my dad is putting the bose system in my moms car. are the whole harness' different that go into the back of the cd player? i know all the wires going to the speakers are different than regular plugs. whear does the rear sub wire go to/splice to. should we just rip all the wires out of a maro w/ bose system from a junkyard?.

 

Hey! Now, about putting in a Bose system, my gut reaction was DON'T DO IT! After some thinking, my reaction was OH MY GAWD! DON'T DO IT! The Bose systems are absolute crap. The speakers themselves are great, and it's my understanding that each speaker has its own individual amp. The amp is matched to the speaker so that no matter how loud you turn up the system you will never distort the speaker. That particular feature works incredibly well. My Z with the factory Bose stereo has almost 130k and I absolutely abuse the speakers, only now are they starting to rattle just a bit. Before they started rattling, the sound was absolutely crystal clear and beautiful no matter how loud it went. But the speakers are 1 ohm. Most car stereo speakers are 4 ohm, some are 2 ohm, but never 1 ohm. This means that you'll have to go with the Bose amps and speakers and wires, which are hard to get since Bose doesn't sell them directly, they only allow them to be installed in the cars. You'll hafta buy everything used, and if they're damaged in any way, you're stuck with it. People will also charge a bundle for those. When they go bad (eventually all speakers do), you'll have to find more used Bose speakers and amps, or you're going to have to buy new speakers and amps and then you're going to have to rewire the whole car for those. And while its nice that the speakers won't distort because the amps don't overpower them, if you're driving in summer with the windows or tops down, it won't turn up loud enough to make you happy.

Now the speakers are pretty nice, but the head unit sucks. Right now I'm on my second Bose Camaro, and both of them spit CDs like nothing else. If you put in a CD thats at all scratched, nicked, or anything, it won't read the CD, it will spin for a while and eject the CD with an "ERR" message. After about 7 minutes, the thing will warm up and you can play CDs for a while. After about 17 minutes, the thing get's TOO warm, and it starts spitting out CDs again. My CD Player on this car also scratches CDs towards the outside, on the later tracks. The inside of the CD will be almost perfect, and the outside is marked and nicked up, and then once the CD is nicked up, the thing won't read them. It also absolutely hates CD-Rs, pretty much no matter what brand they are. It has more trouble with those than anything else. My stereo also has good days and bad days tuning in radio stations, more bad than good lately. I noticed that my old 95 Monte Carlo had lots of trouble with CDs too, and when I asked around, even my friend's 2001 Avalanche spit CDs. Basically, I would recommend that you never ever put a GM or Bose system in your car at all. You're better off going to a stereo place and getting a completely new system, in the long run it will be better for you.

That being said, I'll answer yer question :-D I believe the Bose harnesses are different than the regular factory harness, but go ahead and check with the service department at a dealership. I was able to go in once and get a wiring diagram for the Bose setup... it didn't help much, but if they have that on file they might be able to answer your question. You probably would be better off somehow getting the wires out of another Bose Camaro, because i'm pretty sure that the Bose wires are different than most speaker wires. Most speaker wires are split, Bose use some sort of wierd co-axial setup if I understand what i was told correctly. As far as the rear Bose sub, I think thats one of the wires coming out of the wiring harness so I don't think you would have to splice anything if you can get the factory Bose wires. Really tell your dad to think twice about doing this, but if he does I hope this helps!

-Bill

 

thanks alot. my bose cd player in my car never spits cd's anymore after i had it fixed. that was only a couple thousand miles ago but one got stuck in there so i had it fixed and it was either cleaned(the parts that eject it) or fixed. and my dad isnt buying the whole system he yanked one already out of a car. all he needs is the passanger door speaker and the wires. but i will let him know what u said about the different wires and ohms.

 

Hey onoiocoko, just curious, where did you take the CD player to get it fixed and how much did it cost? I went to a Chevy dealership and they said that they couldn't fix it there, but they would take the CD player out of the car and send it to Bose, who would send me a used and reconditioned CD player for 400 bucks. So basically they would send me someone else's that had broken and gotten fixed, and then they'd fix my broken one and send it to the next poor sap who needs one... ouch!

-Bill