Car Stereo Installation

Best Buy had a clearance sale, so I bought a 760 watt amp and a 900 watt subwoofer. Yeah a huge improvement over my previous setup, but I got a REALLY good deal on it, I couldn't resist! I had to build a new box for the sub, the 12" speaker just barely fit the height of my trunk. It is a LOT louder than my old setup. I can control the volume and bass boost going to the sub through my deck. Although it is very loud, there is a ton of sound deadening material between the rear seats and the trunk (probably for fire safety), if the trunk is open, it is VERY loud.

The new amp draws quite a bit more current than the old one, so I had to run thicker gauge wire to my battery. I think I used 8 gauge wire, and it is quite thick and inflexible. So its hard to route the wire down the side of the car. Installing the fuses was difficult as well. It requires a 60 amp fuse, which is impossible to find. So you need to wire two 30 amp fuses in parallel to equal one 60 amp fuse.

I installed everything in the spring, but I just bought a new car! So I'm going to sell the deck, and put the amp and sub in the Acura. The stock deck in the Acura will do for now, and I want to upgrade to an MP3 capable deck in the future.

Well, I finally did it. I made an excuse to buy a new deck! At the cottage (of all places) a rear speaker wasn't working so I was fiddling with the wiring. All the wiring is just held together with electrical tape, and it the high summer heat and humidity, it seems to unravel a little. So, without heeding my own advice about disconnecting the battery before fiddling, somehow a freshly uncovered bare power wire touch the deck frame. This resulted in a rather spectacular spark and a funky smell. Amazingly the deck still turned on but there was no sound ... As you can see, I blew the top right off of one of the transistors. I thought this was the reason fuses were used. I might try and replace the transistor to see if it works just for kicks.

So I replaced the deck with a powerful Pioneer CD deck, Model DEH-P440. It was rather expensive ($300 CAN) but well worth the cost. It has primo sound, it is the 'Premier' model, meaning it has better components and features than the normal Pioneer decks. It integrates perfectly with my external amp and subwoofer, and allows me to adjust the cut off frequency and volume of the sub! It can also filter out really low bass from the non-sub speakers, as this typically damages them at high volume. The deck also came with a remote, and enough sound customization to drive anyone crazy!

In the pictures you can see my setup. Eventually I'll make a cover for the main controls where the deck sits. There is a 200 watt Pioneer amp powering my 10" subwoofer. I bought the speaker and amp and built the box for a budget $150! This sub won't pound so much that you hear my car blocks away, but it can put out enough bass to rattle things a little, although I rarely play it that loud. It really adds a lot of bottom end to the music. Now before I installed the deck, I made sure to properly solder and connect all the wires to avoid a repeat of my previously accident! Lesson learned!!

I've installed a 200 watt amp and subwoofer in the trunk of my car. It sounds really good, but it tends to rattle parts of my 20 year old car. The good thing is that its not to loud outside the car. It was very economical to build as well.

I'm just having a little problem with the bass, as I want the bass to come only from the sub, and not from my speakers. This should give a better quality of sound, but my cheap deck won't do that. I have to build some small preamp to the sub to equalize things ... More updates as I figure out what to do ...

Its easy to install a new deck, all you need to know is how to connect the wires. For old cars this can difficult, as I had no manual for my deck and didn't know what the wiring from the car was. A wiring harness ($10) greatly simplifies things so that you can pull out or replace the deck easily without having to resolder or wire anything.

FIRST: Disconnect the car battery when wiring the power on the deck!! Sparks and accidental groundings are all too common and many people have blown their stereos!!

Most decks use standard wiring I believe, which is:

• white, white/black: front left speaker
• green, green/black: rear left speaker
• grey, grey/black: front right speaker
• purple, purple/black: rear right speaker
• red: power (+12V)
• Black: ground
• yellow: power (battery backup, always on)
• blue: antenna (used for automatic antennas)

The solid speaker wires are positive and black stripe wires are negative. These colours do not correspond to whats in my car. My car also had no rear speakers, which I had to install wiring for, drill holes for and mount myself.

My car has:

• dark green (-), light green (+): front right speaker
• grey (-), tan (+): front left speaker
• Black: ground
• yellow: power (+12V, but ONLY when the car is on)
• grey: power (active only when the car lights are on)

So, connect car yellow to deck red (not yellow), ground to ground and speakers to speakers. 'New' decks need power to save presets into memory, so they need to have constant power. You need to splice the wire from the cig lighter (orange) and connect it to the deck yellow. If you don't care about saving your radio presets, just connect the deck yellow AND red to the car yellow. Car grey and deck blue (antenna) are not used, cap them.

Speakers have a positive and negative terminal and are usually shown - so connect them properly for better sound.


Last modified: August 21/2003