Daimler Door Speakers

In order to change the door mirrors on my Daimler Double-Six, I had the front door cards off.  This seemed like a good time to replace the speakers, which are in the doors.  The car is fitted with an early 2000s era Pioneer CD player, connected to the original speakers.

However, only one and a half of them is working, and the Pioneer is on its last legs.  While the car would have been fitted with a power antenna when new, that is long gone and there is no antenna at all.  That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if I could play music through my phone, but the Pioneer only plays CDs, and the mechanism doesn’t work properly as it takes many attempts to get it to load or eject a CD.   At least the one CD that is stuck in there is a David Bowie CD.  It could have been a lot worse.

I don’t like how the Pioneer looks in the dash, so I have a Radiomobile 8 track, converted to Bluetooth to put in its place.   The Radiomobile 8 Track was standard on the Vanden Plas.

Changing the speakers first will allow me to verify they are working correctly before doing the radio.

The car has four door speakers, each integrated into the door pocket.  The door pocket is actually separate from the main door card, and is screwed on separately.  It was quite easy to remove them, and see the speaker.  Turns out it was a regular 4″ speaker, with a standard mounting.   To remove the old one, a 1/4″ deep socket was required.  I didn’t have one, and neither did my local bunnings so I had to order one online.

I had a set of focal 4″ speakers that I had ordered for my 450SLC.  They turned out to be too deep for the application and were still sitting on the shelf.   The fit perfectly, so I ordered another set.  I had a set of the Auditor RCX-100.  Those had been replaced with the ACX-100, but the specs were pretty much identical.   I used the newer ones in the front.   The original ones were ELAC and made in the UK, so almost certainly original.

The fronts went on quickly as I already had the door cards off.  The rears didn’t take a whole lot longer, and given those backing boards were also not great, it made sense to have all four repaired.

With four new speakers installed, David Bowie sounded pretty good in the car.