What Are Car Tweeters? Location and Uses

What are car tweeters? Tweeters are a part of a vehicle’s speaker system. Anyone would want to have a car music system that delivers clear and high-quality sound. Tweeters play an important role in improving the audio system in your car.

What Is a Tweeter Speaker?

Also known as a treble speaker, a tweeter is a dome- or horn-shaped speaker that is responsible for the treble sound in an audio system. It produces high-pitch frequencies, ranging between 2,000 Hz and 20,000 Hz.

A typical tweeter speaker is small featuring a magnet, copper voice coil, and a speaker dome. Due to their directional design, sound from tweeters is clearer when their placement is toward the direction of the listeners.

A tweeter receives an amplified signal through its positive and negative wiring. After that, the voice coil creates a magnetic field, which causes the coil and dome to move forward and backward pretty quickly. This movement creates a high-pitch sound.

car tweeter speakers
A good car sound system consists of tweeters, woofers, and mid-range speakers. (Credit: OzHarte / PixaBay)

What Are Car Tweeters? Location and Uses

Car tweeter speakers work as the opposite to sub-woofers (which create the bass or low-frequency sounds). As a part of the speaker system, it works with mid-range speakers and woofers to produce quality audio output.

Location of Tweeters

Most factory-installed car audio systems have the tweeter in three common locations: dashboard, center pillar mounted, or on the upper side of the right door.

You will find the woofers in the rear or trunk and the mid-range speaker on the door. Because of their directional sound delivering technique, car tweeters are mounted higher than other speakers, so they stay on the head level of the listeners.

The placement of the factory-installed tweeters is not often ideal. In fact, automakers don’t give much thought about it except for when manufacturing luxury cars with some top-of-the-line sound systems.

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Uses of Tweeters

What are tweeters used for? To have a good sound, of course. They dramatically improve the performance of 2-way and 3-way speaker systems. Also, their addition to an audio setup will bring added effects to the output.

Most factory-installed sound systems are 2-way, having a tweeter and a woofer. However, a 3-way speaker produces a better sound because there is a midrange speaker to balance out the high and low frequencies from tweeters and woofers.

Many car brands use generic plastic diaphragm tweeters that have a small capacitor. These tweeters, with their limited capacity, are not capable of producing good sound. However, many luxury brands use high-quality sound systems from industry leaders, such as Bose and JBL.

Tweeters definitely help with producing better sound but they alone are not enough to make car stereos sound better.

Conclusion

What are car tweeters? I hope you’ve got the proper explanation. However, only tweeters in motor vehicles don’t guarantee to produce good sound. It takes well-positioned tweeters with woofers and mid-range speakers to get good-quality audio output. The factory-installed audio system often provides a sub-par performance. Installing an aftermarket stereo system can be a solution in this regard.