im tryin to replace the factory radio/cd player for the mach 460 with a new kenwood headunit. i cant find a wiring harness that will fit the mach system. does anyone know where to find one?
yea ive looked at that one before. according to the reviews its fits but one guy said it was crap.
That sort of harness is crap. It's the same type of deal that gives you RCA outputs out of your high level output.
The only other option I see at this point is to buy some RCA wires, cut them and plug them into your aftermarket head unit. Then run the cut RCA wires into the factory amplifiers.
If you cut one end off of this wire, you will be left with essentially a two conductor wire (positive and negative for one speaker). You will need 2 of these.
To make this even easier, buy the harness I showed you, cut that leve adjustor off and connect the cut site of the RCA's to the harness. This will make it easier to discern which speaker/lead you are plugging into.
Hey. I feel your pain with adding a new CD player to a mustang. People at all the major stores told me that it couldn't be done, or that they would have to "rewire the whole system and bypass the factory amps". First of all, assuming the 99GT is simililar to my 98GT, those guys are out of their mind. All I needed was go to bestbuy (or any place that installs car audio stuff) and pick up a wiring harness kit for my car. It should be about 20 bucks. It includes one harness with a black square type of connector. This plugs into the factory plug that directs signal to the initial amp. On the stereo end of this harness, connect the speaker wires. The other harness in the kit is the gray rectangular harness which has wires for ACCpower, switch power, ground, amp lead, illumination. Doing the whole thing takes a little bit of time for a beginner (maybe an hour). Some people tried to install one of those RCA -type adapters...it was junk. Good luck if you havent already finished.
I know some people say that going this way isnt a good idea for power reasons, but I havent run into any problems. The only one that I can think of is that the tweeters get VERY loud. If I turn up the volume so that I can feel my sub, the tweeters just kill my ears. I can go around this by setting the crossover settings on my Alpine to bring down the front and rear levels about -10 dB. I think this effectively reduces the gain on the factory amplifiers.
Here is a cool site that has some pretty good detail on the mach 460 system.
You install an aftermarket head unit incorrectly, risk ruining your amplifiers and speakers, but the people who tell you not to do this are the ones out of their minds? I think you got it backwards here, dude.
WHOA WHOA WHOA... this thread is getting a little out of hand.
First off. its not hard to install an aftermarket head unit onto the mach 460 system. If you take a trip to any of your local radio installation places you can get the proper adapter to hook into the mach system. It comes with a square black plug that attaches to the factory AMP input
***WARNING*** Factory amplifier input is LOW LEVEL.... this means that you must attach RCA connectors to this harness and plug it into your decks pre-amp output
DO NOT CONNECT TO THE SPEAKER OUTPUTS FROM THE RADIO!!!
i would go a take a picture of how my wiring is set up, but it would take me about an hour to get my radio out...
WHOA WHOA WHOA... this thread is getting a little out of hand.
First off. its not hard to install an aftermarket head unit onto the mach 460 system. If you take a trip to any of your local radio installation places you can get the proper adapter to hook into the mach system. It comes with a square black plug that attaches to the factory AMP input
***WARNING*** Factory amplifier input is LOW LEVEL.... this means that you must attach RCA connectors to this harness and plug it into your decks pre-amp output
DO NOT CONNECT TO THE SPEAKER OUTPUTS FROM THE RADIO!!!
i would go a take a picture of how my wiring is set up, but it would take me about an hour to get my radio out...
That has been stated numerous times...thanks for your redundant input though.
I have an aftermarket receiver now that has RCA outputs. I am trying to figure out how to hook it up to the mach 460.
From what I am reading here, I guess I need to buy the harness for the power, acc, grnd etc. Then I should get a set of rca cables, plug them into my receiver and then cut off the RCA plugs on the other end and splice it into the speaker wires on the harness?
The RCA cables will each have two conductors (two wires). If I am suppose to splice them into the harness, will it matter how I hook up the positive and negative signal? How do I know which is which from the RCA?
I am sorry if I am repeating what has already been said, I just want to make sure that I got this right.
Thank you
< Message edited by Nevada95 -- 2/21/2006 8:37:10 PM >
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wiring harness for mach 460? - 
