I just wired in an Alpine to get some music going in my car; had to futz around to find disconnected stock speaker wires, old system removed with side cutters, no power wire, etc. etc. I now have four stock speakers working OK, but this car has a factory amp and subwoofers installed and I'd like to try to use them. OK, I know it's no big deal, but I'm an old guy and my hearing isn't what it used to be anyway...

There's still a bunch of unused factory wiring that was chopped off: some of them are presumably for the dimmer, dash lites, signal for power antenna relay. Does anyone know what the color of the input wire (or wires) to the factory amp is? Any idea on how this was supposed to work? Can I steal a signal from one of the other speakers as input? etc. etc. Thanks for any help.

Frank

 

I believe the speaker wires are what fed the factory amp(s), so you're probably already using them.

------------------
The IROC Homepage
<A HREF="http://www.rit.edu/~jli4307/camaro" TARGET=_blank>
View the restoration of an 85 IROC</A>
"I didn't know a bored out Ford could go so slow" -Shenandoah

 

Jim, I sure hope so. I didn't even think to try it out! I'll try it tomorrow and post results here.

thanks!

 

Just be careful, the new deck is going to be more powerful than the stocker and it may be possible to overload the inputs of the factory amps.

------------------
The IROC Homepage
<A HREF="http://www.rit.edu/~jli4307/camaro" TARGET=_blank>
View the restoration of an 85 IROC</A>
"I didn't know a bored out Ford could go so slow" -Shenandoah

 

I turned on the factory amp and nothing happened. I'm not even sure if it's getting power (looks like there's an indicator light)but nothing lit up. What's strange is that there's several wires from the factory harness that have about 2 VDC on them whenever the stereo is working. The only connections from the stereo to the car are power (direct from battery), ground and speakers. It doesn't matter if the engine's running or not (I couldn't easily find a switched input from the ignition and had to run a new power wire, so I can now fire up the head unit w/o the ignition being on.)

Any thoughts on this? It's almost like the speakers are feeding something, but I don't know what speaker voltages are supposed to be. The unit works great and my "default" is to just use as is, but this amp thing kind of has my interest now. thanks