okay, if the deck has a built in amp we just connect the cars wiring harness to the wiring harness to the deck? correct?


my next question is, if the deck has a built in amp (or doesnt') but you want to hook up a 4 channel amp....speakers wires must be running from the amp straight to teh deck? and spliced into the wire harness that contains the wires for each speaker?

 

q1) yes, if you want the deck to power your speakers.

q2) you can do that if you don't want to run new speaker wires to the speakers directly from the amp. I've done it many times with excellent results, in fact I can't hear a difference between direct wiring and wiring via the factory harness...so I save myself a lot of time and energy and usually run it through the harness. NOTE: do not hook the amp wires to the deck's speaker output wires. Hook it to the factory speaker harness that runs to the speakers( the same harness that you would have plugged into the deck's speaker output).

 

yes, that's correct, the deck should come with it's own harness for power, ground and speaker wires right.


No, the amp will connect to the deck through rca patch cables
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The speakers in turn will then run off of the amp, not the deck.

You will also need a wiring installation kit for the amp.

 

You can attach the wires from the amp into the harness, but I would avoid it if possible. Investigate first how hard it would be to run speaker wire into your doors, etc. Some cars are hard, no question, but others are relatively easy, and if so, then doing it right, and running new wire is the best way to go. This has the side benefit of allowing you to keep the stock connectors and wiring for when/if you sell the vehicle. You can buy adaptors for stock wiring harnesses, but by the time that you've bought them at $5 to $9 american per connector, you probably could have bought enough bulk speaker wire to do the job.

 

well. i actualy just pulled my deck out of my car (96 accord)

this is what i noticed:

the care wire harness was still intact and plugged into the deck's wire harness, but from the deck's wire harness, all the speaker wires were cut, and attached to the new speaker wires that are running directly to the amp...

so are you saying its better to splice into the car's stock wire harness?

 

First, it sounds to me like you are still confused. The system in your car would appear to me not to have an external amp(s), just an aftermarket deck and speakers. If it had an external amp(s), you would have rca patch cords coming off the back of the deck running to the external amp(s) and the speaker wires coming off the external amp(s) to the speakers.

Secondly, splicing into a harness in my opinion is a last resort, try and get the correct adapter harness for the vehicle you have.

Thirdly, you can utilize both the built-in amp of the deck, and an external amp to power speakers and subs, but you need to know what you are doing. My advice, seek out friends who have systems set up or shops where you can visually see the different types of systems and how they are wired, ask lots of questions, and then you will understand it better.

 

sorry, i guess i forgot to give some info

my deck had no built in amp...

so i had all the rca's connected from the deck straight to the amp (front, rear, sub)

but what i noticed was that speaker wire was running from teh amp, straight to the harness and spliced into those wires....maybe it was too difficult to run them into the doors?

 

ahhhh, ok, I gotcha. Yup, you can do it that way, I just prefer to use all new wiring and go directly to each component, but to each his own, just make sure you solder and shrink tube the connections.