car audio questions

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bstevens39

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hey, new to the forum, just pick up a 2005 ls v6 yesterday. i tried search around but couldn't find exactly what i was looking for.
so i have a pioneer avic-f700bt that i took out of my last car b4 i sold it. i want to put it in my ls but an confused about the factory amps. i know there is one under the rear deck to power the subs. is that the only amp in the car or is there others for the door and console speakers. if so where are those located?
basically what i want to know is that if i install a new deck will it just sound the exact same?

sorry if there is already a thread about this, please lead me in the right direction if there is.
thanks
 
Which factory sound system do you have now?
Are there speakers in the center console?
 
I put an F90BT in an 04 with the 12 speaker system.
You have two factory amps. Both are mono. One is for the sub woofers, and the other is for the center channel speakers. You can use both, or you can leave out the center channels. They don't help much anyway.

The eight pin connector on the back of the radio has the connectors for both amplifiers, including the turn on wires. You'll need to wire a 1K or so resistor is series with each of the turn on wires to keep the speakers from thumping at start up. If you use the center channel speakers, you will need to sum together the left and right outputs to make a mono signal. You can do that with some resistors or with a Y cable. I think you can set the sub-woofer outputs to mono from the unit.

You can get an adapter to make the steering wheel buttons work, but they won't work very well.

If you search, there are a few big threads on installing AVICs into the LS.
 
so if i got this right, one of the wiring harnesses will have the 2 rca cables and 2 amp turn on wires. so could i just but the 2 turn on wires together connect that to a 1k resistor then connect the remote turn on from my stereo to the resistor as well????
 
bstevens39 said:
so if i got this right, one of the wiring harnesses will have the 2 rca cables and 2 amp turn on wires. so could i just but the 2 turn on wires together connect that to a 1k resistor then connect the remote turn on from my stereo to the resistor as well????
Click to expand...

That will probably work. I used two resistors, one from the AVIC to the sub-woofer turn-on and one from the AVIC (same wire as before) to the center amp turn-on. I did this to reduce any possible interaction between the two amplifiers. With resistors costing me less than one cent, it seemed reasonable.
(If you buy them by the 10,000's, you get reasonable prices.)
 
hey joegr, could u possible post a pic or link to the resistor im an looking for, i'm not sure what i'm looking for at all.
 
problems getting subs to work. not sure if the problem is with my resistors http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170266247782 or something else. but when i connect the turn on from my deck to the two from the harness my subs pop then just hmmmmmm, no sound. when i use the resistors they work fine when the car is on but not started but when i start the car there is no pop but the subs just hmmmmm, no sound. any thoughts?
 
bstevens39 said:
problems getting subs to work. not sure if the problem is with my resistors http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170266247782 or something else. but when i connect the turn on from my deck to the two from the harness my subs pop then just hmmmmmm, no sound. when i use the resistors they work fine when the car is on but not started but when i start the car there is no pop but the subs just hmmmmm, no sound. any thoughts?
Click to expand...

Those should have worked (as long as they aren't in parallel). Maybe you should try 3K to 4K resistors.
 
from the stereo i connected 2 resistors to the turn on then connected the resistors each to a harness turn on. i thought it might be the resistors were to weak but thought it was weird that the subs just popped and hmmmmed when i just had all the turn ons together with no resistor.
 
bstevens39 said:
but thought it was weird that the subs just popped and hmmmmed when i just had all the turn ons together with no resistor.
Click to expand...

well if it was hooked up with out any resistors it should definitely work fine other than a "pop" on turn on and turn off, if its not working with out any resistors then there is a problem somewhere and it wont work with any resistors.

the resistors are just there to silence the "pops"

the humming is suggesting that the amp is turning on and the problem may with the source, are you sure that you have them hooked up to a audio output and not an RCA input (as there are a lot of different RCA connectors on the back of an AVIC)

there may be a problem with the output of the deck, for instance the AVIC's have a small fuse inside of the units to protect the preouts and maybe yours is blown, i would try to substitute a source to confirm this, the easiest would be to use a ipod or similar device with a RCA to headphone cable and a couple of female to female RCA couplers to try to plug the ipod into the sub RCA's from the harness (car harness not the AVIC's harness) just make sure that the radio is still able to be powered and that the key is on and the turn on wire is still connected and see if you get any sound that way.
 
even with the resistors there is still a pop. its hooked up to the subwoofer output. what would cause the humming, is it that the speakers aren't getting an audio signal but the amp is on?
 
