It was embarrassing

Morgan, like most high schoolers, didn’t particularly enjoy getting stuck driving the family minivan. Luckily, she’s the daughter of Charlie, one of our car A/V editors. He told us that she’d at least be able to tolerate the van if it sounded better and gave her a place to plug in her iPhone®.

A minivan isn’t a place you’d normally think of to put in a rockin’ aftermarket sound system, but sometimes it’s better for family harmony to just go ahead and spoil the teenager a little. Besides, Mom and Dad will get to enjoy their music better when they drive it on family excursions.

Kenwood to the rescue

Thanks to Kenwood, we were able to overhaul the system entirely, installing a new DVD receiver, component speakers up front, full-range speakers in the rear, a subwoofer, and a 5-channel amp. Three of us writers jumped in and installed everything in one day. It turned out awesome — the sound is amazing, filling the van with bass, clearing up the vocals with the new tweeters, and overall, adding excitement to the music.

We did this installation a couple of years ago, but here are the relevant links to current Kenwood products: 

• DVD/touchscreen receivers
• component speaker systems
• full-range speakers
• component subwoofers
• amplifiers

Better tweeter placement

The Sienna came with factory tweeters mounted in the corners of the dash by the windshield, but we mounted the new tweeters closer to the woofers on the door by cutting holes in the sail panels. This makes the stereo image, the “picture” the speakers make of the instruments’ positions on an imaginary stage, sound stronger and more realistic than when the tweeters are mounted farther away from their woofers. We bypassed the old tweeters so we wouldn’t get too much high end, especially echoing off the windshield.

The rest of the installation

Thanks to Crutchfield’s vehicle selector and MasterSheet instructions, most of the equipment went in easily. We found the perfect spots for the front speaker component crossovers inside the door panels, on a little shelf below the armrests. They are actually accessible without having to take off the door panels, in case crossover adjustments need to be made later.

The only hitch in our installation involved the mid-rear side panel speakers. The hole pattern in the Sienna’s speaker bracket didn’t quite match our speaker and bracket assembly, so we had to do some finagling with different mounting screws and how they were angled.

The family wagon gets its rock on

The results exceeded everyone’s expectations — especially Morgan’s. She and her younger sister now often just sit in the van in the driveway and crank it up. When Charlie heard it, he considered reclaiming the van for his daily commute. But there’s no way that Morgan’s about to give up her new favorite place to listen to music.

If you want to make your teenager's hand-me down a bit more cool, use our vehicle selector to find out what fits and contact our advisors (many of whom have teens of their own) for further advice and ideas.