Originally Posted by 01SilverCC

The OEM Infinity amp remote on wire should be green/orange, sometimes to me it looks like it's green/red. Either way it's on the black speaker output plug in the OEM radio harness, at the very end of the plug. The harness Crutchfield sent you probably has a solid blue wire on it. Connect the blue/white wire from the new Kenwood deck to the solid blue (or blue/white if you have one) on the Crutchfield harness. This will trigger the OEM Infinity amp no matter which source you use, radio or CD.

The system will work and sound good with interfacing the high-level speaker outputs to the speaker level inputs on the OEM amp. The down side is you don't get much of a turn on the volume **** before the system gets loud in the truck. That is to say, with the volume level on the Kenwood at about 1/4 of the way up, the volume that you hear from the system will be about that of the factory radio at half to maybe 3/4 of its maximum volume level. This is due to the Kenwood having much more power in watts on its speaker outputs than the OEM radio had. It will still sound good though and should have better bass response than the factory radio.

It is possible to bypass the factory amp and wire the Kenwood directly to the speakers in the truck. If you look at the factory amplifier plugs you will see the same wire colors for the inputs to the amp as you have for the outputs from the amp to the speakers. The speaker output wires may be a bit larger gauge, and they may be twisted together in pairs. This is how you can identify which wire is which. Compare the speaker wires up at the factory radio harness to the corresponding wire colors on the Crutchfield harness to figure out which wire does what. For example, look at the solid green and green/black wires in the Crutchfield harness as it plugs into the OEM radio harness. This is going to tell you which 2 wires are the left rear + and - speaker wire inputs to the factory amp. Now find those 2 colors down at the amplifier location. There should be 2 sets of wires with the same colors that correspond to left rear up at the radio. Cut them, and connect a test speaker to one set, turn on the radio and if you hear music from the test speaker, you have identified the speaker level input from the radio side of the amp harness. Then the other 2 wires with those corresponding colors will be the speaker output wires that lead to the speaker itself. To test to be sure you have the speaker output wires, you can connect each wire to the one of the terminals on a 9 volt battery. It will make a popping/scratching sound from the speaker. If you want to bypass the factory amp, just connect the wires together, color for color. I don't know what year your truck is but if it's a 2000 or older, left rear + will be brown/yellow and I think left rear - is brown/blue. If you have a 2001 or newer truck, left rear + will be white/red and left rear - will be white/black. So on a 2001 or newer truck you would connect the 2 white/red wires together and the 2 white/black wires together to bypass the amp and connect the Kenwood deck directly to the factory left rear speaker without running any new wires. Do this for the other 3 speakers and then you will not be using the factory amp. It's a good idea to unplug the amp if you are not using it though.

The factory speakers in the truck should be 4 ohm and the Kenwood can handle them just fine. If the speakers are in bad shape, good replacements are not too expensive. I would say to try the Kenwood deck interfaced with the factory Infinity amp and see how you like it. Most people do like how it sounds that way.

Jimmy

Originally Posted by kmarc30

I wanted to ask you about installing a aftermarket deck. I bought a kenwood and I've installed and of course have no sound. I would like to keep the factory infinity amplifer so I can keep use of the 7 speakers and especially the 3 highs in the dash. Do I really need to buy the $90 harness CHTO-02 2002-2005 to make the amp and all speakers work. I tried hooking the two blue/white stripe colors together and still get no sound. I have a 2004 dodge ram 1500 quad cab and no wireless phone connection. Thanks man,

Originally Posted by Sed

What is strange is that when I switch into my JVC touch screen menu the amp gain from off to low/medium /high it is the Jvc amp that feed my speakers not the infinity factory amp. Cuz at the JVC setting off amp gain I get no sound at all.


So when you put 2 amp in serie for car speakers the factory infinity amp stop working but you still have to send the 12v into the factory infinity amp so that the sound work.

Strange