Standard Stereo Upgrade!

[onlinegamesnz]

Hi,

I am upgrading the stereo in my 5 Series E34 as i have finally decided i need CD. I was woundering if anyone could tell me where i could find a wiring digram fom the plug. I was also woundering if i would loose any OBC/ECU information by playing around with these electrics? I am generally good with electronics and have installed many stereos in cars but this is a beamer ofcourse!

Anyone help PLEASE!!!
used:

[superdeadman]

Originally Posted by onlinegamesnz

Hi,

I am upgrading the stereo in my 5 Series E34 as i have finally decided i need CD. I was woundering if anyone could tell me where i could find a wiring digram fom the plug. I was also woundering if i would loose any OBC/ECU information by playing around with these electrics? I am generally good with electronics and have installed many stereos in cars but this is a beamer ofcourse!

Anyone help PLEASE!!!
used:

well first of all, it's a bimmer, not beamer (beamer, beemer is a BMW motorcylce )
second, i'm not sure personally, but if no one responds to this thread, please check out bmwtips.com to see if you can find somethign there, and if not, go to roadfly.org or bimmerforums.com

I'm sure there are members on this forum that had the same problem, but unfortunately i do not know of the solution.
ohh and WELCOME to WERKZ!

[da_bull]

http://www.bimmerwerkz.com/forum/aud...ios-45420.html

to the forums...

[BeemerMan]

Originally Posted by superdeadman

well first of all, it's a bimmer, not beamer (beamer, beemer is a BMW motorcylce )

Hey thats my name :lol:

[wcleafs]

are you replacing the stock head unit with a after market?
what plug do you want the wiring diagram for?

A couple words of advice as I just replaced my stock stereo with an aftermarket unit.

1. due to the 10 speaker configuration and the amplifier utilizing a passive crossover (built in to the stock amp) any proper replacement will require a crossover to be used. I built my own and customized the cross over points to suit what I wanted.

2. There is a post floating out there suggesting that the person that posted it simply removed the OEM plug and connected the front and rear speakers to their respective outputs from the aftermarket head unit. If you try this wait for the smoke to appear out of your head unit as doing this will create almost dead shorts due to paralleling 3 speakers together. :

3. aftermarket head units work better with seperate grounds for each channel . Experience talking here, I had to run a seperate set of grounds from the crossover back to the head unit. prior to doing that I had degraded output and a amplifier imbalance which caused distortion.


If anyone has any questions on this fire me off a PM

Hope this helps and I saved you all the headaches I experienced, Spent the better part of 2 days in my trunk rewiring and cusing. :lol:

[mobileemotions]

This a wiring nightmare, but I will give you a description for an amplied system. The speaker wire is the hardest to deal with. So to figure out which wire goes were there is a few ways to do it. Turn on your car stereo - yes people might freak at this. Cut one wire coming from amp. One speaker will turn off. Find the like wire with the strip and cut that. Connect these wires to your 3 way crossover if a front speaker. The upper one on the door is the tweeter on the dash is mids and lower one is the lows. So connect to the crossover the one that you cut. Repeat until your done with all 20 wires. The rear speakers will be connected to your four channel amp directly. The bmw amp is located in the left rear part of the trunk.

Put your new headunit in the dash, run two sets of rca wires -front and rear to the trunk from your new headunit - because of the tight depth for stereo install use right angled rca behind the new deck. Run one wire from the blue wire on your new headunit to the trunk (remote wire). Hook the yellow wire up to any constant wire, the red to the ignition wire or wire the comes on when you turn on the car. Ground the black wire to the car or to a grounded wire. hook up the antenna wire to the stereo. Your dash is done.

Take the rca's and the remote wire hook them up to the amp. Since your battery is under the back seat, take some short power and ground wire and hook directly to the battery. You might need to replace the battery terminals to hook up the additional wire.
Now run the crossovers to channel one and two and the rear speakers to channel 3 and 4. Turn the gain down on the amp for the front speakers. Tweak the volume (gain controls) to get the balance your want.

There is a simple harness that does work if their is no amp, but I thought all these cars had amps. Not sure since I have only done this install on two of these cars and they both had amps in them. I didn't use the harness, because of the amplier. You can still use the harness for the power and ground (Red, yellow and black wires) though so this would save some time.

Yes I do sell car stereo stuff and I own a 89 535i and have 2x12" subs added to this set up also. The car though would probably sound better with a single 8" sub for added support. Since my Alpine deck with built in xm was stolen last week, I am sure I will be changing things around.

You can run all the wiring back to the headunit instead of using an amp in the trunk. If that is the case then run the 8 wires to the head unit instead of a 4 channel amp.

http://mobile-emotions.stores.yahoo....19wihapli.html

Jim
mobile-emotions.com

[wcleafs]

If needed I have the pin outs and wiring colours for the harness in the trunk. testing was quite simple and all you need is a nine volt battery and a couple wires.
There is already a remote wire in the harness so no need to rerun one of those and you can use the high level outputs from the head unit vice the low level RCA cables. (just for ease)

with after market head units it will be wise to run two more ground lines due to BMW's design work on the OEM head unit.