Volvo 740 gets some audio upgrades

hello welcome to furious driving and this is my 1988 740 and this is the radio for my 1988 volvo 740 and it doesn't work so a little while after i bought the car having got bored of listening to static i stuck in a sony head unit which got taken out of my little red mini however it doesn't look right it doesn't fit properly it only works on one speaker so let's see if we can sort something out grab yourself a cup of coffee and come along for the not ride the city in the drive try to do wiring so climbing in what do we have well we have the original fascia of the radio which is very strange surround which is like a pyramid slope almost which means that on the aftermarket surround thing we've got to make a regular fronted radio fit it juts forward and comes down horizontally unfortunately because this radio has got rather a strange arrangement where it's floating in mid-air these big springy things hold it in place the replacement radio does kind of rattle around quite a lot so oops that wasn't good so that's not ideal secondly we've got the speakers ht223 i believe is an upgrade on the standard pack however only one works the one on the passenger side door works the one on the driver's side works not very often it sometimes flickers on from windows or two not very frequently in the back i have been wondering why these rear speakers were making no noise until i finally priced off the speaker grill and found out door cards are not very loud so that is an upgrade this car never got so i think we might rectify that today our shopping list consists of some wire speaker wire because i'm going to rewire the front door speakers because dell cables clearly are broken i know the driver's door lock is also on the shonky side because it randomly locks and unlocks itself which means there's another wire through the hinge which needs to be sorted out as well at some point meanwhile i just i'll only deal with the speakers for today because i'm not taking the entire door card off hopefully maybe if i am i'll deal with that secondly a new head unit i've gone for the lightest smallest head unit i could find i think it was the amazon reba i forget which but basically i went for retro style and then ultra lightweight there's no cd chain um player in there but it's very very light indeed so hopefully it'll fit in there and it'll lock in place and not be rattling i'm also hoping it's retro styled enough that it doesn't look too out of place the modern ones do look a bit bit weird so yeah it's got a bit of a 1980s hi-fi vibe about it bit like an old 1980s or early 90s technics perhaps if you'd ignore the fact it's got an sd card uh usb slots and phone buttons so got a bit of extra um what do you call it a bit of extra functionality there right what else have we got finally we have got some some loud speakers now i have always been a fan of alpine stuff i've stuck it in most of the cars i've ever done upgrades to another other fine brands available but i've just always used alpine stuff so i picked this up my plan is because the front door speakers were an upgrade 25 years ago and they still seem to work okay i will repurpose them into the back of the door for now if i was going all out for everything i would put a new electric antenna in the back of the car as well because this had an electrical the motorized radio aerial when it was brand new someone's replaced it with a rubber one at some point in the past however i'm not that worried and it's another few pounds of expense so we can live without that for the moment come back to another day if i feel like it oh one more thing to say is once i've got these wires in place i can finally get around to putting the blue plastic trim back around edges of the doors did i mention you can still get your quentin merchandise on the red bubble store quentin with the red wing show you're one of the og quentin fans by getting a quentin mug with the red wing before he comes back from the paint shop literally any day now i really really hope with his non-red painted wing anymore right so start off saying goodbye to the sony which has done us proud for a bit on one speaker but it doesn't really look the part all right step one done gone now this goes off to the volvo loom and this radio here has its own loom this is where things get interesting and fun yeah phone is the right word yeah so unplug this for you so these two big square connectors go into the volvo car loom matching that we have this connector here which is power earth switch ignition and electric aerial do we even need to change that one i don't think we do that one should still be working absolutely fine no need to mess around with that one that's a nice spare one for the box and then we've got this one which is the speakers now what we can do is dispense with that plug not run into anything and just wire this plug here straight into the radio and wire these cables here into the new door wire cable speaker things that make sense i think so it doesn't make sense and how does it look in there it looks good can i change gear yeah more or less because one thing i have found with any aftermarket radio in this car is that because it's so much further forward than the original one was because it was slanting away with the dashboard when you go to first third or fifth you bash your knuckles into it right let's get some wire cut right so let's try and measure up some lengths of wire to go into the various crevices of this dashboard that is so tiny isn't it so loaded with stuff it's got bluetooth