While really like the Mazdas I have had, my first was a 2014 Mazda 6 with the Bose premium sound. It is now my daughter’s car and she recently complained of the bass rattling in the front door. Was not really a Bose hater until this (but hoping Mazda reconsiders their vendor choice). After some hunting online, this appears to be a known problem and has to do with moisture exposure. Here is picture of the woofer mounted in the door:
After popping the door panel, my initial reaction was that is one strange looking woofer. It has a number of unusual properties as I soon discovered. It is a premium paper speaker with a screen on this side and is 1 ohm. So forget about finding a drop-in aftermarket replacement. Removing it from the door revealed another oddity and why it has failed...
As you can now see the spider is on the opposite side of the voice coil. Somewhat less obvious (not original pic), is that it is half delaminated from the frame. So know I know the source of the rattle. I checked with Mazda dealer and a replacement part is $300. At this point, as a clear design issue, I appealed to the service manager for some relief and was told they needed to see the car. This was not convenient at the time and will not get into lengthy details, so I got my speaker glue and repaired...
Not wanting to have to repair again, starting looking into root cause and how to prevent recurrence. The driver is mounted in a shroud so they had considered how to shield from exposure. The problem appears to be when the window is fully down, the lower edge is below the shroud. I had some dacron damping liner, so here is my solution:
As you can see (pic is back side of shroud), cut dacron to fit and gorilla taped it to the top edge of the shroud. The woofer excursion did not appear to touch the liner and any moisture will (hopefully) evaporate in the liner rather than on the driver spider. Expect the tape may loosen eventually, but was really just done to hold liner in place while reinstalling. For now, it seems to be an improvement...
So far, this fix has held up well and recently applied the same fixes to the other driver as the issue occurred in the other door as well. My latest Mazda is a CX-9 and it was bought without the Bose option and sounds pretty good. At least I know I did not give Bose any more money for a marginal design that forced you to buy their replacement part.
After popping the door panel, my initial reaction was that is one strange looking woofer. It has a number of unusual properties as I soon discovered. It is a premium paper speaker with a screen on this side and is 1 ohm. So forget about finding a drop-in aftermarket replacement. Removing it from the door revealed another oddity and why it has failed...
As you can now see the spider is on the opposite side of the voice coil. Somewhat less obvious (not original pic), is that it is half delaminated from the frame. So know I know the source of the rattle. I checked with Mazda dealer and a replacement part is $300. At this point, as a clear design issue, I appealed to the service manager for some relief and was told they needed to see the car. This was not convenient at the time and will not get into lengthy details, so I got my speaker glue and repaired...
Not wanting to have to repair again, starting looking into root cause and how to prevent recurrence. The driver is mounted in a shroud so they had considered how to shield from exposure. The problem appears to be when the window is fully down, the lower edge is below the shroud. I had some dacron damping liner, so here is my solution:
As you can see (pic is back side of shroud), cut dacron to fit and gorilla taped it to the top edge of the shroud. The woofer excursion did not appear to touch the liner and any moisture will (hopefully) evaporate in the liner rather than on the driver spider. Expect the tape may loosen eventually, but was really just done to hold liner in place while reinstalling. For now, it seems to be an improvement...
So far, this fix has held up well and recently applied the same fixes to the other driver as the issue occurred in the other door as well. My latest Mazda is a CX-9 and it was bought without the Bose option and sounds pretty good. At least I know I did not give Bose any more money for a marginal design that forced you to buy their replacement part.
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