Adding Speakers

Ok. I have a '96 XJ 2 door. It did not come with the rear sound bar or rear hatch speakers. I want to add some to the hatch. What is the simplest way to wire these to the head unit. I have an aftermarket Pioneer deck.

I looked and did not see a wiring harness for the speakers so I assume I will have to run the wires myself, which is not a problem.

Brian

If you have rear wiper/defog, there should be a flexible conduit running from the liftgate to the upper hatch frame - run your speaker wire through there.

Run 12 or 14 gage - if you don't, you'll probalby be doing this again when you upgrade speakers and add an amp later (if you're willing to do this much work, I'm taking it as a possiblilty. Besides, I just hate doing a job twice!)

You should be able to pull the wiring through the flex tube, then get it down the passenger doorsill just by pulling trim panels and leaving the headliner in place. Why the passenger side? No power lines - just a clean run. The turn signals, brake lights, and other things that are likely to flash run down the driver's side, and you may pick up some "click" from your lighting there (I've noted it with cheaper setups.)

From there, you can figure out the best way to get the wiring to the back of the head unit. I shall also leave speaker mounting as an exercise for the apt pupil - but if you're going to do this to expand your low-end sound, I'd suggest using rubber "well nuts" to mount the speaker - the offer the additional advantage of cutting down on the speaker housing vibrating against the liftgate shell. Do the same thing up front - I've found high frequency rattle to be quite irritating...

I've also found small bits of heat-shrink tubing useful for projects like this - colour-coding the ends of the wire pairs makes it easier to keep track of what went where...

5-90

IMO the easiest way is to find a sound bar. I wanted to put some speakers into my hatch and ended up buying the sound bar. I was in a hurry and didn't want to run the wiring into the hatch, so the bar worked great. They're really easy to install and if you can find one in a junkyard, they're usually pretty cheap. Even from the dealership (if they still have any left) they aren't too expensive. I got mine from the dealership, then found one in a junkyard a month later...

The stock wiring for the rear speakers terminates behind the panel with the spare tire if you want to use that. Pull off the panel and it's plug and play, really easy. In my case I already had speaker wire run up the passengers side of the headliner (like 5-90 mentioned, no wiring on that side-I just went along the headliner instead of the door sills), so I just spliced that into the bar's wiring harness. My bar is also mounted in front of the seat belt mounts instead of behind. Where I usually have a lot of stuff in the back anyway, having the speakers high helps keep them from getting blocked or damaged.

Good luck!