I was hoping someone could shed some light on this for me. I am by no means an expert with this stuff.

I ordered new front door speakers for my 2k2 w/ non-bose. I bought a 4 channel amp to power the front doors and a sub. I also bought 16 gauge speaker wire for use with the front door speakers. I currently have a sub installed powered by an amp, but i replaced the amp.

Can anyone tell me exactly how I should run the wires to amp the door speakers? Does the 16 gauge wire go directly to the amp? Does anything need to be connected to the headunit? Thanks for any help.

 

Well the front speakers are easy. Just hook your RCA cables up to the front inputs on the amp... and hook the speaker wires up to the amp. per channel, not bridged.

The fun part... exactly what style of sub are you trying to run? Stock or aftermarket?

 

u can splice the speaker wires behind the head unit - its not fun trying to get speaker wire into the front doors of the 5th gen, i believe its necessary to drill

 

Drilling to get speaker wire into front doors that already have speakers???? That would be a first for me.

You can run the speaker wire through the rubber tubing that holds all the wiring for the electric windows, door locks... etc.

 

Unfortunately, with the 5th gen Maxima, Nissan decided to go with some weird harnes system for the front doors. On the car end of the rubber hose is a large plastic jack that you cannot get another wire through. For the wire coming from the car, you will have to drill. On the door side, there is enough extra room inside the rubber connector to run your wire through. So you can simply cut into the rubber and insert the wire. I used a cheap plastic housing for the wire, and I siliconed the ends where they met the metal. Pics:

 

Ohh love pics... still hate engineers. They never design with mechanics, and installers in mind.

Here's a question though... how hard is it to get to the connector? Just wondering, cause you could have probably used the existing wiring for it... unless you're trying to run over 50 watts down it.

 

HEY! I'M A MECHANICAL ENGINEERING STUDENT!

Anyway, it's quite a b*tch to get to the stock wires from near the door, because that jack is located so high up. But, you could always just tap into them behind the radio, I suppose.

My KAR 400.4 puts out around 70watts/channel, and I didn't want to use the stock 18 or 20 AWG wire.

 

Hey... I'm working on my associates degree in automotive engineering. Still doesn't mean it was designed for me to work on.

The fun thing about being a mechanic... you get used to dealing with things that are a b*tch. Honestly, this is me though, and I can be very picky. I would pull the connector out... way one or another Then pull the old pin and wire out for the speaker, install new 16 ga, and rewire from there to the speaker with 16 ga as well. But that's going for the clean... pain in the *** install.

 

Ooohh...automotive...sounds like fun! (no, seriously)

I guess you could do it the way you described, but I'm sure it would be a bigger PITA than anybody wants to deal with. Hell, drilling the new hole was enough of a PITA.

And, in the future, we'll have to design things with the installer in mind. Agreed?

 

Agreed.

I guess I'd only go so far if I was going for that SLEEK look. Like if I was putting the car in a show.

Kudo's on the sealing. Some people wouldn't bother with that... and then wonder why their door has so much rust.