Ive finally decided to tackle the audio system. the previous owner destroyed the wire harnes so Im going to rebuild my own to account for the added rear speakers. But my actual question involves this second hand head unit I got. There are a bunch of wires comming out of the back and I have no idea what they go to. There are two bulk heads. the first has 4 wires,RED(with fuse) YELLOW(with fuse) BLACK and BLUE. The second has 2 each of WHITES GREENS PURPLES and GRAY. I guess these are the speakers? The head unit is a 100w DUAL xd5110 am/fm/cd. as always, Thanks for the help
You are going to find that the speaker wires are the second group, separate from the power lines. The white, gray, purple, and green are your speaker wires. There is a standard in radios about which goes where. I would be guessing if I tried to work out the 4 channels. I can tell you that there should be 2 of each color, one of which will have a black stripe. The solid color is your positive speaker wire for that channel, the same color with the stripe will be the negative for that channel. Mix these up with the positive and negative on the speakers and they are out of phase. This will block the speaker response and kill bass. If I was to guess, the gray and white are left and right front, while the other two are left and right rear. Normally what I do is put all my speakers in, run the wires, power the unit up on the radio, then turn the balance to the left, fade to the front. Now I take my wires for my front left speaker and put them on each color (in phase) until that speaker works. The other 3 lines will be 'dead' due to the balance/fade settings. Hook that speaker up, neg to neg, pos to pos. Now turn the balance right front and hook that speaker to the color that is now working. Put the fade to rear, now find the working wires and hook that right rear speaker up. You will only have one pair of wires left, those will be the left rear, hook it up. Now set your fade and balance to center and check it out. Again, it all must be in phase, otherwise the sound will be bad. On the other side, red with a fuse should go to a keyed source. Then there should be a yellow or orange that is hot all the time for the clock if it has one. There will also be a female hook-up, crimp style, that runs a power antenna or amp turn on relay. Could have one or both of these. Depends on if the wire 'heats' with the radio on, or heats with the entire deck on, c/d or radio. Hot with radio only is antenna, hot when c/d or tape is on, then it is amp turn on. There also may be an input wire for your headlights to control the display light intensity. All depends on how cheap or expensive the deck is. Any RCA plugs should be pre-amp. Always test to make sure though before you hook them to an amp. Don't want to chance burning it up. Black wire will always be a ground. Run it to a good solid point of metal under the dash. Then run a wire from the deck somewhere in back to the same point just for insurance. Dave Edit: Forgot while typing that you named the colors of the power harness. Red and yellow are heat in. Both should be hooked up, but one goes 'key hot' the other goes always hot. You will have to try them both ways to know for sure which is which. Black is ground. Blue will either be light input or antenna relay. The way I would check is to get ground hooked, get the 2 hot wires figured out proper and hooked, then turn the unit off. Now take a test light and put to the blue wire. Turn the unit on, FM mode. If it's hot now, that is antenna. If not, it is probably your light input. If you find blue wire is hot with FM on, see if it stays hot with C/D. If so, it not only will put up a power antenna, but will switch your amp as well. If not, it will only trip the relay on a power antenna. It would technically work an amp relay, but only for radio music, not C/D.
Dave is the man! Couldn't have said it better myself. Print his post out, take it to the car with you, follow it to a T and you shouldn't have any problem!
wow, thanks for the time on that one, really apperciate it. I'll have to check out how bad off the stock harness is tomorrow in the light, im sure there are usable power and ground wires present other than that you are right about the black stripe on the speaker wires, didnt notice at first. I have one of those $20 speaker boxes from wal mart im going to put in the trunk for now so I'll only be running 2 speakers at the moment.
