A few months ago I bought a Firebird radio from a member here to replace my original '85 Camaro radio, which had developed a motorboating problem. The radio appeared identical except the buttons and ***** were grey instead of black. When I installed the radio it worked okay, but the LED display was really dim but eventually brightened up to normal after about 10 minutes. This happens every time I turn the radio on. While driving yesterday I turned on the headlights and the display disappeared altogether. This was in the daytime, so I don't know if it would be visible at night. I know the display should dim when the lights are turned on, but not go totally black.

So, is this something I can easily fix or replace? I still have my old radio.

 

Okay, a correction. I just checked it in the garage. It's been a while, so I couldn't remember how the dash and radio display dimmer worked (brightest is with the headlight **** CCW). The radio display is still on when the lights are on, just a lot dimmer, which I couldn't tell when driving in the daytime. But the main problem is the long time it takes for the display to show and brighten when the radio is turned on.

 

*bump*

Come on you GM stereo gurus, does nobody have an answer to this?

Could it be something like a bad ground somewhere?

 

try un-pluging the dimmer wire from the bunch, my aftermarket doesn't dim at all because i don't have it hooked up, just make sure you unplug dimmer and not illumination, that should fix your issues

 

So which one would that be? There is the 12-wire plug and a 2-wire plug with a brown and orange wire.

 

the illumination wire is the orange wire, the dimmer is the orange and white wire, disconnect the orange and white wire and try that, if you need a picture of the factory radio wiring color codes, let me know

 

What he said . Check the connection for the dimmer wire. Sounds like it is getting a bad connection on the back of the radio. You might of to use an electronic cleaner on it and check for bad wire/kinked wire.

 

That would be great. I haven't yet gor around to looking at it. The change happened when I replaced the original stereo with another one, so if what you say is true, it may well be a problem with the connector.