okay i bought a Sony MEX-5DI and I had to buy a 4 channel amp to go with it. well i tried installing at where i work (best buy) and they told me they cannot do employe installs till january. its understandable but that is a long time. i just wanted to know if my radio is a stock how would i go about hooking it up? i have a little experience but i have never wired up an amp. the way the radio is setup is that it only has 2 pairs of rca's comming out from the back, ant in, aux in(<----what is this?), sub out, bus control in. that is all it has. for me to run my current four speakers, can i cut into the wires that are in the harness and just join them to a longer speaker wire and run that to my amp or do i have to completely run new wires to it directly from the speaker? if you can answer any of these questions it would be greatly helpful or maybe just give an idea too. my amp is gonna be under my passenger side seat cause i got this really thin one that fits perfect. any idea on where to hide all the wires? thanks again

 

that nice you can hide your amp, under your seat, wish I could, wahtever you do makesure that no metal hits the screws where the wires connect, if a piece of metal touches them it could hit both positive and negative and fry the unit, I think they do make plastic covers for that area, hate to see you forget and shove a screwdriver down there and ruin it. Don't cover the whole amp as it needs to stay as cool as possible. As far as the wiring goes its pretty straightforward, you could run all your wires through the stock harness, I ran seperate ones to get the most power as the stock wires are pretty lame. They make special wire kits that allow you to run an adapter straight into the stock harness, from the radio, so its just plug and go, takes all but two seconds. I know circuit city sells them. Personally I would run a good sized wire from the battery to the main power wire, then run another one from a switched 12 volt source, so it turns off with the car off, or from the fuse box--very easy, no wires to find. Then run your ground in a good spot, or from the black ground on the original harness, and the remote to the remote on the amp, and the power antenna to the stock harness wire. If you run from the stock harness, I wouldn't cut the wire, just strip around it in a spot, and attach the wire, this way you can easily put the stock radio back in with ease. To be real clean you can solder, but caps with electrical tape will work fine. The sets of preouts on the back should be for the front and rear speakers, if so you run them to the amp, and then two sets of wires, one set for front speakers and other for rear speakers. Run a heavy duty power cable to battery post right by battery and connect thick wire for ground somewher in the trunk, on bare metal, keeping the ground wire length as short as possible, remote to remote on stereo and your done. Make sure you work with the battery disconected, if you are screwing in a screw and happen to touch screwdriver to the case of the amp, say bye bye amp, without power nothing bad can happen. I think I covered evrything, if you have questions feel free to ask.

 

just looking back I noticed you said they are pre ins, i don't know what those are for, does it say anything in the manual about these

 

dude thanks a whole a lot for all of the info. im gonna try it tommorow so i can go the amp wires for the battery and the kit to hold the new unit in place. thanks again for all your help

 

What amp do we sell that fit under the seat? Thats BS they said they wont touch it till January. I'da done it for ya.

 

im not too sure what kind it is cause the plate is missing. they just put open item for me for 10.00 bucks its 800 watts and like i said it is thin. we don't sell it there no more cause it came back from service saying it was working properly, so maybe they said something was wrong with it so they can upgrade i wish i was up there so i can get this thing going. im gonna try asking a different one today to see if he can do it.