Stupid speaker wiring question (00 AC w/amp)

Just checked your original thread on this after remembering this is a '00

Check this reply - see the pic. https://www.tundras.com/threads/project-double-gnar-adding-stereo-camera.96839/page-2#post-2486233

Note the front right/left there. See the purple/pink wire in your door at the base of the "Y"? Same wire.

If you hook a 9v battery up to the pink and purple wire where it plugged into the factory amp, you should be reading 9v at the door with your voltmeter/multimeter.

Do you live anywhere near me? I'm happy to come help.

 

Will have to check the wiring colors tomorrow but can't say I follow the rest.

 

Apologies but not my area of expertise, how do you hook a battery up to a wire that's into a harness?

 

This is tough to explain over the internet. Like I said, if you're anywhere near Atlanta, I'm happy to drive over and help.

But the gist of what I'm saying is this. Unplug at the base of the "Y":

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Then unplug this connector that was on your amp but is now attached to your Metra harness:

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Important for you to understand this - these are opposite ends of the same wires and should be the same color:

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I don't expect you to have probes or anything. If you have a paperclip, you can cut a couple of 1/2" lengths and insert into the harness on the pink/purple pins of either end of the harness, then tie the battery to one end, then test for voltage at the other end.

 

Oh, and I guess you could also re-crimp the OEM speakers back in and see if it works.

That could be a very easy test, returning it to original state. If it works, it's how you wired in the new speakers. If not, it's something else.

 

But the OEM ones didn't work though, so I'm not sure how that would work. Or am I missing something?

 

Ah. Rewinding because I must've missed something.

The OEM door speakers never worked? Like, not even before the new head unit went in?

 

Only the passenger side main one, that's it.

 

So ...

OEM radio with OEM amp, OEM speakers: Only passenger main speaker worked.
New radio with bult-in amp, OEM speakers: Only passenger main speaker worked.
New radio with built-in amp, new speakers: Only passenger main speaker works.

Is this accurate?

 

Almost, but the two new speakers I put in each sides rear door both work. And I've not touched the passenger front door so that one's just been working the whole time.

 

Staying with the front: Basically, the nutshell here is the front driver door speakers have never worked, at any point, period.

 

Correct, well at least as long as I've had it, presumably they worked at some point though.

 

Ok. Hearing that, I seriously doubt there's a problem with how you wired up these new speakers. I suspect your truck has probably had a wiring issue across the purple and pink wire I pointed out earlier, i.e. the wire that delivers speaker signal to your door. But the only way to quickly figure that out is with continuity testing

If I remember right, the door uses a "sub" harness, I think it originates behind the kick panel. @Tundra2 may be able to confirm this, I think he's changed his door wiring harness? If not, the person who retrofitted power windows definitely can confirm.

Pop off your driver kick panel, then starting here, tracing the pink/purple wires backwards:

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Make sure wherever they're visible, they're not nicked or cut and the connectors at each end aren't damaged. Whatever loom they disappear into, trace that up to the rubber door grommet, then get to where that wire bundle comes into the truck. Look for where that bundle meets its 1st connector inside the truck; look and confirm the pink and the purple wire are in it. Then just generally check as it heads back to the stereo to confirm it's not cut anywhere and there's no clear water corrosion etc.

 

Ok I'll do that tracing tomorrow but if I unplug the plugs you note above should I at least get the door speaker working? And on the door speaker meeting the window bracket, I added some tape between them so it wouldn't be metal on metal and it's not the part that moves so I think it should be ok, no?

 

Probably, yes.

My 1st reaction to this was "No." but maybe I'm not understanding what you're asking. I think it's "No" because you don't know where the wiring fault is, the wiring fault which likely existed before you started, and is why the speakers were never working in the driver door in the 1st place.

There are at least three harnesses involved, the break in the circuit could be anywhere. IS it the "Y" with the blue/green wires on the door? Is it the door harness, which runs from the kick panel to the end of the pink/purple wires in the door? Or is it between the center dash and the kick panel connector?

The point I'm trying to get across is this. In your dash, this factory pink wire and purple wire are the exact same circuit at your door. I'm pretty sure they hook into a connector behind the kick panel The route will be ballpark what I'm showing here, where the connector on the right is in your dash, you popped it out of the factory amp and into your Metra harness, and the white box I'm showing at the kick panel will be the receiver/connector your door harness plugs into:

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That's ultimately what you need to figure out. What is broken in your circuit?

You could easily test if it's the "Y" by swapping the one from the passenger door to the driver door.

To test the segment from that Y to the kick panel, ideal solution is a continuity test using a multimeter. To test the segment from the kick panel to the center dash, also needs continuity test with a multimeter.

 

PS - if you find your "Y" adapter is shorted somehow, I've got my spares leftover and I'll never use them. I'm happy to send mine to you if the part number is the same, or you can pickup if near enough to do that. Here are mine: https://www.tundras.com/threads/door-speakers.95747/page-2#post-2427187

Part number is visible on one of those, you can compare to yours. 82346-0c010

 

You need to unplug that connector at the speaker and get one multimeter probe in one hole of the connector. If the probe is too big you can stick a paperclip in the hole you want to test then put probe on that. Then go to the radio side find the same color wire in the main connector. Same deal, hook the other multimeter probe into (or use paperclip) the pin for the same color wire you hooked into on the door side. With your multimeter in ohms (wouldn't hurt to post a pic of your meter) you should get 0 or close to 0 if the connection is good (hopefully one wire good and only one wire bad) if you get "OL" that connection is no good.

