'08 IS350 w/o ML rear subwoofer blew. Replace with stock or upgrade?
 

Sadly, the subwoofer on my 2008 Lexus IS350 blew a couple of days ago, so it is time to get a new one. Now the question is do I replace with a stock subwoofer or get an aftermarket one? I would prefer to get have a sub that would fit where the stock sub did and I have heard that there are aftermarket subs that will fit in there. I am not trying to spend crazy amounts of money on this either.

hey, its possible that a paper ring's glue lost its flexibility. Its maybe possible to repair. I have the same issue, if I give bunch of bass for the ML sub, it starts giving cracking sound like something would be on the membrane. Short fix: reduce sub :D
However I haven't fixed mine yet but seen others here who were able to. New was something around 4-500 EUR.

For the ease of getting it back up, check to see what went wrong. Sometimes it's just the surround foam material that went out. Those can usually be repaired. Or locate a used subwoofer from your local junkyard/ebay

I will definitely look into that. Thanks!

Maybe it was over driven? even if voice coil is cooked it's possible to have it rebuilt. When amp. does not have enough dynamic capacity and over driven, that's what happens.
This is called amp output clipping which will cause damage to speaker or amp. If one wants loud volume with marginal amp, better look for high SPL speaker.

My ML sub blew out so i bought a new one which blew out within a week...I ended up just getting one of these. It took up some trunk space but couldn't find any other options that i could use with the stock ML amp.

https://smile.amazon.com/Bazooka-BT8...ass+8%22+8+ohm

I thought I saw somewhere that the oem base speaker is 2.0 ohm or something way low.

If true, that 8 ohm speaker will over heat the base channel in the amp.

Can someone confirm?

Higher Impedance load draw less current so less chance of over heating. 2 Ohm load draws lot more current than 8 Ohm.
Simple Ohm's law is all we need to see this. We have to look at two parameters when selecting speaker, Power handling
capacity in Watts, Impedance in Ohms. Ohms figure is sort of average value because Impedance varies depending on
frequncy. To see this we need to see speaker spec. sheet in graph, Impedance vs. frequency. Important to know at which
frequency Impedance is lowest(dangerous point to blow speaker)

Yes a spec sheet would be nice. What I'm saying is if there is no external load or in this case one of much higher impedance, and someone cranks the input driving it to saturation whereby it's pinned against the rails, that energy has to go somewhere. So if not dissipated into a *balanced load* the amp has to dissipate that heat internally and it fries....

Just thinking outloud as matching the driver to the load is critical for proper heat dissipation.

uu can around\
Time to refresh Ohm's law.