How to Protect Car-Door Speakers from Water-Damage?

Okay, so you managed to get some nice new speakers installed in your car and then there was a rainstorm. Soon you noticed slight hiss and noise coming from the speakers and then, poof, there is no more music coming out of the speakers. This has happened to me in the past and from then onwards i always make arrangements to keep my speakers water proof. I will be explaining this in a while.

Lets first see what causes the speakers to stop working. This usually happens when the weather stripping on your car is old and it lets too  much water in or the drain holes on the bottom of your car's door are clogged up and water keeps accumulating inside. What happens is the water manages its way to the speakers that are mounted on the inner metal wall of the car doors and soon it causes shorts and the speaker's voice coil destroys itself.

But this should not keep you away from getting nice sounding and fancy speakers. You can avoid this common problem in two ways.

1) Buy marine speakers in the first place. This avoids water damage as those speakers are designed to work in wet environments. 

2) Make arrangements to protect your speakers from water by keeping water away from them.

You know how water makes it way to the speakers. So now, we should make a shield or a covering surface that should protect the speakers by directing the water around the speakers and not letting it no splash onto them. This can be done in a number of ways but the basics are same.

1) Get those speakers baffles (you can get some made by METRA and they are pretty cheap) and mount them around the backside of your speakers. This totally weather seals the speakers keeping the elements away but there is a downside to this approach; BAD SOUND QUALITY.  Speakers usually need a certain amount of airspace behind them to reproduce sound effectively. Using totally sealed foam speaker baffles will affect the sound quality much and the mid-bass response will be reduced too much.

2) Cut the backside of the foam speaker baffles providing the speakers with appropriate airspace and yet keeping water off them. However, this is not my favourite way to do it. As the foam baffles are pretty much flimsy and if you are running a bit powerful speakers, they will vibrate giving off noise and decreasing the sound quality.

3) My favourite way to do this is to use dynamat or any other sound deadening material and making a cylindrical shape out of it. Then I would mount the material around the speaker giving it adequate airspace while the water manages to flow around all the way to bottom of the door and out. The advantage with this approach is that dynamat is thick and wont vibrate at high volume when speakers are at high excursion levels. Plus, unlike foam baffles, dynamat wont deteriorate over time and stays in place. You can see detailed installation using this procedure in my video below.

I did the same thing in my previous car and the speakers lasted well over 3 years until I sold that car. They would probably be working still as well if the new owner had not replaced them. :)