STTNG has excellent music and great speech sounds recorded by the original cast, but through the stock speakers… well, let’s just say it could sound better 🙂 There are a couple manufacturers of speaker upgrade kits for pinballs – Pinball Pro and Flipper Fidelity seemed to be the most popular two.

I decided on the Flipper Fidelity Premium DCS Speaker Kit for upgrading the STTNG machine. It comes with replacement speakers for both backbox speakers and an 8″ woofer for the cabinet. Some nice things are included in the kit.

• Spacers are included for the speakers such that they can just be screwed in without any modifications needed to the cabinet.
• A volume/level control is included to control the balance between the cabinet woofer and backbox speakers

Received the kit quickly and in great condition, and was excited to install it. Easy as pie and pretty much exactly as described in the instructions.

Here I have removed the backbox display and speaker panel. You can see the stock speakers still on the panel, and the new Flipper Fidelity replacements above. Notice how the stock right speaker is tiny compared to the left one!

Given the included adapter bracket in the kit, installing the right speaker is a piece of cake. I did have to slightly enlarge the holes in the bracket using my drill, but that was a 30 second fix.

The included level control is pre-wired and ready to plug-and-play. I installed it in the top right of the backbox as suggested in the instructions. Three sets of wires come out of it, and it is a simple matter to complete the connections:

• Molex connector to the audio board
• Left speaker
• Right speaker

Here is the stock woofer at the bottom of the cabinet. Removed four 5/16″ nuts that held it in place…

… and replaced it with the Flipper Fidelity adapter bracket. Since the new speaker is bigger than the old one, the bracket allows the new speaker to be installed without drilling any new holes into the cabinet! Brilliant!

And finally here is the new woofer wired up. The crossover PCB has two positive (+) terminals, a high and a low, that can also be used to select the level of bass desired. After trying the high output and finding it a bit much, I used the low output, which is just perfect.

So how does it sound? Definitely a huge upgrade over the stock speakers. It’s a double-win: The bass is much clearer and deeper, and the mids and highs are also much clearer and pleasant sounding. As for the kit, I really like that the included level control allows you to control the balance between the backbox speakers and the woofer – it’s almost like having a “bass” knob like you have on your sound system. The installation was easy and quick, and given that no wire cutting was required and through the use of the supplied adapter brackets, the speakers could be just as easily returned to 100% stock configuration if you ever so desire! I definitely recommend Flipper Fidelity to whoever is considering a speaker upgrade for their pin.