Thought I pass along my experience with attempting to improve sound quality in the base Pioneer system in my 2019 ES300h. BTW the correct wire harness for the car is Metra 72-8109 which you can find for around $9/pair. I tried out Infinity Reference 3032cfx - 3.5in - both in dash corner and rear door. At least for me 4in won’t fit without some mods to the openings or rear door panel. So I installed on the passenger side and compared the sound moving the balance left to right using some music I enjoy. What I heard was slightly clearer highs but lost a lot of mids for example snare drum side hit. I was hoping for better but thought this would be the case. This systems today are eq’d to match dynamics of the interior and type of speaker. So, I’m actually happier with the stock speakers… If you want better speakers and no doubt the Infinity’s are or better performance, you really need to have a clean preamp signal and add your amp and dsp so you can tune the system like you can do with a home theater setup. At this time, I can’t find any adapter yet on market that provides a clean preamp signal (hopefully soon). Note you can do high level inputs like AuidoControl and sum inputs etc but I don’t like the results with this route but that’s me…

I was hoping for better but I thought I would pass this along. I’ve been playing in the audio area for a long time but what I feel sounds good may be different to others so always keep that in mind. I included some photos of the speakers and areas for info.

Note I was going to change the front woofers to Dayton Audio reference 8in but after being not happy with the 3.5in change, didn’t bother… but those 8in woofers are nice especially at around $70!

 

Good writeup. It looks like the weak link in this stereo is the electronics. That's unfortunate.

 

Thanks - just sharing my experience.

 

Cool. I already did the dash speakers in February of this year and posted about it =)

but good you're a first on the door speakers. want to try it but hesitant.

As far as the dash speakers, did you install bass blockers? apparently that's recommended as many in the toyota crowd have their 3" aftermarket speakers blow out in a few months. you'll notice the factory speakers have a large capacitor.

 

Did you hear a decrease in mid sound quality? No didn’t bother with bass blockers as was not satisfied with the change.

 

I just picked up a 2nd 2021 ES over the weekend and I'm going to do dash speakers. debating on doing the bass blockers (they came with them)

Without the bass blockers though on my old car, it sounded great. but the bass of the woofers/sub could've been drowning out any "bass" from the dash speakers. Our amps could be filtering out the bass anyway which i wouldn't doubt based on the amp schematics. Our amps appear to take one input from the HU for the front and splits it post amp to the woofers and dash speakers.

the blown speakers from the toyota crowd could be driven solely from the HU which i'd understand.

 

yeah agree that the dash and rear doors probably have been crossover’d.

 

Why did you do that?

Edit: OK, nevermind. I just read your post in the other