Morel Maximo Speakers & Regulator Maintenance

While I have been steadily trimming the fat from my RX-7 with intentions to “refine” it into a pure sports car, there is one feature that won’t be going anywhere: the stereo system!

Unfortunately, given that this car is 2 decades old now, the stock system is very lacking. The Pioneer headunit I installed did appreciate the quality by offering a boost in amps, but there was still room for improvement. With the rear speakers removed, the entire soundstage pivoted on just the pair of door speakers, and in a way, they created a bottleneck. My goal was to do a simple upgrade, I didn’t want to get carried away and run new wiring or add an external amplifier. Updating the door speakers would be sufficient for my needs. Although having a nice stereo system is important, it still plays a more secondary role in respect to the car’s overall scheme and focus. A quadruple-digit wattage setup is more fitting in a daily, or the like.

I had to hold myself back even further when it came time to shop for a new set of speakers. Instinctively, I started my search with high-end coaxial speakers before realizing the folly. Buying expensive speakers to be powered off of factory wiring and only a head unit would be the epitome of overkill. After more careful researching, I settled on the Morel Maximo 6.5″ coaxials. The Maximos are actually Morel’s entry level speakers, so you can imagine the amount of self-control required for me to make this choice (lol). Regardless, these are still relatively midrange and reviews on their quality have been abundantly praiseful. I favored the Maximos namely because of their good sensitivity rating (90.5db) versus other alternatives I was weighing. Sensitivity is correlated with a speaker’s efficiency. The higher the efficiency, the better the speaker is able to convert electrical watts into acoustical watts – which is especially important when you’re foregoing an external amplifier.

Here’s what the larger, 6.5″ Morel looks like next to an old, stock speaker.

To mount the speakers into the door, I bought a pair of these PVC adapters from an elusive vendor.

I say elusive because the seller has been known to ignore communications and not ship people their orders. I was lucky on my first order and received the adapters in a timely fashion. I later bought the same adapters again to have as spares and to modify, but I haven’t heard or received anything in weeks…

The adapters fit decently, but the casing on the Maximos are slightly oversized so they do not sit perfectly flush inside the rings. I may decide to make my own adapters in the future, but unless the PVC adapters vibrate or cause an issue, there is no urgency to perfect them.

Since I had the door panels off for the speaker install, I also removed my driver-side window and then the regulator for servicing.

With the regulator on my workbench, I cleaned and regreased all the cabling and tracks.

I noticed previously that the driver-side window moved a little slower than the passenger-side, so this will help everything slide more smoothly and hopefully enable the window to move up and down faster.