Car Stereo Wiring Harnesses & Interfaces Explained - What Do The Wire Colors Mean?

nearly 3 years ago we did a radio installation or how to wire a radio properly what we're going to do in this video is we're going to take you through another radio wiring and we're going to show you when to use a harness and when to use an interface what wire colors do and how to make your connections both in color and the way we do it here so the first step in wiring any radio is obviously to figure out what car you have what I mean by that is you need to make a determination as to do you need a harness or do you need an interface there's a big difference between the two an interface is typically used in more newer vehicles and generally those that have a factory amplifier the reason for that is many of today's newer vehicles have data bus systems so in the old days you would turn the key one wire would go to 12 volts and turn on the radio in most newer Vehicles that's actually done through a data bus signal so you won't find a wire that actually turns on with the key instead it sends a series of signals and the data bus decodes those signals and then tells a radio to turn on by providing the power to the radio to turn on you'll need to create that and to do that we need an interface now some Vehicles can still get by with just using an ordinary uh wiring harness and those connections are relatively straightforward when using an interface the connections are a little bit more difficult but ultimately they're the same so we're going to take you through on how to wire each one as you can see we have two harnesses both harnesses look very similar however there's one distinct difference one uses rcas one uses speaker levels this factory amplifier uses the same type of signals that an aftermarket amplifier does low-level signals this vehicle doesn't have a factory amp so we're going to use the amplifier in the new radio to drive the speakers and just make our speaker connections we have quite a few wires and we'll go over what the actual wires do so we have a yellow wire what this is is a constant meaning this is a direct line to the battery what this does is actually provides most of the power to the radio and provides memory backup then we have a blue wire that blue wire is a remote turn on or power antenna this provides 12 volt out and that signal actually comes from the aftermarket radio what this wire will do is either trigger a power antenna trigger an antenna amplifier or trigger the factory amplifier then we have two green speaker leads these are the left rear green being the positive green black being the negative then we have two purple speaker wires this is the right rear purple being positive purple black being negative then we have our black wire this is ground then we have our red wire this is accessory or turns on with the key this is what actually triggers the radio to turn on on next we have our white speaker pairs these are the left front Channel white being positive white black being negative lastly for our speaker wires we have the gray set these are the right front gray being positive gray black being negative and then finally we have the orange wire the orange wire is typically an illumination wire in some Vehicles it's called a dimmer wire occasionally you'll see a orange and black wire labeled dimmer typically these have the exact same function however the dimmer may actually adjust up and down between 0 volts and 12 volts as you make an adjustment to your interior dash lights that's the difference between illumination typically illumination is 12 volts only either on or off and dimmer is actually a riat goes up and [Music] [Music] down [Music] in our previous video we showed how to make a connection using crimp connectors specifically butt connectors now some people like to use crimp caps they do yield a slightly better connection but what we really like to do is actually solder joints typically because they will not come apart like butt connectors whereas you could actually pull one of these connections apart and there these are susceptible to failure and we'll show you exactly how Buck connectors can fail so we'll just take a simple piece of wire we'll make a simple strip we're just going to put the two wires in and crimp them and then I'll try to pull it apart and you'll see It'll fail relatively [Music] easily so on this one we're just going to pull and you can see it breaks right apart and generally when I actually make a connection with a buck connector I actually bend the front p portion of the wire in this actually prevents most failures but I'll show you that you can actually still make one fail so when placing it you can see we actually only go about halfway through the buck connector Bend Over The Wire put the wire in make our crimp do the same thing with the other side now for most this is actually a fine connection and you can see I'll be able to try to pull pretty hard and I can't get this to come apart now I however have been able to pull the insulation back which is dangerous now the wire failed either method of crimping actually does work and it's not likely that it will fail but there's always a possibility and how often do you really want to tear apart a dash whereas you could have just soldered it and it will never come [Music] apart one question we get asked a ton is should I cut my harness that comes with my radio of course you should what you need to do is actually trim this down to make it fit behind your dash now some things you don't want to cut off are a noise filter it's there for a reason you could cut it off it's not wise probably lead to some engine noise you also do have an inline fuse for the accessory wire probably should leave that should you cut the wire on the constant well you could it's likely that the vehicle has a fuse on this wire as well generally of almost the same size I'm in the habit of not cutting these off I can wrap it in such a way that it's not a problem for me um but I will go ahead and make all the other connections cut them to length and then generally Loop this one through something similar to this that way we'll cut it right here make it to our Metro harness so now we'll solder the connections first thing we do is cut our wires to length to make our life easy next we'll tape up our power wires the red yellow and black up to the noise filter just to kind of clean that up so we can make our speaker connections and all our other connections just a little bit simpler we use our favorite Tesla cloth tape links in the [Music] bio [Music] so all of our connections are meticulous now we're going to cut our heat shrink all to the exact same size it's a bit Overkill something we like to do [Music] though and we always retain the first one that we