How to: Wiring for Car Audio System - Power, Ground, Signal & More EXPLAINED

when you need to install wiring into a vehicle for a custom car audio system there are definitely some valuable tips and tricks to know in order to get better results what wire do we need what parts of the wire must be protected and how can we test the wire to verify it is good before installing all the trim panels and having the headache of needing to pull it back out i'm mark welcome to car audio fabrication here on this channel we do car audio gear overviews we do car audio lessons and we also do car audio build log videos like this video because in this video we're doing the electrical install upgrade for project jetta without further ado my friends let's get into this let's kick things off here we've seen everything that i've got for wiring this build so first of all we've got a bunch of 14 gauge speaker wire more than enough for our subwoofer and for our speakers if we need it we've also got some zero grade ground wire this is tinned ofc so although it's silver in color it is ofc wire got a bunch of the karma series rca connectors i misspoke earlier this is all 14 gauge wire so this is for the speakers whereas this 12 gauge wire is for the subwoofer i've got the zero gauge power wire here again it's that tinned ofc for oxidation protection and this is from the colossus flex line extremely extremely flexible wire easy to run throughout the car even though it is large in size got some different fuse blocks that we'll be using further down the line in the build once i build the amplifier rack and attach these we've got our main system fuse got a battery terminal here not positive if i'm going to use this but i wanted to have it on hand just in case got some various heat shrink along with some different connectors and our final system fuse a special thanks to new concepts for sending over all the wiring for this build and being a channel sponsor learn more about them at the link down in the video description first thing i want to do is get the big old power wire ran from the engine compartment to the back of the vehicle luckily on the jetta it's pretty easy this is on the driver's side right next to the brake pedal if we pull this out of the way we can see that there's a nice big grommet that we can use i'm gonna pop that grommet out and we're gonna put a hole in it using a better method than traditional on a grommet like this what a lot of people will do is they'll just cut like an x and then push the wire through or they'll try to cut a hole and it might not be perfect the problem with that is you can still have water kind of coming in on the wire and i try to avoid that for obvious reasons so the better approach here is to use a leather punch set i like to pick a punch that is slightly smaller than the outside of the wire itself and i can just give this a whack with a hammer and it's going to give us a nice perfect cut through hole after we make that cut you can see how this is going to have a nice perfect seal on the wire to get the wire into the engine compartment i'm going to do the old zip tie trick here i've already got the grommet threaded onto the wire here make sure that you have it in the correct direction obviously but i can just poke this through that hole that we saw there and then i'll build a fish it out in the engine compartment and pull this up through check it out i pushed this up through and it was sitting right here when i came around to the engine compartment so first try i'm gonna need both hands here but i can pull it up through once i have the wire ran into the engine compartment here i like to make sure that it's good and protected so this meant wrapping it in wire loom like you see here and i use a specialty tool i actually did a full review video about this so you can check out up in the corner of the screen after i wrap the wire with the loom i then wrap it with exterior protection tape from jk tapes this gives me a really really nice strong protected wire inside the compartment i make sure that that tape goes all the way back through the grommet when i pull it through like this so you can see that is a nice perfect firewall transition now i can run the rest of the power wire to the back of the vehicle i'm going to follow along this factory wire harness here so i've got the main power wire laid in here and i've also ran the remote wire alongside that allows the head unit to tell the amplifiers to turn on it is a little messy for the time being i'm going to clean everything up once i run all of the wires but the last wire i want to run on this side of the vehicle since this is all going to be the power side of the vehicle is i need to run the acr connection wire this is audio control's little dash control that we can use on the dsp amp in order to adjust the volume of the subwoofers so i'm going to run that wire as well here's another helpful tip for you guys before you run these kind of wires that have smaller strands inside of them always do a continuity test just to verify that the wires are good there's nothing worse than running a wire through the whole vehicle putting on the interior back in and then finding out that somewhere in the wire there's an issue so i always like to do this for these little dash control wires as well as rca signal wires as long as you use quality wire you will rarely have an issue but it's worth doing this quick test for that one time that you might find something now that i know that dash remote control wire is good i can run it alongside the power wires and start buttoning everything up with some zip ties always be sure to use a good set of flush trim cutters to cut that end of the zip tie perfectly flush with the head and here we have it my friends the positive power wire is completely ran everything is completely zip tied in there along with the remote turn on lead in the remote dash control for the acr3 that's going to be right about here in the center console next up i need to run the rca signal wires these are going to carry the signal from the head unit to the back here to our dsp amplifier and what's really nice about this particular set is it has four different connectors so we can do front left front right rear left and rear right i'll be using the dsp amplifier to create the subwoofer signal and send that to the secondary sub amp so we only really need these four connections going up front i'm gonna run those along this side of the vehicle it's usually a good idea if you can to try to avoid having the power wire and the signal wires on the same side of the vehicle so in this case there's plenty of room on both sides so we're gonna do that but at the end of the day if you're using a high quality signal wire it's not as big a deal as what it used to be you can still have this close to the power wire you're obviously more prone to noise in that instance but again with a high quality signal wire it's not as likely to happen i'm also going to run speaker wires from the amplifiers up to here where they will make their connection which goes into the vehicle wiring because these door molexes are nearly impossible to get speaker wire through so i can use the factory speaker wiring it's not going to be a very big deal because it is shorter runs and what we're going to be doing for our application there would really be no huge benefit with increasing the speaker wire size and again it's nearly impossible to get through these anyway so it's going to do just fine for our application so signal and speaker wire are now ran on this side and you guys can see i've got the carpet back in the vehicle here i can start adding the trim on the sides got the wires secured on each side going into the trunk there is still some work to do in the trunk the last connection i need to add in the trunk here is to add a ground now i did measure this factory ground location right here and this measured to be less than 0.1 ohm of resistance all the way up to the front of the vehicle so definitely a good ground i'm going to make my connection there i first strip away the insulation and i'm going to use this crimp terminal from new concepts in my hydraulic crimper i'm gonna crimp this down that gives us a really really nice crimp on that wire i can then apply the heat shrink and heat shrink it up now it's back into the trunk where i can connect the ground wire to the factory ground location using that oem nut and with that my friends we now have all the wires in the back of the trunk ready for the next stage of this project now you guys might have noticed that i've already applied all the sound treatment materials in this vehicle and that video is going to be coming up soon i'm also going to make a video showing you guys how i built this special mounting panel that integrates into our center console for that remote dash control we're also going to be building a box for these 213s so tons of cool videos coming up on this project we just passed 500 000 subscribers that's awesome guys thank you so much for all the support if you are new here i would love to have you as a subscriber once again a special thanks to our monthly channel sponsored new concepts for your next car audio build definitely consider checking them out for all of your wiring needs also a special thanks to bryson mike ali jared jerry marcos william and the rest of the patreon membership team a big thanks to all those guys for making these videos possible and as always my friends thank you guys for watching don't forget to design build and install

Channel: CarAudioFabrication

Views: 195,601

Keywords: car audio fabrication, car audio, caraudiofabrication, wiring car audio, amplifier wiring, amp wiring, power wire, ground wire, 0 gauge, 4 gauge, how to wire amp, speaker wire, rca wire, signal wire, remote turn on, bass knob, amplifier, install

Id: YR52kzA4BTQ

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020