroy your stock speaker. This was easy for me since the first one no longer worked. If you find that you have Bose speakers from the factory, I would personally not recommend not doing any of this. If they are higher end speakers they will not look as cheap as the one pictured.

• Note: only do this to one speaker, come back and do the other after a depth check in step 3 if you have a model like the CR-Z where incorrect speaker depth can cause the window not to roll down. Alternately, you can measure the old speaker before cutting it.
• Cut the plastic speaker basket with wire cutters as close to the center ring as you can, you will also have to cut the electrical attachments at the bottom. Eye protection is recommended since the plastic can shoot off at you.
• Second, cut the speaker cone away from the built in spacer with a razor, box cutter, or sharp knife.

Now you'll need to pull out your bench or angle grinder, gloves, and face shield to grind down the sides of the new speaker.

• Slowly and carefully grind the outer edge of the speaker mount on your new speakers stopping every so often to check to see if the mount fits into the inner lip of the old speaker's spacer. This will take longer than you'd think.
• Once you determine that it fits you will need to mount the new speaker inside the spacer left from the stock speaker's spacer
• I chose to drill and screw the new speaker in place, but mounting tape may be fine. I just hate taking my door panels off, so I wanted to make sure it stayed in pace. (note, my screws are asymmetrical only because I didn't drill one of the wholes straight the first time, and no-one can see it in the door panel)

If you have a model that requires a shallow speaker depth to not interfere with window operation, please check the depth of your new speaker to the depth of the old one for the other door. If the depth is too much, use washers or some other method to make up the difference.

At this point you will need to wire your new speakers with wire cutters, crimp connections and new wire ends. I'm not covering that here since you likely already know that or can find the info elsewhere easily. Your new speakers will likely come with attachment cables for the + and - terminals on the back of your new speakers. Hopefully the clips on the base of your old speaker's spacer are intact and you still have the screw and backing plate intact for the top, if not, here is where the mounting tape comes in.

*Note, while I did purchase component speakers, I found that the tweeters the previous owner installed were better quality than the ones that came in my set, so I left them alone. This is likely the reason one of my speakers was blown. It seems that the previous owner of my car installed upgraded speakers and chose to go back to factory before trading in or selling the car. I hope this was useful. If this doesn't appeal to you, I think you can order adapting kits shipped from China. Not sure if you'd still need to trim the new speakers with those as well though. I didn't go that route because of shipping time, and having one speaker out was driving me crazy.