cut that way all of them are the exact same length I usually start by doing the power wires first then the speaker wires then the remaining [Music] wires [Music] [Music] a [Music] [Music] a [Music] [Music] he [Music] before we tape any harness you can see we have some extra wires that are left over now in our example we're using an old Panasonic harness and on this harness it actually has a dedicated Remote turn on out and a power antenna out which is this blue wire here and it says aent so we're not going to use that what they call side brake is actually the parking brake typically if we had the signal in this harness we would make the connection the parking brake is usually ground and you actually need to make that connection at the parking brake or for those of you that want to bypass it it's up to you those of you that have a double D or navigation radio you're going to have a reverse wire a vehicle speed sense and a parking brake now vsss that's actually a pulsed signal that goes up and down with your speed those can usually only be connected at either the speedometer or with an interface and then the reverse wire reverse wire on a double D or a monitor radio for that matter will actually trigger the backup camera so this will need to be either made somewhere in the kick panel or actually at the reverse light so in our example we're not going to use any of these three wires so we're going to tape them off and now we're going to go ahead and clean up our harness to make it look nice and make it easier to tuck behind the dash once again we'll turn to Tessa and we'll go ahead and start taping it up [Music] and just to make it look extra special we have two exposed wires we're going to tape those too [Music] we made it easy for the sake of the video and just use a simple harness that's pretty basic this only applies to vehicles that have standard audio systems and when trying to do a harness like this it's much the same just the RCA's Now when using an interface you generally have considerably more wires and that's because of the design of the interface and this interface actually has steering wheel control as well but our harness for the most part is the same so this will plug in at the vehicle side this will plug into the actual controller and then we have our wires so on this one we have red for accessory yellow for constant black for ground RCA on this it may be the auxiliary in that's in the center console or it could actually be to the subwoofer a 3.5 mm to the steering wheel control on the aftermarket radio and then this one uses actually speaker level connections to the rear speakers and on this interface there's another harness that actually comes from the output of the controller that contains all the other wires so your red wire your uh front speaker wires your illumination wires Remote turn on that type of thing all the connections will stay the same same the only difference is now you have an interface in the middle some Metro harnesses will contain wires that you won't use one in particular that kind of pops up a lot now is brown for mute your radio May support it your radio may not if it doesn't you simply tie it off and don't use [Music] it now that we have our harness complete we can go ahead and plug this into the vehicle and then this would plug into the radio some people have mentioned they've made all these connections and their radio won't turn on what could be the problem well the first thing you do is plug this in and begin testing all of the leads if your radio is not turning on you only have three wires to test you have your ground you have your constant and you have your accessory first one being your yellow for constant make sure you have 12 VTS on that your ground use a continuity check test for ground and on your red wire which is for accessory you'll use a voltmeter to test for 12 volts [Music] one surprising question we get is do I even need a harness well technically you don't the one thing you'll face though is you'll need to actually test every single wire because there won't be wire colors that match those in the aftermarket whereas the aftermarket harness makes this really easy and the aftermarket typically maintains the same color standard both on the radio side and the interface side making wiring much much easier so in our interface we did this as just a simple radio change out now if you have aftermarket amplifiers you're going to actually need to bridge out or tee off a remote turn on lead to turn on those amps we didn't do that but in the same harness which is the blue wire you can see right here and in the harness we have it back here you would just run a lead to your amps you would want to use a disconnect namely because if you ever had to pull the radio out you would want to be able to disconnect that one wire another thing that this harness doesn't touch on is if you're running multiple amps you would run your rcas from your aftermarket stereo to your amplifier now what do you do with the speaker level outputs from the amp to the speakers well there's a couple things you could do one you could run new speaker wires we have a video that you can watch on that or what some people do is run four wires from the amp to this harness and what they will not do is make the connections from the aftermarket radio to the speaker connections they'll actually take the four leads from the amplifier and connect them to the aftermarket harness thereby using the stock speaker wires to actually power the speakers when choosing not to solder connections you can either use crimp Caps or you can use butt connectors now butt connectors typically come in one of three sizes yellow being for 10 and 12 gauge blue being for 14 and 16 red being 18 through 22 so you'll need to size accordingly we generally use the blue because most of the time it's between 14 and 18 gauge wire both on the aftermarket harness and the fact or the aftermarket radio harness hopefully this new video helps clear some things up provides additional Insight subscribe if you're new click that like button make sure to follow us on Instagram at qualitymobile video and thanks for watching [Music] a

Channel: Quality Mobile Video

Views: 5,680,145

Keywords: wiring harness, how to, wire car stereo, wire, stereo, car, car radio, car stereo, how to wire a car stereo, how to wire a car radio, interface, stereo interface, metra, axxess, aftermarket, install aftermarket stereo, install, harness, connect a wiring harness, solder wiring harness, solder wire, solder connections, solder stereo, solder radio, car interface, car wiring harness, wire repair, wiring harness colors, wire colors, colors, radio wiring, car audio, wiring, radio install

Id: -kUOZVb8XKU

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2017