I'm thinking of doing it. I hear you "do not" need to hook up a switch as the instructions illustrate as when you're in radio mode plugging in the iPod will override the radio. Anyone who's done this have any tips, insight?
I did this mod about a week ago and it works perfectly. I would highly suggest wiring up a simple rocker switch into one of the blank dummy buttons on the left side of dash. The only difficulty I had doing this is I kind of slipped pretty bad when using my rotary cutter and made a big gap outside of the space I wanted to cut out to put the switch in on the dummy button. I covered it well with electrical tape, and when I get the time I'll fix it with some epoxy and paint. Other than that though, its very much worth the effort, especially given that I just installed a 500W subwoofer system about a month ago. I did this mod all with parts and wiring I already had so it cost me nothing besides my time. Overall, working very slowly and taking breaks it took about 3 hours, but could be done in half that if not less. If you're good with soldering its an easy job.
I recommend the switch because it completely mutes all other inputs and you know you are getting a clean signal. I do not have experience with this mod without the switch, but I have heard mixed results when people choose not to use one. It is not that much more work for peace of mind that you are doing the job right and getting the best sound quality possible. The sound quality from this mod versus a standard tape adapter that I was using previously is night and day. People are right when they say it is extremely, if not impossibly difficult to tell the difference between this and cd quality if you are playing MP3 songs with a high bitrate. Even at the standard 192Kbps encoding rate it sounds damn good.
Couple of questions...Does the switch need to be "on/off" or "on/on". Never understood that. And in the picture on the illustration where the aux cable is soldered to the board it's very difficult to make out. Are there 3 wires in the aux cable? And lastly he mentions removing the varnish before soldering. What's the best way to do so? Chip it off? solvent?
The minjack often has the two grounds linked for a total of 3 wires. What I want to know is where he got the audio ground. It looks like the unshielded part of the cable is run to an empty spot on the board.
I used a single pole single throw switch, ie ON/OFF. The switch just needs to create an open circuit between the wires when in one position and a short circuit in the other.
A little piece of sandpaper was used to remove the varnish from the blank spot of the circuit board as seen in that guide. No matter the size of connector, what you are using will be a TRS connector of some sort, which has a right and left channel, in addition to the shield which acts as a relative ground- so yes, three wires for the aux cable. If you are confused about which wires are what when you are soldering the TRS cable to the circuit board, reference that wikipedia article and use a multimeter on the diode setting to see which wires correspond to which channel on the other end of the connector. Typically, the ground wire will be a bare wire and the right/left channels will have red/white(or black maybe) shielding on them.
When I did this, I didn't have much luck scraping off the varnish so instead I connected the ground via a short run of wire to a big solder pad further up the board. There are a few of these and it was quite easy. I was worried about burning something or scraping off something important!
In my install, I have got the Saab mobile phone 'pod' and I'm using my phone as the music player. I drilled a hole in the bottom and fitted a rocker switch, which is connected to the mobile phone wiring harness to switch telephone mode on and off. This looks neat and tidy, and works very well.
Overall I think the mod is great! Sound is good and it's not difficult to do.
Just a clean creative thought here. If you don't want to put in a new switch, wire the window lock switch to turn this on and off instead of locking the windows, because who uses that anyways?
just a clean creative thought here. If you don't want to put in a new switch, wire the window lock switch to turn this on and off instead of locking the windows, because who uses that anyways?
I think you lose treble and bass controls right? I had the tel-mute mod in my Viggen, and it was the best option at the time. I had the tape mod in my last 9-5 and it was good, but the cassette made physical noise. I now have an AudioTroll which has it's own set of issues, but is a good solution. This mod seems to be the best/available option.
You don't lose the treble and bass controls with this one. I originally thought that you did, and I think this is because you do in the 9-3 but not in the 9-5. I've tested this myself and I can positively confirm that you do not lose them. Everything functions as it should. THe only thing you do lose is the RDS Traffic Announcements, but this is a fairly minor loss.
I actually use mine in conjunction with a Parrot hands-free kit, and because I also use the phone as the music source it works pretty well. If there is an incoming call the phone automatically stops the music playback anyway, and the handsfree works exactly as it should.
I'll post up some pics tomorrow, if I can take some while the light lasts.
A lil' help. I'm knee deep in this mod and putting things back together but I can't figure out how to run the cable(s) out of the unit. Note the pic...
The greyish cable is the ipod connection. Which is the best way to run it out??
There's a little metal notch in the middle of the back plate, just where the CD player module joins the rest of the radio. I enlarged this but cutting a bit of the metal away, and fed the cable through there.
It's hard to explain without a picture, though, I'll try and find one.
I see where you're talking about. Nice. I was all set to use the rear window on/off switch as mentioned but it's all wired with one connection including the window switches. I'll have to rethink where to put the switch.
