Back to the center of the car, we removed the center console and antique Kenwood head unit to expose a pretty standard stereo rat-nest.
In the trunk of the car was this massive 400W amplifier mounted to a heavy piece of stereo board that was screwed to the floor of the trunk. The power, Ground, RCA, speaker, and subwoofer wires all ran from the cabin of the car, through the engine bay, and into the trunk of the car. This was a lot of messy lines that we had to clean up.
The speaker wires were a bit of a jumbled mess, we rerouted them from the trunk to just behind the driver’s head, which is were our new, significantly smaller amplifier will sit.
After cutting wires to length and spending half a minute with the routing, we now have a much cleaner installation.
We have much shorter RCA connectors going from the head unit to the new amplifier.
1 comment
That looks great and really provides subtle updates yet retains much of the look and feel of the original.
Be careful with that headunit though, or the android based ones like that. They usually run older builds of android, on older processors, with no way to *easily* upgrade the OS without rooting it and going down a rabbit hole there… It’s like buying a 5yr old android phone today, and using it, assuming it’ll work like today’s phones. Still a huge improvement from where you’re coming from. 🙂
You can still find some period correct headunits from pioneer or my favorite a Nakamichi CD45Z from that era. excellent quality, and has a line input, which you can adapt a BT adapter to. Sony also makes modern double-DIN headunits with knobs. KNOBS! God I miss knobs on aftermarket headunits.