Paul350Z

iTrader: (1)

My car is about four months old now and I've come to the conclusion that the $1500 Bose unit is worth about $400. I tried changing out the rear speakers and the subwoofer hoping that it would help. Nope.

So after much research and planning it begins.



Up front is going to be a Pioneer AVIC N2 with navigation, DVD and MP3 playback abilities. I bought the optional voice remote control microphone and steering wheel mounted remote.

I've mounted the Pioneer 6-CD changer into the small pocket behind the passenger's seat. That guy is going to be a pain to get right as it has to slide in from the front but needs to be supported in the back. I'll take the current stock pocket holder and modify it to support the back end of the CD player.



I installed a one hundred amp fuse next to the battery and ran 4 gauge cable back to the luggage cubby behind the passenger's seat. Eventually I plan on buying an amplifier to drive the Zenclosure e-bay box and Infinity 10VQ speakers that are in the mail.



The four gauge cable will run back to the amplifier rack. Here's the ground and power distribution blocks waiting installation. It's sized to fit inside the little recess below the floor of the luggage cubby.



The Pioneer AVIC N2 requires a whole lot of wires. I figure close to 150 feet between five speakers, three RCA, GPS, microphone, remote unit, parking brake, rear view camera, front mounted screen, reverse sensor, and AM/FM antenna.



I mounted the remote unit under the passenger's seat close to the transmission hump. Cables from this guy run forward to the headend and aft for the reverse sensor and CD player.



The GPS antenna is going to be mounted just forward of the triple gauge cluster. Pioneer supplies a peel and stick metal plate which acts as a ground plane improving GPS reception. Sitting that far forward on the window it's going to get a very good view of the sky. I wanted to have the cable come out of the center of the the dash so I had to cut a keyhole for the large jack to fit though and to allow the dash to seal up with the cable in place.



A test fit to see if the cable fits. A bit more filing needs to be done at this point. (No I'm not going to leave five inches of cable loose up there!)



I'm at a hang up point now as the dash mounting kit Crutchfield sent me was broken in two places. I cursed them out royal. I bought everything at the same time and all the first volley of equipment arrived within two to three days. Crutchfields broken mounting plate took 13 days to make it here.



I've got a replacement coming from Arizona so it's hopefully here today or Monday. The speakers arrive Tuesday next week so I'll start in on assembling them. Prior to buying the subwoofer amplifier I want to hear the Pioneer drive the front Pioneer Kappa Perfect 6.5's to see if the volume is good enough at 20 something watts. Most of the four channel amplifiers I'm looking at are 45-50 watts which is just 3 dB louder which ain't a whole lot louder. I will no way crank the system up to stupid levels but so want it to sound 7-up ... crisp and clean.

So if the head end drives the door and rear speakers loud enough I'll get a nice mono subwoofer amplifer. If not I've got to decide on two amp - a 4 channel and a mono, or on big five or six channel amplifier. I'll cross that bridge once I get the head end installed and do some testing.

I did a custom install and made my own iPod interface. Everything I've read says that the $120 Pioneer iPod interface is teh sux displaying only the first eight letters of the song's title, is slow to navigate and other issues. So I'm going to use the A/V input on the AVIC to run the iPod's audio into it. I might add a front mounted camera (think no lip damage!) to the video side of that input. I took apart my Griffin car power adapter and hard wired it into the car. While I was at it I added a three blue LED cluster to the center console's lid with a switch. The iPod will sit in there and do just fine. I can pull it out and drop it into to a cup adapter that will sit in my coin pocket replacement cup holders.





Today I'm going to work on the door speakers, connecting the parking brake and reverse sensors. I'm waiting on a second 50 sq.ft. of fatmat to arrive too ... the car is going to stink like asphalt for a month again.

BTW - does anyone really know where the speed sensor wire is? After looking at a dozen or so post here it would seem that the consensus is that it's the white wire connected to the white box just forward of the shifter ... just one wee problem. THERE IS NO WHITE WIRE! There is a white wire with a black stripe and a white wire with two light gray rings but no white wire.

I picked the white wire with two light gray loops figuring that the people putting out "white wire" never really looked along the wire do discover the two gray loops every few inches. If the thing smokes I'll let you know.

rplink

Paul, I noticed the same thing when I installed my AVN5435. I'm almost positive I hooked the speed sensor wire up to the White/gray.

