SaabCentral Forums banner

Head Unit Install Notes: 9K w/ Harmon Kardon

732 views 0 replies 1 participant last post by  Solid Snake 
#1 ·
Just sharing a few things I found out as I put a head unit in my 98 CSE. The only harness I could get a hold of was made for a VW, and was only designed to fit 9k's with no amplifier.

A few notes about the harness...

1. Power and remote wires are crossed.
2. Harness has 8 pins, amp connector has 9 pins in a 10 pin connector, so it won't fit without cutting bottom wall off the stereo harness.
3. Harness has no pin to operate the power antenna.
4. The locking tab for the amp harness doesn't align with the stereo harness.

Procedure...

1. Bent/cut off the locking clip on the amp harness.
2. Use a dremel/nibbler to cut off the bottom wall of the stereo harness so the amp harness can plug in with the yellow amp turn on wire hanging over the edge.
3. Connect the remote wire (check for crossed remote/pwr wires!) to this yellow wire also to the antenna wire so the amp turns on and the antenna rises when the car is on.
4. Solder the harness wires through a resistor network to convert the high level head unit output to the low-level balanced signal the amp likes. Without a resistor divider, the head unit gets very loud at a low volume setting (for me, 10/50) and any noise or hiss is quite audible. The goal of the resistors is to give your volume control more range and to reduce the noise floor of your head unit.


A---R1---B---R2---C---R1---D

Where:
A= + speaker output from head unit
B= + speaker into amp
C= - speaker into amp
D= - speaker output from head unit
R1= resistors
R2= resistor between 330 and 1k ohm

R2/(R2+R1*2) = Volume ratio

For example, if I used 220 for R2 and 470 for R1, overall volume and the noise floor would be 19% of the original voulme.
 
See less See more
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top