Also, make sure that you have a good ground to the AVIC.
"Hum" problems tend to come from one or more of the following.
1. Bad grounds.
2. Driving with the wrong impedance.
3. Unshielded or improperly shielded cables.
 
bstevens39 said:
even with the resistors there is still a pop. its hooked up to the subwoofer output. what would cause the humming, is it that the speakers aren't getting an audio signal but the amp is on?
Click to expand...

if you have a pop, then the resistance is not high enough, be careful, if you go too high the voltage will be too low to turn on the amp.

the humming is either due to a bad connection (ground or connection cable as joe said) or faulty equipment (the avic itself, or the factory amp)

if you substitute the audio source (as suggested above) you can isolate where the noise is coming from, its a pretty straight forward integration, there is not much some one can mess up, so i am leaning on faulty equipment, but i can never rule out installer error.
 
ok thanks guys, i will double check my gound is good and all my other connections, if it still doesn't work i will try substituting the audio soruce.

i have my ground from the avic, and ground from the wiring harness connected to the same ground point, (bolt that holds the climate control, got a metal washer between the bracket and ground so its no toughing plastic)

if my ground was bad would my unit even turn on?
 
bstevens39 said:
ok thanks guys, i will double check my gound is good and all my other connections, if it still doesn't work i will try substituting the audio soruce.

i have my ground from the avic, and ground from the wiring harness connected to the same ground point, (bolt that holds the climate control, got a metal washer between the bracket and ground so its no toughing plastic)

if my ground was bad would my unit even turn on?
Click to expand...

Yes, because it could pick up a ground path using the antenna cable.
Other opinions may vary, but I prefer to connect the ground coming from the car's harness to the AVIC's harness with no connection to the chassis ground. That gives the AVIC the same ground path that Ford intended for the OEM headunit. (Not all grounds are the same. There are "clean" grounds and "dirty" grounds used on the car.)
That said, I do not believe that your grounding to the climate control bracket is a problem at all, and now that it's done, I'd leave it that way.
 
bstevens39 said:
if my ground was bad would my unit even turn on?
Click to expand...

the units can run with a bad ground, it depends on how "bad" the ground is, if the resistance to ground was real high, then no, it would not turn on, or it would find a new path for the power to flow, like through the antenna wire.

but if the resistance to ground was fairly low, then the unit would work until the unit needed more power than what was able to travel through the bad ground, for instance, it would turn on and seem to work at low volumes, but then cut out when you tried to turn up the volume.

now the real kicker is that not all metal parts in the car are a great source of ground, because of the way that a bunch of parts are spot welded together, there could be very small differences in the resistance to ground at different parts in the car, those small differences can and will produce noises in the audio system, not that i think that this is what is going on in your car, since there is no sound other than the noise coming out of the speakers.

i would just use the ground in the factory wire harness, as since it was designed to be used as a source of ground for the audio system, it should be in a spot that has a very low resistance to ground that yields no noise


EDIT: damn it Joe, you beat me to it once again, i guess i need to practice my typing skills and be a little faster on the keyboard, or just be a little shorter winded
 
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so if i connect my ground from my avic to the ground from the stereo harness, i don't need to connect it to any point on my car?
 
No (as in that's right - there's no need for the extra ground), the ground coming from the car's harness is already connected to the best ground point for the audio system. This assumes that whatever adapter harness you may have used is wired correctly.
 
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