Question, why didn't you install the GPS antenna on the strut bar? Mine works great back there and I even have it under the plastic cover.

TiPIACE

wow ur attempting this yourself

im planning a similar setup, but ill lose my car for a whole month by the time its finished

i had the same setup with dvd, tv, dts, etc in my last car and when i took everything out there was so much cable it took two boxes to take home
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...e/120_2059.jpg

im interested to see where u mount the reverse cam. I bought the Pioneer ND-BC1 and thinking of flush mounting it on top of the numerplate with a small hole in the plate for the lense to poke through. But the last thing i want is my installer having to remove the bumper

ill def be giving my installer some of ur pics so we can work out what path to feed the wiring

good luck with the install dude

Deceit

Paul,

Your setup is going to be pretty badass. Can't wait to see how it turns out. This is definitely one hell of an organized install!

Good luck!

Paul350Z

iTrader: (1)

I'm probably going to go with a micro-camera from www.supercircuits.com and mount it near the rear license plate.



I use to do custom car stereo installations 24 years ago when I was just a kid.

I got the CD in and it's perfect.

Paul350Z

iTrader: (1)

Got the microphone installed. I pulled the A pillar cover off and found a cable bundle which has been a source of a pretty constant rattle. There are two (2!) white connectors in the pillar which I there were the source of the problem. I ran the microphone cable down this path and bundled the two stock bundles together with wire ties every few inches. After this picture I also wrapped a bit of electrical tape up and down to further pad the cables.



The cable drops down behind the dash from the front area of the A pillar cover. I taped and wire tied the cable across the bottom of the dash and then up into the head end area.

TxTitan

Pretty dam awsome so far man

rplink

Paul, thanks for the tip on the a pillar rattle. I've had a rattle in that area for a long time and I thought it was actually coming from the front dash piece.

How did you get the A pillar off? Can't find a How to on that one.

Thanks.

MajorWoody

iTrader: (2)

Damn, that's going to be a great set up.

rplink

Nevermind Paul, took a real close look at your pics and saw the two clip holes. Got the pillar off, no problem.

Paul350Z

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I took a break for the heat at the thermometer hit 92 degrees inside the garage ... and 105 outside (in the shade!)

I found the reverse signal wire. It's located on the driver's side inside the rear quarter panel. Since I already had them off it was easy enough to track it down.

It's located in the third jack down of the four. I believe one of these feeds the Bose amplifier.



Using volt meter and a pin to reach inside the jack I put the car in reverse and hunted for +12VDC. There are a few of them in there so working the gear lever back and forth between reverse and forward I found that the cyan (blue-green) wire with a dark silver-gray stripe was the correct one.

I ran the sensor cable back along the transmission hump, though the open lugage cubby area, up thru the speaker bridge area, out the back and along to the left rear quarter panel.

TiPIACE

Paul that camera looks awesome. Have you see it in action? Is it a good picture? It says viewing angle is 53degree, whereas the pioneer is 112degress

Paul350Z

iTrader: (1)

The lens comes off and you can get a wild wide angle one for about $15-20 depending.

S0 I went back to work

I ran the RCA cable bundle down from the head end. Removed some earlier wiring on an expermental LED foot well lighting and the radar detector's wires. Those will get re-run off of the new power distribution system. I've got some purple neon lights to try in the foot wells next time.

I went to work on the passenger door and ran into loads and loads of problems. First the factory wires are darn near impossible to change out as they plug into a jack that's in the kick panel ... darn.

So I remove the stock bloze speakers (see picture below) and fit my 1" spacer in. The window is already rolled down (old installer habbit) and find that the speaker's magnet presses up against the glass. I make a 3/8" gasket out of plywood to add to the front of the plastic spacer.

I couldn't figure out where to mount the huge crossover so I fat matted the inside of the outside medal and mounted the thing there.

Lots of soldiering, lots of wires to tighten down.



I'm worn out having spent about eight hours on the thing today and about four hours on Friday. If I only had the darn face plate bezel I'd be happy.

TiPIACE

Paul does the stock speaker grille still fit over the speaker with the spacer?

