Wiring a Car Stereo and Speakers, Amp, & Sub made EASY for Beginners

hey everybody Steve here and I can't tell you how excited I am about this video this is gonna be really really really fun and something I've never ever done before is put a big old subwoofer in a car I'm so excited about this we're also gonna do some 6 by 9s in the back it already has some nice five and a quarters I put those in about a year ago because the factory ones were completely dead and we're gonna go with this Kenwood exelon d/dx 396 which is the bottom of the line touch screen head unit with six outputs is what my requirement was and also my other requirement was that I want to be able to listen to music from my phone so speaking of those six outlets there's the RCA's for the fronts the backs and a sub there's this there's a amplifier kit and the creme de la creme is this kicker amp it is a 5-channel amp for the channels are 65 watts and the subwoofer is 300 watts at - 2 ohms so that's going to go into the seat I hope and I also got a couple enclosures for the 6 by 9s and in addition to those enclosures I also have some speed wire also 9 also known as 9 winner incidentally all of this stuff can be found on Amazon and I'll leave links to all of this stuff in the description of the video if you want to replicate this one the only thing that I can think of that you might want to do different is you might want to add depending on the size of your front speakers you might want to add some five and a quarters okay let's talk about wiring this is the wire harness that came with the radio or the stereo whatever you want to call it unfortunately the stereo doesn't know what kind of car it's going into doesn't know whether it's going into a Ford or Chevy or a Dodge or a Lamborghini so what we need to do is we need to buy a car specific wiring harness for this to attach to and that looks like this this one in particular is a mattre 70 - 2003 and it is for General Motors cars between 1998 and 2008 and it looks like this here's the good news if you're just installing the stereo or the head unit it's a one-for-one okay for every wire you see over here red yellow black etc etc etc you'll see a corresponding wire over here and you just match them up one for one for one for one and that's it period end of story you're done you're wired it's easy okay so now I'm gonna step up the level of difficulty but just a tiny bit in some vehicles for example my 2006 Colorado the original wiring harness did not have a switch source which is this red wire right there so wiring from the radio through the aftermarket into the the cars system won't do anything so what I'm gonna need to do is instead of wiring those two together I'm just going to take this guy right here and now I have to find in the fuse box a switched source and then running this thicker wire to the fuse box so everything else would be just the same it's just that I need to find a switch source ok scenario three ups the ante a little bit but still not that difficult what we've got here is we've got our car harness and we've got our aftermarket harness and all the power stuff is still being connected there and by power stuff I mean the red which is switched and yellow which is constant and orange which is the dimmer and black which is ground and those sort of things they're still doing exactly what they were doing in the previous example but look the greens the Browns the purples and whites are no longer connected and the reason for that is because I'm adding an amp to the system so what I'm going to be doing is from the amplifier I'm going to be wiring this this is called speed wire there's actually nine wires in there and it's all eight wires for the speakers and then one one extra wire for a switched source and essentially what this is gonna do is this end right here which I haven't done anything with is going to go into the back of the amplifier and the rest of it is going to find its way back up to the wire harness because I'm putting in an amplifier I'm not going to be needing the four wires from the radio I will be using those I'll be using these instead so instead of connecting the radio speaker stuff to the aftermarket speaker stuff I'm going to be connecting the amplifier speaker stuff to the aftermarket because remember on the other end of this is the car okay so we need to tell the car to drive the speakers once we add an amp all of that information is going to be coming from the amp so that's the amplifier telling the speaker is what to do and the speaker's getting connected to here and going through there and right where my finger is there's going to be wires specifically to the speakers because think about it that the speakers already work with the factory radio all we're doing is tapping into it right here so I've already got wires going to all four speakers that would be eight wires now there's one piece missing here and is the RCA cables I'm going to be running RCA cables from the back of the radio itself which is not pictured here and those are going to go directly to the amplifier so right now I'm ready to start joining my wires up and for that I'm going to use solder and I'll catch you back on the other side okay so I finished soldering and covering up all these lines going to the speed wire and then over here on the other side I've got the yellow and the orange and the black the red I capped off from here and all these guys I capped off as well so that I wouldn't have any chances of shorting anything and then i bundled this up because I'm gonna have to figure that out when I get down to the car but as far as the wiring is concerned wiring should be good to go alright so I really want you to come away from this with it being crystal clear so let's take a look at it pictorially what you're looking at right now is a stock factory situation where you've got a factory stereo which has got wires behind it which is basically driving four speakers and what I want to show you is what we need to do to add a five channel amplifier which is going to be here and a subwoofer which is going to be here so let's take a look at it okay so we've added some stuff basically this big huge fat red wire is the power wire because we need to run power directly from the battery to the amp this black line here is the ground for the amp the next thing that we're going to do is we're gonna run these RCA wires directly from the back of our aftermarket stereo to our amplifier so that we're basically sending the signals from the head unit or the stereo to the amps that the amp can make all the decisions and with that your aftermarket stereo is going to have its own harness that we're going to need to buy an aftermarket harness which is specific to our vehicle which is right here okay so we also talked about this speed wire or we also call that the nine wire which is basically taking all of the information for the speakers and sending it back into our harness so that we can drive all of our speakers from the amplifier so this represents a shortcut in doing all of this because you don't need to rerun any speaker wires now for those of you in the know you can also run the speaker wire Clee from the amplifier if you wanted to rewire everything I hope this makes that a little bit clearer for you I hope you enjoyed this video hope you found it informative and if so please like comment and subscribe I've got dozens and dozens of more car related videos coming up so feel free to click on the little bell you'll get notifications every time I come out with a new video so once again hope to helped and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Tahoe Steve

Views: 954,697

Keywords: car stereo installation, how to wire a car stereo, how do i wire a car stereo, car speakers installation, car subwoofer installation, car amplifier installation, how do i install an amp in a car, how do i install a subwoofer in a car

Id: 72Tmq8S71F0

Length: 8min 52sec (532 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 24 2020