Will anything bad happen if I throw in some 4ohm 3way speakers without adding additional processing or amplifying? I know this wouldn't be optimal but I'm looking for stop gap for the lack of clarity

 

you will be wasting your time

a 3 way set up needs an amp

Im not sure on the specs but you will be cutting the power in half (roughly) by running the amp at 4 ohm.
An amp will power the set up properly.

if you just have to do it...Nothing bad will happen. The bose amp will be fine.

 

Hmm pretty sure the Bose speakers are actually 1 ohm. I replaced the Bose amp for an aftermarket one and had to run the factory speakers in parallel to run at 2 ohms because that's as low as the amp will go. Moot point next week though when new Focals go in.

You'll be putting a lot of strain on the Bose amp running 4 ohm speakers off it. The factory speakers actually sound pretty decent with a good amp driving them. A lot better than the Bose amp did with the same speakers. I'd go for a decent amp instead.

 

If you ran two(2) 1 ohm speakers in parallel, it is still seeing 1 ohm. You would have to run them in series to see 2 ohms...

And running 4 ohm speakers on the Bose amp won't put a strain on it; you just won't get the output like you should.
The exact opposite of running too low of impedance speakers is what will overload an amp.

 

You're right, I got them confused. I just remember the installer telling me that the factory Bose speakers were running at 1 ohm but the lowest the amp supported was 2 ohms (Hertz HDP 5 5 channel amp.) I went with just an aftermarket 10' sub and the factory speakers to start with. There's a huge difference in sound quality with the new amp over the Bose. Still not enough though Focal KRX 2's are going in next week to replace the factory speakers in front and Focal PC 690's in the rear for fill

 

Cool....just didn't want anyone hooking it up wrong and not liking the results. Glad yours is more to your liking now...

 

Excuse me if this is a dumb question. I'm kind of new to car audio, but I've messed around with putting in new headunits, subs, basic stuff.

Question: I'm looking at replacing the stock bose amp with a jbl ms-8 which can run 8 channels at either 2 (30w) or 4 ohms (15w). If i wanted to run the stock speakers, how do I configure the wiring? For example, in the front do I tie together the (+) and (-) signals from the 3 speakers into one and feed them into one channel or should each speaker get their own channel? Is each speaker in the front 2ohms or together they make 2ohms?