tax refund came in so i purchased a new stereo i had my eyes on for a while. yesterday i do my install, and have appropriate harnesses and what not. i have good sound from what i thought was all the speakers. i was messing with the stereo and hit a rear speaker shut off mode. thats when i noticed my front speakers were performing very poorly. they sounded like a pair of headphones that were really loud. my speakers barely put out any sound. mainly just very high highs. and are distorting horribly. i tried all options thru the stereo with no luck. called tech support for my modules for the car, and they informed me that the speakers dont go through their module, and that the issue with be with the cars harness itself. i switched wiring from front to back, and the fronts still perform poorly when rears are hooked to front. so its not a stereo issue. so for my own piece of mind, i hooked up the stock deck again. and it does the same thing. rears sound awesome, fronts are still sounding like headphone speakers. i tried wiggling all the wires in the car harness searching for maybe a broken wire or bent terminal. but cant get anything more.
what else should i look at? i guess long term i could run my own wires to the door speakers, but that involves alot of labor for this issue. is this a common issue? is there something i can look for my car does not have the upgraded factory system with amp. so i can eliminate that as well.
any help or info would be appreciated.

 

Could be an impedance mismatch - would need speakers that the head unit specifies. 4 ohm, 8 ohm, etc.

Bypassing the car's wiring would confirm the speakers are bad, but both?

Sounds (ha ha - sound) like the fronts are being fed through a crossover. I'd pull the door panel and test bypassing the crossover.

 

I installed the stereo, and left stock speakers. And being as my car doesn't have the premium stereo from factory, it should have the 4ohm speakers from factory, which is what the new headunit puts out.
i tried searching the web with no luck on my problem. Wiggled wires all with no luck. So I bit the bullet and tore into the doors. I hate pulling door panels as the switches are a pain to unplug on this car. But I got the panels off. Turned stereo on, and it only had factory tweeters working. Which a 1 inch tweeter wired for highs only isn't gonna put much out for sound. Just the insane highs I mentioned in the original post. I hooked up a speaker I had sitting on my shelf, and it worked fine. So some how I blew the actual speaker on both doors. So I went ahead and wired in the aftermarket speaker into the factory wiring. And now this sounds awesome.
The stereo from factory always was too quiet for my taste. I was gonna do a full system install including deck, sub, and a 2nd amp for the car speakers. But I won't need to do that now as this headunit woke the sound of the car up. I still plan on adding a sub, and will be replacing the rear deck speakers too.
But my issues with this are over. Took maybe an hour total for disassembly and install.

 

Great that the mystery is solved. I live with the factory set up - mine has the amp under the rear deck and a multi disk mp3 headunit so it does the job on commutes.

 

I liked the factory headunit. 6 disc CD changer, and aux port. But it was too quiet.
new deck is am/FM, CD/DVD, Bluetooth,USB, GPS. So it was quite the upgrade.
Its so loud I can't turn it all the way up, like I could with the factory deck.