Hey guys, not new to the forum, was on a while ago when I had my Sportster. I have tried Youtube and the forums and can't really find an exact answer to my specific issue.
I'll try to be as thorough as possible to avoid any confusion. Last year I bought a used 2014 Street Glide Special, the salesman was telling me about boom upgrades already done but I didn't really pay much attention, just wanted to get out and ride it. This is/was my first ride with any radio/infotainment at all; that being said, I recently received some aftermarket lower fairings with speakers and pods and was trying to find out how to wire them in.

What I currently have now is the Boom Stage II
76000277 Amp is in the front fairing 75W x4
76000524A Batwing Fairing speakers
I believe 76000745, I have saddlebag speakers and there is another AMP in my left saddlebag, I can't see the part number though.

I did not put any of the audio equipment in, it was already there, so I have found most things related to how to run the wiring, either the highway bars, internal/external and such. What I am trying to find out is how/where am I putting the wires themselves for the lower fairing speakers??
I'm not looking to upgrade anything right now, the speakers in the aftermarket lowers are from what I have been told:
Impedance: 4Ω
Frequency Range: 45HZ-22kHZ
Output: 60W-120W
Sensitivity: 92dB

Am I splicing into something? Series/Parallel? Should I be going into the front or the rear existing wires? Do I need to purchase any other equipment to get these in and working? The harness that comes off of the fairing AMP has stuff going everywhere, and a lot of the bundles are numbered, but I have no instructions or manuals that tells me what is going where.
I have 16G wire, all sorts of connectors, I just really don't know if there is some wiring coming off the existing harness somewhere I should be looking for, or if I physically need to cut and splice into something, and I didn't want to just start cutting until I talked to someone who actually knows about this stuff.
I'm handy when it comes to the mechanical aspect of things, but I admit this audio stuff is throwing me off. I feel like with the right explanation I should be able to figure this out. If anyone can explain it like I am five I won't take offense.

Thanks in advance.. Scott.

 

My take is you have two 2 channel amps. Front and rears. Ideally I would add an amp for the lowers. Other wise tap into the fronts left front upper and lower on one channel. Right upper and lower on the other channel. Problems. Not sure if you can do this with mixed speakers. Your Harley speakers are 2 ohm. You listed 4 ohm as the new ones. Someone will chime in I'm sure.
My understanding is also Boom systems limit your options. As well as not as much Boom for your buck so to speak. $$$. You are kinda tied to that system. So look at Harley options for lowers or start clean? Ride safe

 

Budda109, thank you for the reply. I appreciate the assistance, I went ahead and looked at the front fairing amp again, it says 75W x 4, to me that would suggest 4 channels? Then I would guess a 2 channel for the saddlebag speakers? The ohm issue you mentioned does give me pause for concern though. I wish there was more info on this to be found online, just not finding everything in one area, finding little bits here and there.

 

The Boom system is 2 ohm. As far as I understand it you will not be able to use your aftermarket speakers with the current set up. If you want to keep the rest of the Boom system, maybe find some Boom 6.5s for sale and use those?

 

Using 4 ohm speakers on the 2 Ohm Boom system should not hurt the speakers or the head unit. Having a higher resistance load, your head unit will produce somewhat less power than it will running into a lower resistance 2 Ohm load. If you wanted to double the number of speakers you were running, you could connect two 4 Ohm speakers in parallel and the resistance is halved...to 2 Ohms.

I used to run a subwoofer box in my car this way. With a 4 ohm load, my amp would produce 450 watts; but by wiring in parallel so the resistance was reduced to 2 Ohm, I could get 800 watts.

If you go up in resistance from 2 ohm to 4 ohm, you reduce the power output and heat of your amplifier whether a separate unit or built into the head unit. So the real danger is only when you run 2 ohm loads on units that are only rated for 4 or more; in which case your amp will get very hot. The older HD audio systems used stupid 8 Ohm speakers. J&M audio and Hogtunes came out with a set of 6 ohm speakers for those older models to get a little more oomph out of the stock head unit while not cooking it. I had some friends that managed to get by for a while with 4 ohm car stereo speakers...but eventually that burned out their head unit and they replaced with aftermarket options.

