Upgrading a car stereo sucks...

The last dipshit who put this stereo in didn't even cap off the unused wires. He's lucky nothing shorted, as the orange wire is live.

It's not too bad, most new cars and stereos have simple color coding. Try putting a Kenwood stereo in a 69 camaro.

There is a standard connector seen in most cars with a basic stereo here these days (iso terminals). Go outside it for some of the DVD stuff and it gets odd (was hearing earlier this evening about an 08 Land Rover and it having a dedicated fibre connection for just that, everything else another way) but iso connectors are good stuff. I almost always rip out whatever crap is in there and rewire to iso these days.

Worst one for me was some Japanese import from the early 90s (after they fail emissions regs over there they get shipped to the UK because right hand drive). There was a relay hidden in the passenger side which fed the speakers (four wires plus shield to each) which had their own amps onboard (which had of course all failed in the subsequent couple of decades), and to cap it all off the manufacturer wiring diagram (apparently made before colour printing so abstracted for that) was wrong.

I would keep the stock head unit if it's not broken and just install a aux cable and route it through the glove box.

It wasn't that bad when I did mine but I had to buy so many butt connectors cause the wires kept coming out. In hindsight I probably should have just soldered.

@endo Thats why you use heat shrinks

Don't you normally put heat shrink over a soldered connection? You can still just have a bad crimp with the butt connectors

I don't go that far with car stereos. I just wrap them like you would with a wire nut and heat shrink it. It hasn't given me any problems.

I mean, that's not really ideal because heat shrink doesn't actually conduct the connection, just insulates it, so thew quality of the connection is just the twisted wires. But it's really not that delicate and I've done jankier things before, so whatever works lol

My buddy and I ended up keeping the first blue connector, and just cut off the wire crimped parts, and crimped the new wires on, and was good to go. The deck I got was just a 30 Watt (x4) that had FM, Aux-in, USB, and Bluetooth. No CD player. $20.00 USD at Walmart. Replaced the blown door speakers with some Sony Xplode 6 and a halfs. Now my car thumps as if it has a 10 inch sub!

Hence I just be lazy and get adapters ;')
But yeh, it's a nightmare sometimes.

I think were almost beyond the days of aftermarket car audio gear... Cars today have pretty unreal sounding OEM systems in them, built in subwoofers and 400+watts of power. The market for car audio has definitely shrunk since my teen years!

Well, my car radio had no tape deck, no aux, no BT, so no way to connect my phone. I didn't touch the speakers, just got a new console.

LOL tape deck? really! hahaha I always laughed at a buddy at work.. still rocked cassette tapes.. had a huge bag of them under his seat lol (old 2000 gmc truck).. He recently bought a new truck (2015 or something) and didn't know what to do lmao... I was like " i guess you could get a walkman for the aux in jack (if you can find one that still works) lol". funniest thing ever! the guy is the most tech illiterate person ever, doesn't even believe in cell phones.

now that's my kinda guy right there Jarmenti

I can hardly wait for the 8-track to make a comeback, like vinyl has. Imagine getting an 8-track deck for your car, NEW, and having someone engineer an 8-track-cassette-to-aux adapter just to plug your phone into it. XD