A quick LED Mod to my new Exile Cabin Speakers...

[ian ashton]

I ordered 3 pairs of SX65's from Brian (Great CS by the way! He even threw in some Meguairs detailer and a chammois!!!), and I wanted to jazz em up a little bit before I installed them. At some point I'll do LED speaker rings on all 6 and my towers, but I've got so many other projects planned that one had to wait. Anyway, I was playing around on eBay and bought a bunch of different style LED strips, basically to just see what they looked like, when I came across these. So, for $16 shipped I ordered 3 sets (6 strips.)



These are a little long, so I cut them down. You just have to make sure you cut in increments of 3 LEDs to keep the circuit complete.


Before: (So Sexy!)


So all I did was wrap the LED's around the cutout area lip thing for the tweeters. The LEDs have 3m adhesive on the back, and stick pretty darn good:

[ian ashton]

LEDs wrapped all the way around:


Next I just ran the power/ground wires along the inside of the grille, and used super glue to hold them in place. The Exile grilles are awesome for this, as they've got little channels that hide the wires completely, you can not see them from the front side:


After: (Notice, you can't see the wires, OR the LED strips, they are completely concealed behind the grille, I think that adds a layer of cool-ness;


This was taken with my iPhone when I was "testing" them before I actually trimmed and secured them into place, but you get the idea. I didn't get any good pics with my real camera. This was powering with a 9V battery, not sure if that has any impact on the brightness or not, but they are defiantely pretty bright. Should look pretty sweet!



So for $16 its not a bad little upgrade. I got all the grilles finished in about 30 minutes, now I just have to get them in the boat and re-wire all of my LEDs to the new switches.

[brain_rinse]

Cool idea! The LED rings look good at night but I don't care for the frosted spacer look during the day. I like the stealth mode of this mod... nice work.

[bergermaister]

I am SO copying you when I swap out my cabin speakers in the next month or so!

Thanks for the idea. I've been wondering the best way to go about doing this.

[viking]

Nice Mod Ian. Making sure they are hidden is the bomb! I'll be interested to see how the sticky tape holds up over the next season or 2.

[ian ashton]

I also super glued them at the seams, just in case

[dusty2221]

Looks great!

Seems similar to something I've seen....

[ian ashton]

Looks great!

Seems similar to something I've seen....

You were my inspiration! Didn't you use single LEDs? Too much work for me!

[Brianinpdx]

Ian - This is pretty cool. Good job. Dont thank me for those extra goodies... Thats my warehouse guy. We are sponsored by Meguiars so we pass along the good love so to speak.

Glad you got the speakers. I like the light upgrade. Looks good and fairly easy for guys to do.

Is the rest of your boat dialed in with blue LED's?

-Brian
Exile Audio

[skiyaker]

very cool- that's enough to make me consider an LED upgrade
Ashton- did you do other upgrades or just replace the cabins? Let me know what you think of the difference in sound between you polks and the exile- I'm trying to decide whether there would be any sense in replacing the stock cabin speakers without doing a whole lot else (new amp, battery, tower speakers, etc) which I don't have the coin for right now.