Geek4ever

Wow, installing a new aftermarket car stereo can be tricky and hard. No wonder they charge so much to have it done by a professional.

First things first:

I wouln’t have to do this if there was a simple easy docking system standard for cars that just let you slip in a new head unit without any dramas, kinda like installing a new hard drive or dvd-rom into a PC.

These things all generally use the same size slot and power 4 sets of speakers, how hard could it be to standarize on the backend connections.

Well I wanted to be able to easily connect my new iPod to my Car stereo, so this needed an upgrade as the FM transmitter router just wasn’t working for me.

Buying the gear:

A new headunit is an easy thing to buy, anyone can buy one from just about anywhere for any price. Once you decide what features you want and how much you are prepared to spend, then its just a matter of shopping around and finding something in your price bracket.

I decided to buy a Panasonic CQ-C1303 because it had an AUX in port which was the main reason for the upgrade. It also plays MP3 CD’s as well as your standard Car Stereo CD player day to day chores. I really liked the blue backlight and it seemed to have a good layout for the buttons. :-)

After reading a bit about installing a car stereo on ehow.com. I decided that I needed to buy a wiring harness. A bit of searching found just 1 store that sold the one I was after, it was also pretty vague on wether or not it would match my car. Little did I know that this purchase was going to save me from total disaster, I just thought it would make things easier.

The overall Experience:

I would have to say that it wasn’t that bad. Sure it took a whole 3 hours. When I first started, I just cabled up the new headunit to the wiring harness using the included guides to make sure everything matched up, as the cables were color co-ordinated and matched each other, this was pretty easy.

Next was removing the old stereo. This was a task in itself, your car owners manual doesn’t include anything about removing the stereo and a look around on the internet didn’t find anything that I could use. A friend mentioned the first part of the puzzle and from then on it was trial and error, sure I probably removed more pieces than I needed to, but in removing those pieces, I could feel around and figure out how to remove the main center console pieces.

Once I had the stereo finally free of the center console, I realised that none of the cables were marked or color coded in anyway, so without the wriring harness I would have had to stop here and put it all back. Well thanks to extreme luck I was able to connect the stereo up and then test that it worked.

Once everything worked, even the automatic aerial that goes up when the radio is on. I had to put it all back together, this was much harder than pulling it apart due to the fidly nature of the center console, a lot of my time was spent there, though it was all worth it in the end as it’s back together nice and neat.

Would I do it again?

Probably not, it sure was a real pain and I would rather save up and get it done by professionals than have to go through that mess again. I am glad I did it, cause having the AUX in makes driving the car almost fun again, though once is enough for this lifetime, I will leave the future installs to the car geeks. :-)