aux in usb in microsd everything it's not got dab i don't think from no it's not got the ab but you know it's just absolutely loaded with everything you could want and it's about 30 pounds it's almost free almost almost three not quite free oh this will be interesting the radio antenna is a little too short for me to get my knuckles on too i'm not quite sure how much to do that that'll be fun to play with now this is the beginning of carl's being properly integrated on the interior so underneath the dashboard there is like a plastic kick plate thing with a sponge on the back for sound deadening to make the whole thing look very tidy and you need to get behind that to run a cable from the door to the uh in central column uh central stack sorry and to get into that all you need is two phillips head screwdrivers and one little plastic tag you turn the key on and the thing just lowers down then you can get a cable up into the middle bit somehow i can feel it i can't reach it there's too much hvac in there there we go got it so there that is driver's door which then runs down below that there's other stuff on cable tight too and then out into the door itself which actually just loads this pry off really simple and there is my speaker so something i really ought to look at on this door is this check strap doesn't seem to do its job very well or at all in fact so one day i must get around to doing that and these look like they've been changed once already because uh there's no sorry ignore that now why you may ask am i doing this job now of all times and i've had the car a year already and ignored it all this long well it's because on saturday i'm going to the festival of the unacceptable or unexceptional or something in fact this video may actually go out on saturday so you may be watching it while i'm there or i might put it on thursday i don't know really depends on my scheduling there we go so that's that removed and that i can reuse in the back door and this cable here feed myself out enough to to do it hopefully i do have enough to do all of the bits let's cut a bit extra long but then i can feed this out through this grommet here and hopefully we can get this out into the door right so this grommet here out into the door is so tight it's not true uh it would not accept another cable through there whatsoever so i run this beside the grommet so i can push that back in on it again and then feed that up there take this all together inside there in a second and feed that into the door so there we have one speaker cable installed as far as the door's concerned just need to put some ends on it i was about to say i would definitely recommend getting one of these cable insulation stripper things because they make life so much easier and it wouldn't prove me wrong so let's do a bit of a crimpy mccrimperson just here hopefully the door will stay [Music] in the same place long enough to do this there we go that was a relief right so that's all crimped up connected up those old cables are shoved into the door out of the way that can go in there unfortunately it looks like these screw holes don't exactly add up to where they used to be so trying to screw this into a new position that's not going to interrupt or affect the pegs that clip the uh the cover on now obviously the tighter you can hold a speaker in place the better it will sound so you don't really want it to be rattling around loose if you can at all help it this over i don't want to mix it yeah i'm going to make some modifications aren't i if i just take the end of that leg off it should be enough to allow me to get that cover grille back on again without too much aggro i hope no not having it why aren't you having it have it ever used so-and-so there we go alpine speaker fitted you'd never know awesome right now that cable can be tidied up there in a minute first of all before i finish on this side i'm going to run a cable to the back door which means same kind of deal again lay cable all the way from there down the side of the car into the back of the car which is then going to run up on inside that b post and go out into the door as we did last time i'm hoping that gromits can be a bit more forgiving to be honest now i've got these cable tied up out the way to keep them neat and tidy and i've labeled them so i know which ones which when it comes to do the connections in a minute genius like a diamond bullet so there you go there's wiring in the hidden inside there and you'd never know to come off just need to put the other the kick panel back in and this this trim down here then the car looks so much nicer i will just say these are the original or at least original volvo maybe not the original but certainly original volvo speakers so i guess they probably are 1988. they've lasted really well if you could think about how the ones in my mini and my rover coupe last didn't they 5 and 15 years newer respectively interesting there we go two more crimping but crimpers and we are in there both front speakers wired in well into the doors anyway ah done ish right unfortunately this little uh handbook thingy with the radio it does tell you what color wires go to where so you're not going to put all the earths on the same speaker by mistake all i'm connecting up is the two greens are front left the two whites the front or rear left then you've got the two greys are front right and the two purples are rear right and the ones the black stripe is the earth you really can't go wrong famous last words i have been very tempted to actually just use the um the