I'm no audiophile, but I like my stuff sounding good. So, do you have to rewire around the Bose speakers or can you use the wiring all ready there after removing the amps?

 

you can do the by pass, I did that with my old black max and didn't have any troubles. On this one I just went all out and used 12 gauge to each speaker.

 

I bypassed

 

stock wires are pretty thin. I noticed an improvement using thicker ones after swapping out the bose.

 

All right, I'm looking into the bypass. Since I use Infinity Kappa's with the built in crossovers, the wiring on those is pretty thin, and I can't imagine that thicker wire before that is going to really help all that much. If I was doing thick wire all the way to the speaker I'd understand. If I'm totally off let me know.

Thanks for the input.

 

the thicker the wire, the lower the power loss over a longer run.

 

If your going to run Kappa's you should amplify them, which means you will want to run new wires anyway. You dont have to, but to really make those things scream you will want to

 

Well, after looking at the wiring diagrams last night, I'm just gonna re-wire. I'd like to be able to afford the amps, but that ain't happening. Though it's not much to talk about my HU currently has a amp build in that does 60 watts a channel, so no it's not as goos as a seperate amp, but it's way better than HU's that were in the store.

I was actually thinking about running RCA's to the trunk just incase i wanted to have amps in the future.

 

if you are gonna take out the interior to run wires, i would suggest running every ting, incase you do want to put in a system later. it makes it alot easier since you are already there

 

well, that's sorta what i was saying.

One more questions, just because i'm lazy. Does anyone know about how much wire it takes to go from the front to the back?

 

i bought 17 feet of power wire. i had 15 ft rca's and 3 feet of ground wire

 

All right. Here is what I'm doing this weekend.

Panasonic CQ-C8400U Head Unit

Upfront...
two 10' 14 gauge wire going to the fronts
Infinity Kappa 62.5i's up front.

Going to the trunk is the following...
two 25' pulls of 14 gauge wire
2 Infinity Kappa 692.5i's
3 pulls of shielded 4 strand wires for sub and possible future amps for front and rear
1 pull of 25' 8 gauge wire for amp
PPI Amp
Polk 12" sub

Anyway, with all of this, I'm wondering which side of the car should I run all of my wires and I know I'll have to take out the back seat but I'm wondering if I'll need to take out one of the front seats too? Advice?

 

dont run all the wires side by side to the trunk and back. run amp wires down one side, and sub wires down other, and speaker wires up the middle to avoid whiney noises.

 

Well all of my wire shielded so I'm not super worried about noise.

Went to wire the sub today and found no real easy way to get through the firewall, any thoughts on how to get my power cable to the battery?

 

no need to run the wires on seperate side of the car. just run all the wires down one side to make things simpler. noise in the system is most commonly caused by a bad ground somewhere. i have ZERO noises, and i have all the wires running down one side of my car.

when you're grounding the amp etc, make sure the ground contact point is good. if there's any paint, sand or scrap it off, then connect the ground to be sure its making good electrical contact with the chassis of the car.

 

I hate to bump myself, but I'm still looking for a relatively easy way to get through the firewall. Advice?

 

i used a 1/2 inch drill bit right near the stearing shaft.

 

there is a grommet (sp chk) near the steering column already, find it and use it.

 

*BUMP* How easy is it to snake new speaker wire into the doors for the front speakers? I'd rather not cut up the BOSE wiring as I will probably re-use it if I bring the car back to stock. I was checking out the door jamb (in low light though) and it looked like it would be sorta tricky to get some 16ga or larger through that opening. Any tips?

 

it took me i think 50 foot of wire to run just speakers. the rest were there. i had just a tad left over. i do get a very annoying whine out of my speakers i think from the alternator. they are all run on the driver side, so as tripleGmax said, you may want to run them seperately to avoid that noise, trust me it gets annoying.

Mizeree_X i fit 14 guage through that rubber thingy, i had to really force it through though. when you open my door, you can see the wire a little though.

 

i ran 12awg, too. i just zip tied it under the rubber thing. the wires are black and the zip ties are black so you wouldn't see it unless you really looked.

 

you could do it this way.

where the current wire ends up at the speaker attach your bigger gauge wire to it securly. then pull the wire out from the location where it ends up (the headunit) that way you are pulling out the old wire while pulling in the new wire.

when you want to put back the old thin wire, just repeat the same process...


hope this is clear, its hard to say it and much easier to show it.

 

All my wires are run down the drivers side and there is no power noise! As stated before power noises (or a whine!) is 90% of the time due to a bad ground source, either of your deck or amps. You'll barely ever get a power noise, caused by your wires being run side by side. I've had a large stereo in every one of my vehicles since I was 16, and I worked as a stereo installer at a local stereo shop for 1 year so, I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about here.

 

I had to totally bypass, and I couldn't fit my 14 guage wire thru, so I kinda ran it alongside the old wiring, new infiniti's in front (which don't fit so well where the Bose originally sat), but they ran a lot better when I got a seperate amplifier instead of the bose ones.

 

my grounds look fine, grounded right to the chassis, i actually took the paint off where i grounded it, so it was touching bare metal. i dunno what the problem is.

 

all you have is a big mess of rattling from your subs, you wouldn't be able to tell if you had interferance



I always do power down the drivers side (through the hood release cable grommet) signals on the passenger and speaker wire up the center.

 

I got lazy and drilled

I was going to wire it through the stock harness, but then realized it was 12gauge and not worth the headache and time (and you know me... I dont like hacking crap).

 

Not to stray too far from the topic, but i installed a aftermarket HU about a year and a half ago. After i install my amp, the protector starts to come on after a few months. I tried to fix the problem by re-grounding it. It didn't work. I bought a Mp3 playing HU and re hooked up the amp. It worked fine for a while. I took a long trip to Mississippi and on the way down, the amp stopped working. I haven't been able to get it working, so i took out all of the wires. Some things i noticed about the stereo:
1.When i have the car on, the radio works fine.
2.When the engine isn't on and i try to play the stereo, the bass becomes very distorted.
I talked to someone at Circuit City about the problem and he said it could be the battery. The car starts up fine though. Does any one have any advice???