Can you tell me the depth of the speakers you have? Im a bit worried my JBL GTi's wont fit http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...e/121_2170.jpg

Paul350Z

iTrader: (1)

My speakers are 2.75" deep. The tweeter will get surface mounted right over where the old tweeter was. I don't think you'll get a stock speaker grill to even come close to fitting over the stock hole - if you look at its curved - there isn't a flat mounting surface to mount to. The rear speakers it's possible buy cutting out the stock ones.

Paul350Z

iTrader: (1)

One step forward ... one big step backwards. I would have thought that Nissan routed the pre-amp level output from the head end back the trunk mounted amplifier and then routed the speaker levels back to the head end and then out to the speakers. This would allow them to have one harness to drive cars with and without the Bose amplifiers.

Well oddly enough I was wrong. They run the pre-amp levels to the trunk mounted amplifier and then run the speaker level outputs directly to the speakers.



The lower of the two jacks is the input/output jack.

I really didn't want to try to defeat the door to kick panel jack field to get the door speakers working so I made the compromise to run with the stock wires. I wired the Pioneer head end into the output wires of the stock Bose system ... which is an issue because they're going nowhere once they hit that Bose amp.

So what I had to do is to connect the pre-amp wires (now with speaker level signals) directly to the amplifiers output wires which run to the speakers.

It took a bit of doing as the left side's pre-amp input changes colors for some unknown reason. Here's the chart I came up with and a picture to help.





I finished with the passenger's side speakers and only have to reassemble the door once it gets the poly-wool and more FatMat installed.

Paul350Z

iTrader: (1)

And so the sage continues ... before putting the passenger's door panel back on (three times ... don't ask) I took a look at the factory speaker grill and something struck me as wrong about it.



The darn speaker isn't even centered in the hole and the grill isn't even round if the speaker was centered in it. Oh well, the mid bass shouldn't do too back with the edge blocked off ... darn Nissan.



I did find that the Infinity's stuck out too far and the lower edge of the door panel was resting against the mid-bass frame. Out came the Dremel tool once again to cut away at the lip of the door frame allowing the suround gasket freedom.

It took putting the door panel on wrong once to find that the lock cable had fallen out and twice to get the power window cable back into the hole to connect it back to the switch panel.

Kaitain

iTrader: (3)

Yeah, that is annoying. Looks like those speakers might rub against the door panel if you start thumping to some Fidy.


I think mine (XR-650 CSi's) are doing that when there is too much bass up front. I only had the problem when I was trying to adjust the stereo since I don't really blast the radio but it is still annoying.

Paul350Z

iTrader: (1)

Yeah, that bottom picture is about 50% through my Dremel experence. I cut a bit and tried it, pulled the bottom out a bit and cut a bit more then tried the grill then repeated until I got it to the point where I was happy ... and I didn't even put the diamond cutting wheel though the speaker!

The Pioneer lets you do a low pass filter when running a subwoofer and it adjusts to remove the lowest bass from the door mid-bass speakers letting them work better at what their best at.

I fired the thing up ghetto style - I wrapped a towel around the bottom of the head end and stuck it in the big hole in the dash. I put the AC controls back in and put the triple gauge cluster in the trunk so I could attach the GPS antenna.

The unit it complaining about the emergency brake but all other signals available were good. I didn't move the thing so I don't know about the speed sensor.

Sounds pretty good. The one Kappa side is a whole lot better than the driver's stock Bose speaker that's for sure. The CD player worked perfect and the cassettes that hold the CD's are really easy to get out. I got all four speakers in the right corners and think I got the phase proper too - I'll test it closer once I get the driver's door done.

My dash bezel arrives from Arizona on Tuesday, my subwoofers on Monday, and my second 50 sq.ft. of FatMat some time next week. I'm going shopping for a mono subwoofer amp and a couple of cameras.

Haven't tested out the home made iPod interface or installed the new neon/LED footwell lighting. It's about 90 degrees in the garage which is way too hot for my Duluth Minnesota born butt to handle while working my behind off. I wonder if I could air condition the garage ...

parboy

Paul, might be a little late now as you've already done your speaker wiring, but it's very easy to get new speaker wire into the doors. You just have to pull those connectors out, drill a matching hole on each one and run the wire through. I was able to get 14ga in there no problem. I just went by the install instructions and pics in the sticky at the top of this forum.