clampy things which is a very bad practice but so much quicker and easier now i've lost the solder trying really hard not to get any burns from the solder onto the seat it's my big concern right now ow damn it that's hot right so now if i go and put the trim back in the car and i'll just say for quickly i am so glad i managed not to melt any of the uh fabric or surrounds of the car now let's go get this connected up the antenna ariel which is a little short for my purposes here unfortunately because this new radio is so much shallower i've got a lot of space back here to play with so much room for activities like before when i was putting the sony one in it was actually really hard to cram all the cables in here this time though it should actually be fairly easy connected connected ah yes see what i did there deliberate mistake obviously to connect the old speakers which i'm not using anymore well what i needed to be doing was connecting that one up i'll find the aerial i'm going to try and finagle this in there somehow which is not going to happen there's just no more giving that to take it out there we go does this power up oh yeah it's got a clock on it power button oh yeah got noise out of both speakers only crackles there's no aerial but obviously different crackles [Music] i think it's radio 2 but correctly okay it works i just need to figure out a way of making that a real go in there oh there we go we're in there now of course it's not ah this is not the most easy finagling this is probably the trickiest thing of the entire build okay now oh damn it now let's put a oh it's so close let's try it again see if the ariel makes a difference hey i think i'm gonna have a stroganoff by myself very nice she's a solo struggle so right now problem it works problem is i didn't do the brackety thing on the back of it oh damn it right so there we go right now next ah working backwards with this thing so let's put this thing in here bend the little things in there so i've got a cage for it to clip into and then i can really cut my fingers up on it which is going to make putting the aerial in absolutely impossible yeah oh is this actually working this time no it's cause it's not because i've put the metal cage in and now i can't fold the clips in oh my god it's so annoying oh okay right so oh dear me ah fold all the little bits of metal out again ah right right so now everything's in place except for the fact that i've now no way of getting the bloody aerial into it ah gotcha in okay now i need to check the power lead that's just speakers first ah it's kind of there ah yeah it's licked in it's a little bit of rattling in there but it's only very very cheap off internet so what do we expect ha just thought before i put these trim bits back in i better give them a bit of a clean up because they are disgusting right now let me see that's the blue it should be and that's the brown it is i kind of assume you can't put these into the washing machine little dishwasher that would do it it's actually an alloy wheel cleaning brush but i guess it's pretty good for getting into all the texture of this plastic as well man this has faded so badly right time has kind of beaten me it's about to rain and i need to be inside it's half past six already the day has flown by uh what i've found though is that this connections are inside the door for the speakers yellow and white and white cables with connectors on the end so i've hooked those up on both sides and i've put the side trim back for the time being but what i'm thinking i might do is actually uh connect this bit of wiring into the loom behind there because this rubber bung is really firmly put in there and there's a proper connector block in there so if i can sort of hack into the loom somehow well you know graft in somehow cleverly cleverly and unobtrusively i saved me having to mess up all that bit of rubber but moving into the front of the car we now finally have after well two three efforts a functioning modern radio which kind of blends fairly well into the dashboard it doesn't look too obtrusive as the other ones looked a lot too modern this one's claimed to be retro styled and it does look kind of yes old-fashioned like a technics or a hitachi or something a panasonic from the mid-80s so we're looking quite good here it does apparently have a very useful and in nowhere confusing and useless right but we do have phone charging usb input aux input and bluetooth which at some point i will work out how all that stuff works because i'm going to the festival of the unacceptable on saturday and i've got about four hours each way in the car so i want the audible playing right well thank you very much indeed for joining me in this adventure of making audio stuff happen in my oldness oh not mercedes it's a volvo if you've liked following this on then please do join me again next time when we're doing something else on another car i'll try and put the radio stuff on the other cars a few videos down the line so it's not on all audio channel for a bit as always please do hit like subscribe head over to redbubble grab yourself a mug a t-shirt a sticker and i'll see you again next time doing something completely different

Channel: furiousdriving

Views: 7,915

Rating: 4.9276018 out of 5

Keywords: car, cars, blog, vlog, retro, classic, classic car, retro car, motoring, Volvo 700, Volvo 740, car radio, speaker wire, audio upgrade, car stereo, new radio, new speakers

Id: GLz6_maUFQg

Length: 22min 4sec (1324 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 28 2021