Just got it working this weekend. I have the telephone switch implemented as well. I previously had an inline FM modulator and this is a distinct improvement. I use my ipod with the dock mounted on the dashboard, and I found that my 3G ipod (circa 2003) outputs too high a signal voltage through the line out on the dock. I found that upgrading to the more recent universal dock model removes this problem. For modern iPods there is no true line out functionality, and the volume can be controlled through either the ipod directly or via remote control. I guess they had to remove this feature to enable the IR remote control volume functionality.
With the old ipod and the new dock I still can't control the volume from the iPod itself, but It reduces the output voltage to be in the correct range for the Saab pre-amp.
The other issue on the iPod side of things is that the car chargers create static noise in the background. The only solution I have found for this is to run a DC/AC inverter and plug in a genuine apple power brick. The AC adapter is designed to clean power from a 120VAC outlet which emit a 60hz hum. I noticed that the interference i was getting was around 60hz as well, and sure enough it cleans out about 95% of the noise.
Only paid a few quid for it. It had the added benefit of attenuating the signal slightly - like you, I found that the output from my phone was much too high. With the isolator in place it reduced to a more manageable level.
I tried the ground loop isolator too, only to find that it made it worse. I guess there is another type that taps into 12v power as well that I may try. There's also a third option that hooks only into power, ground, and the power lead going into the device. I'm not sure its worth pursuing any further, but i could do without that background noise.
Did this ipod aux mod last night. I really like it - added an 1/8" input and a switch to the blank below the TCS switch. Doesn't look perfect but definitely looks nice, and the sound quality is great.
What I really wanted to say though is that from what I experienced, you HAVE to add a switch. Maybe it's unrelated, but I wired it up last night without a switch, went out to my car this morning, and it was completely dead. Added the switch today and everything is fine, car didn't show any symptoms of a somewhat discharged battery after sitting for a while.
Nope its the two wires that are connected to the separate board. What I did was get a 6ft headphone extension cable (one side male one female) and wired the female side to be used to plug into, then took the left and right channel wires from the other half of the cable and twisted them together really well and soldered them from the small board to a small toggle switch from radioshack. I'll try to post a picture in a few to show how it looks installed. All the switch does is turns telephine mode on/off.
No, the switch goes between two nodes on the the rear, smaller circuit board when the radio is disassembled IIRC. The tutorial linked in this thread provides all the info you need to wire it all up.
Here's how mine is integrated into my car now. Not perfect but it looks pretty good to me, WAY better than a cable dangling out from the tape slot all the time.
Anyways, I'm going to have to take it apart again tonight. I realized that something is a little off with the sound quality. I'm not sure if it is that I have too long of a shielding piece or if something isn't quite soldered right, but it actually sounds a bit worse than the radio after I worked on it yesterday. I also noticed that the lights on the stereo buttons are out... anyone else have this?
You have to be super careful not to pull on the face of the deck during removal. There are 2 bridge connections that the face plug into on the mainboard and if you're too rough with it the connectors get pushed in, ruining the deck. I learned this the hard way about 5 years ago when doing my inline fm modulator install. At this point you want to remove the deck as gingerly as possible, removing the SID,ACC and pushing from the opening on the back. Then take the face off the deck, and very carefully realign the connectors.
The sound quality problems are probably the same as what the rest of us have been talking about. The sensitivity of the telephone in is a little high, making it extra susceptible to interference. You probably want to look into a ground loop isolator - one that plugs into the power and the ground. I tried the type with easy headphone plug isolator/transformer and it just makes things worse. For now try turning down the volume on your mp3 device and see if that makes a difference.
Well I just completed this mod this weekend. Not too bad though I'll admit I was a bit nervous soldering this intricately...especially with a soldering iron that felt like a sledge hammer doing a tack hammer's job.
Anyway so far it works great. I did mess up once and soldiered the the switch to the wrong spot (nerves again) but fortunately I didn't mess anything up.
I ended up drilling two holes in the upper rear of the radio housing to get my wires out. something others have had trouble with here as well.
My only issue is that I can't use the mobile charge or I get a lot of interferance/static. Guess i need to find a 3.5mm ground isolater (if they make such a thing) or a better power source, something with a better ground than the cigarrette lighter.
I'm pretty happy with the switch. Looks almost stock. I routed the 3.5mm connection into the center console. sorry for the crappy pic.
p.s. anyone found a good way to hollow out the back of these dummy button plugs? The amount of plastic they put in there is ridiculous and the shapes! What gives. Took me a while to clean out with a dremel tool. PITA!
I have a dremel and a die grinder and still found this to be awful. If i could do it again i would have found a round switch like that and drilled! Ended up using a rectangular computer power supply switch I had in my bin.