Sweeney: If you haven't already got speakers in your fairing lowers, there shouldn't be any wires from your amp or stereo going to there. I suspect you'll have to run wires from your four channel amp out the bottom of your fairing and along the crash bar into your fairing lowers; unless by chance the latest model bikes are coming pre-wired for fairing lower speakers. This is what I just had to do to install speaker pods in my fairing lowers; which run off a Rockford Fosgate 300 watt four channel amp. If all your wiring is caught up in a wiring bundle, try Googling your year/model bike's wiring diagram and find the color of wires coming out of the amp for speakers.

https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C...10.7QL-82g-tEk

 

You're asking for trouble if you go this route. Your 4channel amp is pushing the woofers on 2ch and the tweeters on 2ch. If you parallel the 2ohm speakers on the bike with 4ohm speakers in the lowers, you will drop your resistance to 1.33 ohms and the end result will show you some magic smoke.

 

Thanks guys for all the replies, it's been enlightening to say the least. I think I'm going to bag the 4 ohm speakers and just get a set that is 2 ohm.

SeaHag: You are exactly right, I had to run the wires, which I did from behind the highway bars into the fairing. And yes, everything is all bundled up. Is it your suggestion that I tie directly into the wires from the amp itself? I can clearly get to and see the wires going into the upper fairing speakers, so don't tie into those? Also, would I be better off running these in series or parallel. Thanks again for the insight.

 

I think you are kind of stuck for options with the Boom Audio and trying to integrate into it with aftermarket gear.

Others with more experience here might chime in.

Looking on line, your system is a bi-amped 3 way system. midrange 6.5 on 2 channels and mid/tweeter combo on 2 channels.

I imagine there is fixed x-over settings in that amp for the 3 way system which would mean you are limited to changes to it. That being said, according to the HD web site, your 2 - 6.5 booms should be a 2 ohm midrange driver. If that is the case, you might be able to consider replacing your factory midrange driver with a 4 ohm mid range driver and put another 6.5" x 4 ohm midrange driver in the lowers. On paper it should work, just don't know how it would sound or if you would have enough power to do any of it any justice for volume. Not sure, but I suspect there is some weird frequency/eq settings in your boom audio and HD head unit that might cause grief on sound quality.

In the end, I suspect you will still not be happy and end up wanting to upgrade anyways. You could hold off until you can swing adding a bit more aftermarket gear. Aka, better amp and speakers.

HD does not like to make it easy to play nice with their gear, and are trying to make it harder all of the time.

 

Sweeny in my understanding there just is no cheap way to do what you want to do RIGHT.

Realistically you have two options:

1) Pay through the nose for the Harley branded speakers AND amp to run them and have just OK sound that will leave you wanting more. Also from what other folks have told me the bikes around your year were bad about blowing factory speakers due to the Harley EQ curve.
2) Rip out the Boom amps and speakers and start from scratch. Use a couple of BikeTronics line levelers of you want to keep things simple or maybe an Arc PSM DSP since you will be looking at six channels and they are already pre-programmed to work with the Boom Box head unit.

Like a lot of us I tried to work with the Boom crap at first but just ran into a brick wall at every turn. The only component I kept was the head unit, everything else got ripped out. With your bike you could easily hide two amps and a DSP if you went that route in your fairing and ditch the stock amp in your saddlebag regaining that space.

Good luck.

 

I believe Bluesman is correct in his suggestion here. Knowing now how they bi amped the midrange drivers and tweeters, I see all your line outs are in use. So if you tap into either of those feeds, you will be running in parallel and cutting your resistance. So if you want to avoid buying more amps, you'll need to buy a 4 ohm set of mid range drivers for the dash. Get matching speakers to the ones you're buying for the lowers and their tone should match up well enough.