#5 channel amp stock head unit upgrade#

So for the lazy like me to simply give him some speakers, amp and sub and pay the £140 and let him get on with it seems like the good idea.

#5 channel amp stock head unit upgrade#

He said that he would do a standard 6 speaker BMW E46 coupe system upgrade for £100 labour + £40 for 2 decent LOC's (he said stay away from the cheap ones which normally you would think is an up sale but he at the same time he said never bother with the expensive cable, its a total waste). The simplest, most cost-effective solution is to rip it out and start fresh with an aftermarket head unit that will play nice with your amplifier, as well as offer modern phone-integration features.Well I went into my car audio place today and we spoke about changing the stereo.

So, what it all comes down to is: the factory premium head unit is a pain in the **** to deal with. Basically, its just a three-channel equalizer, one for 'treble', one for 'bass' and one for 'sub-bass', the 'sub-bass' channel is just labeled subwoofer level instead. It doesn't affect the rear speakers because the frequencies that are being altered are below the crossover range for the rear speakers. The factory head unit controls the subwoofer level by altering bass-frequency attenuation on the two rear channels. All the signal control is on the four channel input, volume as well as the subwoofer level. There is no outside control going into the amp, it's purely a passive unit. The factory amp has all the crossovers built into it for all the different speakers. Bet you didn't know the factory amp was an eight channel, did you? It's pretty neat, two channels for L/R front tweeters, two for L/R front woofers, two for L/R rear woofers, and two channels bridged for the sub. That four channel signal goes into the factory eight channel amp.

We have a near-useless four channel signal coming from the head unit. But these devices were even more rare than the harnesses themselves, so finding one will definitely be tricky. Mercman also had a device called a BALUN, which was a complex passive device to convert the balanced differential signal to and unbalanced signal (get it: BAL>UN). But even if you can find a mercman harness, you still have to convert the balanced differential signal into an unbalanced signal, or pay out the ass for a DSP or amp that will handle the signal. Now, I haven't seen one of these harnesses pop up in a couple years, but that doesn't mean you won't be able to find one stashed in someones closet that they're willing to part with. In the past, there was a rather difficult to reach gentleman by the name of Mercman who made a special harness (the famed 'Mercman Harness'), which plugged into the factory harness at the amplifier, and had a set of four RCAs that would reach back to the trunk to connect to your balanced-differential enabled amplifier, or your digital signal processor (the JBL MS8 and several others from that time would accept a balanced differential input and output an unbalanced signal to a standard amp). The bad thing is that most aftermarket amps won't accept this signal until you get into super-high end units. This allows for an amazing level of signal clarity and signal noise reduction, second only to fiber-optics. Balanced differential signals use a fancy three wire per channel setup, with the two wires in a twisted pair and the the third wire is some sort of shield/reference wire. The head unit outputs a four channel signal, using whats called a balanced differential output. If you look around in the Car Audio section, this has been discussed several times, but hell, I'm bored, that's why I'm here, so I'll summarize.įirst off, you have to understand how the factory premium audio system works. Our stock premium head units have a subwoofer level setting thus there should be a wire just for this going to the amp if 1) is true. What's the set up that the stock equipment uses?Ģ) If that is the case (see above), then I cannot seem to find any wire on the wiring diagrams that give the subwoofer level (yes the amp-signal wire is the blue one. It may be traveling via a 4 channel output from the headunit to the amp which makes it into a 5 channel output. which has RCA input for the 4 channels as well as a sub channel (but can be used in 4 channel-input mode to 5 channel out).ġ) I don't understand how the subwoofer pre-level gets to the stock amplifier. I want to take the pre-out signals (before the stock amp) from the stock HU and run them into an aftermarket 5 channel amplifier. Everyone seems to just tap into the rear speakers to get signal for an amp (using a LOC). I've tried to do some research around here for the past couple hours but I can't seem to find a definitely answer.