Ok guys I'm gonna attempt this soon and I've got a question. I'm thinking about running the line to the glovebox or the center console and connecting one of these:
For those who haven't seen this before, it's a Blackberry Gateway and you can find it for less than $40 online. You can pair any bluetooth phone or device to and stream MP3s (as long as your device has the A2DP profile). I bunch of guys on the other car forums who have factory aux inputs use it and say its great. If you are streaming music from your phone to it and a call comes in, most phones will pause the music and then resume the music after the call. Seems like a perfect solution with no visible wires. I'm pretty sure the turn-by-turn navigation on my phone (HTC Droid Incredible) will also transfer to it because it does to my bluetooth headset.
What I'm wondering is if this is a viable solution for handsfree calling; Using this setup you will definitely hear the callers voice over all the speakers, but will they be able to hear me well since the mic being used would be my phone's mic; or would it be? Since the mod in this thread taps into the phone input and essentially we are turning that input "on" with the switch, would the factory mic in the overhead console be listening and in use? I've heard it's not great quality but I could swap it out for a nicer noise-cancelling version and still have everything hidden.
What I'm wondering is if this is a viable solution for handsfree calling; Using this setup you will definitely hear the callers voice over all the speakers, but will they be able to hear me well since the mic being used would be my phone's mic; or would it be? Since the mod in this thread taps into the phone input and essentially we are turning that input "on" with the switch, would the factory mic in the overhead console be listening and in use? I've heard it's not great quality but I could swap it out for a nicer noise-cancelling version and still have everything hidden.
The mod in this thread taps into the phone input, but just the speaker portion. I was really wondering what pad you would have to solder to if you wanted to add the mic functionality to this mod, but I don't have any sort of schematic of the AS2 or AS3 board to be able to figure this out. Maybe the guy who wrote up the article would know if we emailed him. I believe that you would have to have a fourth wire soldered somewhere and have a 3.5mm 4-pin extension TRRS connector like this as opposed to the TRS 3 pin connector pictured with the bluetooth module shown. Because of this, I would assume that the bluetooth module shown just uses the mic on your phone which wouldn't be a bad thing since it's probably better than the built in mic. One idea - If you're using an Android phone with this, buy Tasker (awesome application) and set up a profile for whenever you are connected to the bluetooth device pictured, then play around with different audio settings in the profile until you find what works best - I think just turning on speakerphone may work to filter out the caller's voice from going back though the mic, but then their voice may come through the phone instead of the speaker so who knows.
Another idea if you use this bluetooth device - you may want to put a headphone splitter in between and have a headphone jack going to somewhere in your car in case you have a friend who wants to play music but doesn't have bluetooth.
May need an inline volume adjuster because the input is overly sensitive, but i don't see any other potential problems. That box doesn't seem to have an input for an alternate mic so i don't think you'll have a choice in that regard.
First of all, the idea of using something like a Blackberry Gateway is a very good one, and something I've thought about myself. The main problem that I can see is that it will only work (obviously) if it is connected all the time. If you do this, then you will notice a reduction in the volume and quality of the output from the radio. This may not be a problem for you, but if you listen to the radio a lot (which i do) it's very irritating. This only happens when the jack plug is connected to the audio source. I'd thought about wiring up a relay in conjunction with the switch to the telephone mute which would also switch the audio connections, which would avoid the problem. I've not done this yet, however.
So far as a hands-free goes, I don't think that this device will help you at all. If you look closely at the details, it is only for streaming music (using the A2DP profile). If you want a handsfree you have to have a separate bluetooth kit which uses the handsfree profile, which is different - also supports microphone, is not stereo etc.
There shouldn't be any problem with having a bluetooth handsfree and the Blackberry gateway at the same time - on most modern phones i think you can have simultaneous pairings and connections for different profiles. I've read of people who have tried this with Android phones without difficulty.
There is a schematic of the head unit available, if it helps anyone. THis one has an annotation relating to the old tape aux-in mod, but if you ignore that it could be useful:
I'm going to try and get some pics of my install up this week. I'm using a mobile phone cradle on the Saab phone pod, with a flying lead for the audio input and a switch mounted on the pod itself. This works really well and looks nice too (well I think so!).
Also just found this accessory, which actually is pretty clean as well and could be used in conjunction with the mod here to provide MP3 streaming to all speakers; the callers voice would also be heard on all speakers, and the unit itself has a mic embedded. Not sure how well the mic would work in that location. I supposed that 1/8" adapter could be tapped into from the back if anyway was feeling ambitious and that would hide the cord for those of us looking for a "no cords visible" solution. For those not as picky this may fit the bill perfectly without modification save for the factory radio board tap.
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