Ask Us About Car Audio, Part 4: Gasp Harder

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Automotive Insanity > Ask Us About Car Audio, Part 4: Gasp Harder

Red_October_7000: Jun 22, 2009

Can someone point me towards an accurate pinout diagram for the radio in a 2003 Chevrolet Silverado (no Bose, no OnStar)? All I can come up with on-line are diagrams for other cars and robotic sites that compile long lists of poorly described wiring diagrams. I've already got a replacement radio and a connector, just need to make sure I'm doing it right

# ¿ Sep 27, 2016 06:21

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 10:23

Red_October_7000: Jun 22, 2009

some texas redneck posted:

This looks like it might be right.
e: nevermind, I'll look for the right one

e2:
does this help?

code:

2003 Chevrolet Silverado C1500 Car Radio Wiring Diagram
Car Radio Battery Constant 12v+ Wire: Orange
Car Radio Accessory Switched 12v+ Wire: The radio harness does not provide a switched power source. Run a wire to the fusebox for switched power.
Car Radio Ground Wire: Black/White
Car Radio Illumination Wire: Gray
Car Stereo Dimmer Wire: Brown
Car Stereo Antenna Trigger Wire: Pink
Car Stereo Amp Trigger Wire: N/A
Car Stereo Amplifier Location: Under the center console.
Left Front Speaker Positive Wire (+): Tan
Left Front Speaker Negative Wire (-): Gray
Right Front Speaker Positive Wire (+): Light Green
Right Front Speaker Negative Wire (-): Dark Green
Left Rear Speaker Positive Wire (+): Brown
Left Rear Speaker Negative Wire (-): Yellow
Right Rear Speaker Positive Wire (+): Dark Blue
Right Rear Speaker Negative Wire (-): Light Blue

e3: you should only really need that if the original harness has been cut or you're trying to adapt a stereo from another model into it, otherwise spend the :10bux:

on an adapter harness.

You got it right in two! If this works it'll be impressive, and have cost a total of $12. Stay Tuned.

some texas redneck posted:

e4: and the lack of a switched 12V feed is pretty common these days, a lot of cars send a signal over the car's data bus to tell the stereo to turn on/off. You'll probably run into losing the chimes/warning bells as well, GM is a big fan of running all of that through the stereo. Metra makes adapters to retain all of that, but you'll have to dig through their website to figure out which specific one you need. I'm pretty sure you'll need this one to keep all of that working; it'll also keep Retained Accessory Power (where the stereo stays on after you shut off the vehicle until you open a door).

Hopefully this helps, thank you. I was really hoping for a connector pinning one, as opposed to wire coloring, because, unless my eyes are playing tricks on me, I have two orange wires all by themselves on one end of the plug, and every place I see Orange enumerated, it's never anything that makes sense for their to be two of.

As far as I can tell, on the no-fancy-poo poo models, the only thing of note I stand to lose is the chime. I can live without that. If I find myself leaving the keys in it all the time it's not like it's hard to make a buzzer circuit, but I'm anal as all hell about my keys because if I weren't I'd lose them constantly. Also if it does that goddamn stupid thing with the weight sensor in the passenger's seat and deciding that certainly the four bottles of soda you're bringing back to work are actually a passenger who must be bonged at in order to convince them to fasten their safety belt, the loss of the chime will be a blessing, but I haven't yet figured out if it does that.

Red_October_7000 fucked around with this message at 09:38 on Sep 27, 2016

# ¿ Sep 27, 2016 09:34

Red_October_7000: Jun 22, 2009

Hate to doublepost but I just wanted to say thanks again to Some Texas Redneck for that diagram, it has proved correct. Now all I need to do is find myself a switched 12V source. I thought I had one at the cigar lighter but it turns out that the cigar lighter is on all the time!

# ¿ Sep 28, 2016 21:14

Red_October_7000: Jun 22, 2009

So a while ago I asked about the stereo pinout on a 2003 Chevy truck. I said that something good was happening and I'd post the results. Well, here's how it started.

The truck still had the factory stereo, which worked well enough, but it was from the dark days when the complicated cassette deck was going away and the auxiliary input jack was not yet seen as needful on a basic pickup truck, so all it had is a plain ol' CD player, and we all know these days that a dozen or so songs on a disk won't cut the mustard when you can carry around your entire Mp3 collection in the telephone you already carry around anyway. The easy solution, as it would be for many of us, I'm sure, was to pick through the shelf of old car stereos in the basement and find something with a tape cassette deck so you can use an adapter.

Phase Diffusion! :pcgaming:

(I don't know what it does, but it makes the sound sound better!)
This is what I came up with, as the truck's got a double-DIN hole and most of my pile is single-DIN stuff or oddball BOSE decks from when I had an '84 Corvette. I even have a similar GM radio, but it didn't actually fit. This was originally made for Toyota by Fujitsu, and it came out of a junkyard Cressida; I bought it years ago because it was obviously too cool to let languish in a junkyard. I don't remember what I paid for it, but it was $40 or less. Unfortunately, it is very, very tired. The cassette basket doesn't hold tightly so the adapter drifts around and causes the right channel to drop out as you go around a bend. Don't even ask what happens when you go on bumpy roads. Also the left channel output might be weak and most of the controls are so crapped up that it seems like no amount of tuner cleaner makes them right. So I did the natural (that is, natural to us AIers) and bought a similar, bitchin' vintage deck off eBay.

