I'm trying to slap a deck into an 05 mini cooper s.
It has the Harmon Kardon 8 speaker syste, in it.
I know where the amp is, i just cant get it to turn on.
any help would be great.

I really dont want to by-pass the amp cuz i am unsure if the tweeters crossed over at the tweeter or in the amp.

Thanks

 

Seriously?
no one?

 

don't know anything about the H/K system, but it seems to me it shouldn't be too hard to find the remote turn on wire and hook it to the remote out of your deck.

If its anything like the factory amp in my car, it has 4 pairs of input wires, about 22 ga., 8 pairs of speaker wires out, about 18 ga., power was red 10 ga. on a 25 amp fuse from the fuse panel, ground was black 10 ga.
the 2 leftover wires were red and pink 24 ga. I used a volt meter, red had 12 volts on it when the key was on. The pink had 5 volts and i suspect its some sort of sensing circuit.
I relaced the mini factory amp with six 5100T's, used the red power cable to power the LOC and the small red remote wire to turn it on. I used the delayed remote out from the LOC to turn on the six amps.
Later i ripped out the LOC and factory deck, got a proper interface and added a relay for the remote on.

Hope that helped, I'd look with a volt meter.

 

Honestly what’s the sense of replacing the factory HU if your just going to keep the factory amps and speakers.

Its not going to sound any Diff if that’s what your hoping as your going to need to turn of the internal amp on the new HU.

 

Well its not my car, its a customer's.

Turns out that the amp is controlled via a data bus.
2ch output from the deck to the amp.
Amp to 8 speakers.
Amp controls all the DSP, fade, balance, volume etc.

So looks like I am going to have to rewire from the HU to the outputs from the amps, make crossovers, and spend all day on it, only to have the customer complain that it sounds like crap. Only to have him try to return everything, cuz it sounds like crap.

I really dont get it, if you are planning on doing anything HU related, WHY on God's green earth did you get the upgraded system from the factory?
I just dont understand.

 

Where is it you work at???

Also maybe he didn't buy it brand new, it is only a 06.But if you can afford a 06 Mini.Then you can very well afford a Deck and 4 with a nice little amp and sub.

 

Wouldn't it make sense to simply explain that to the customer? Advise him that the weak points of factory system typically isn't the deck but the amps and speakers . . . but that factory decks have their short comings too because of the internal-non-adjustable EQs that they have to make crap speakers sound a bit better.

Just tell him that no amount of EQing can ever compensate for crappy speakers, and since after market EQs don't have any of that false EQ junk built into them, that he is better off replacing the Deck and speakers at the same time - and likely the amp too.

Be honest and upfront, he might appreciate that more than you think.