Apologies for the potato quality of the photograph. Enter the Mitsubishi RX-123. Or three quarters of it, there's no room for the tuner, which is in the little empty pocket down by the ash tray (boy was that a bitch to dismount for being a tiny little pocket for random poo poo). You see, the RX-123 is designed to be mounted under the dashboard, super-old-school-style. It came with a big plastic "rack" which attached to the brackets. The top-most component is an amplifier with VU meter display, which I tried to capture in motion, but since the phone was playing the music, it shut it off briefly while it also took the photo. :frog:

While the Fujitsu could have easily shredded the speakers had I let it, this was only in part due to whatever inherent quality was left in it, and partly because the speakers are, as near as makes no difference, fourteen years old and in rough shape. The Mitsubishi basically demanded I replace them; what could have been written off as poor coupling between the adapter and head and weak channels and alternator noise (Oh boy, the alternator noise through this thing, sounded just like a turbo!) was now clearly revealed to be faulty speakers. The one in the background is the passenger's side, by far the better of the two. The driver's side was missing all but an inch of the foam ring. The foreground speaker is what was swapped in. Nothing special, but, again, I had them already, and Florence + The Machine's Remain Nameless no longer opens with a choir of farts, so I'm happy.

But that's not all, oh no, 'cause nothing is ever as easy as that. Just like I was wrong about getting out of the whole "get the tunes from my phone onto the car stereo with a $12 plug and stuff I already had" I was wrong about "A New-Old-Stock radio will work perfectly!": :frogsiren:

there's a problem with the cassette deck, and it's a real weird one: Sometimes the output level from the tape deck takes a nose-dive for no particular reason. This is not adapter-dependent, it will do it from a real cassette as well. The precise level of the nose-dive varies from maybe 25% to barely-audible with the volume at maximum, the bass, treble, equalizer boost and every equalizer band at maximum, the output on the phone pushed up into clipping, the Loudness on and every filter off. This is, of course, a goddamn mother-loving, cock-sucking Intermittent Fault, and doesn't seem to have any clear cause. Sometimes it happens when you first start up, but that's usually when it's fine; it usually occurs after you've been driving a bit. What's even weirder is that if you press the program change button to swap sides of the tape, the level usually climbs right back up, although it almost just as usually falls right back down to where it had settled before. When it doesn't, this side-changing ritual (of course the tape adapter only does anything on one side) will sometimes restore some or all of the lost output level. This led me to think, maybe this was a head-spinning deck, since it's from 1983 (when the whole thing cost something like $950 :catstare:

), and that some corrosion or accumulation had occurred on the mechanism for the spinning head,, but, no, it's got a bi-directional head and all you're doing when you press that button is reversing the direction and changing which tracks the head is listening on.

Oh, and to top it all off, when I took the cover off the cassette-deck component and let it run off the adapter for an hour or so while I did some work to accommodate the thing (the guy on eBay had listed it as a double-DIN when it's actually much bigger, I initially was driving around with the dash trim plate off and the entire thing wedged fast in the radio bucket!) IT DIDN'T EXPERIENCE A FAILURE! I did notice a fluctuation in the output level when I took the cover off, but I wasn't able to reproduce it readily by poking at likely things.

tl;dr:
-Mitsubishi RX-123 Cassette deck and ONLY cassette deck sometimes experiences unprovoked output level drop.
-Level drop corrected either momentarily or "permanently" (until it decides to do it again) by cycling the direction of tape play. Sometimes multiple cycles are needed, sometimes no amount of cycling brings it back.
-When you're done with the truck for a time and come back to it when you want to use it again, the cassette deck will usually work. Sometimes it will fail again briefly, and sometimes it will be fine the rest of the day.
-There is an "Attenuator" function which quickly knocks the volume down as to make an order at the drive-through or take a phone call, but I don't think it's spurious operation of this feature because this feature has continuity across the tape deck and tuner, and if you switch to the tuner the output level is what you'd expect for it being on or off. Then again, I can't completely get the idea of spurious operation of the attenuator out of my head completely...

# ¿ Dec 25, 2016 09:56

Red_October_7000: Jun 22, 2009

Raluek posted:

I bet there's a cracked solder joint in there somewhere. I guess it also could be dirty/oxidized contacts in a switch. Does it start/stop working when you go over bumps? I'm thinking it just gets jostled a little bit and the board flexes to make/break whatever contact is intermittent. If you're handy, it might be worth touching up all the solder joints real quick.

I'm handy but soldering is not one of my strong suits. Which is weird because I can weld beautifully; stick or MIG or TIG (the pretty pretty princess of the welding processes, if everything is not right it refuses to chooch) or even old-fashioned with a torch, but I'm not so great at soldering. I'm getting better, but not to the point where I can do that and say that all the joints would be better thanks to my attentions.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2016 20:59

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 10:23

Red_October_7000: Jun 22, 2009

VelociBacon posted:

Generally what the poster was telling you to do was to just apply the soldering iron to the connections to reflow the solder joint. You shouldn't have to add any solder.

BTW if you're not having much luck with soldering get a proper iron with temp control and use flux. It's as much of a difference as having the wrong feed rate or cone or whatever for MIG.

Yeah I may have to break down and buy a better soldering iron. I've been doing with my dad's old Weller Marksman and a fistful of 25-watt RadioShack specials all my life and figured it was me because I was always told, and believed, that it's a poor workman who blames his tools.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2016 22:12

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Automotive Insanity > Ask Us About Car Audio, Part 4: Gasp Harder