@shifty` is getting you set up pretty well. Just trying to simplify the multimeter testing procedure as best I can.

I also want to mention that the radio adapter harnesses (convert factory plug to bare wires to switch to aftermarket radio harness) can be made pretty cheap and I have seen those fail once and have a speaker drop out but with it not working before I'm not so sure.

For what it's worth I had one dead speaker in the back of my truck as well. New speaker and good to go. At least that fixed the rear speakers.

 

That's the kicker. If speaker wasn't working in the factory setup, wasn't working after the amp bypass and new radio, and isn't working with new speakers, so the more I mull on it, the most logical conclusion is the actual, original problem is a wiring issue, like ...

1. The previous owner was doing something behind the kick panel cover and nicked/tapped into the pink or purple wire thinking it was, like, for a brake controller or reverse wire, for example
2. The factory wiring saw some water entry at one of the terminals and has a bad connection, so OP just needs to unplug/replug the connectors at each segment of the harness multiple times to clean up the connection.
3. One of the few harness connectors between the speakers and radio is loose, or not fully seated
4. Something crushed or burnt the harness at some point, and that may be what shorted/fried the other speakers or something.
5. The "Y" cable is bad, which would actually make a lot of sense in this case, because everything else in the door is fine, with exception of #1 or #4 above

@ThatYeti would do himself a great service here by swapping the known-good "Y" connector on the passenger side over to the driver's side to see if it fixes the problem. If it does, you know it's #5, and there's no reason to break out the multimeter to test other segments.

You did better than I could, thanks for that. And I agree, a pic of the multimeter would help to identify which mode to put it in, and if he needs to move the probe wires around as some of the less expensive meters want you to do.

And really, knowing there are at least 3 unique sections of harness that clip together to make the speaker circuit, and multimeter probes aren't always long, I'd probably test the pink/purple wires in segments like this:

1. Unplug the OEM amp harness, unplug the door harness connector behind the kick panel, test that wiring segment "1" for continuity
2. Unplug on the door, where the pink/purple convert to blue/green, and test from the kick panel to the pink/purple wire connector in the door
3. Test the "Y", although that may get hinky because I don't know how they split the 2 wires into 4, and OP may not have an easy time with it

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In all seriousness, all the time you've spent trying to figure out what is wrong with the driver's door speaker circuit, you could have already run another speaker wire from the HU to the door.
I ran door speaker wires when I ditched the OEM HU, amp, and speakers.

It isn't that hard to route a new speaker wire through the dash to the kickplate, run it thru the door boot, and into the door.
Use long zip ties with a speaker wire taped to it to feed the wire thru the dash and then the door boot.

You know that that door speaker isn't getting a signal.
Instead of tracking it down in a sea of wire looms from the HU to the door speaker location, just replace it and be done with it..

Also your new HU has to have speaker balance and fader, you just don't know where to find them.
Even the cheapest of Kmart Kraco radios had left-to-right balance and front-to-rear fader.


good luck to you..

 

Ok so life and weather have been getting in the way but I'm got some time and the weather is whatever at this point. Took passenger door apart and seems it's the first time ever if not a very long time it's been a part so of course everything broke on its way out.

Got both sides apart and swapped the y cable that splits the signal from the stereo to the speaker and tweeter... No sound.

Looking at them both I can see someone prior had zip tied that y connector on the driver's side to the door itself so I'd guess this was already chased down but to no end as all the speakers were factory and from what I can see only one of the six it came with worked.

Don't see why wires broken under the steering wheel from what I can see, but there's no way to remove the rocker panel cover as the screws have turned to dust and I don't want to try my hand at drilling them out. Think I may just install what I can and bring it to a shop at this point as I've long since run out of patience for something that didn't really matter to me a whole lot to begin with. Definitely has me doubting my chances of getting the backup camera done and might just throw them both at a shop and be done with it.

 

I completely understand your frustration, I think we've all been there at least once. For me it's been dozens of times. It's 10x worse when it's a customer's vehicle and you're left holding the bag.

And yeah, if you can't get the rocker off, and get the kick panel off after, you wouldn't be able to get access to (A) the rubber boot you'd need to pass a replacement wire through, into the door and (B) the connector where the door harness begins, which may be damaged, cut or otherwise, hence why things aren't working. Quite certain both are hidden back there.

Lots of options for dealing with dead screws w/o drilling. If there's any head left at all, regardless of how bad you blew it out, using a Dremel or other rotary tool to cut a slit in the head, then back it out with a flathead screwdriver is one. Sometimes going with a larger Philips head is an option also, like the factory I think is a #1 Philips, you can try a lot of downward force and twist with a #0 size. I've even had luck with shoving a square-drive bit into one without drilling, or penta or torx bit.

 

May give the Dremel an shot but it seems the ones in the front have rusted to the point of having no imprint of a Phillips at all but I can get the back ones out. Also ran out of spade connectors so I may go to the store to at least wire up the passenger side to see if those will work. Dunno, we'll see but I'm pretty sick of this little project at this point.

 

Hang in there, you'll get it solved. I may have a bag of replacement door fasteners in my box of extras in the shop, if that's what you broke off.

What I've found with door sill screws over the years is, they tend to get sand and shit in them, then water, then sand, then water, to the point the sand and rust become one. I typically dealt with it more on vintage cars, but it happens in modern ones too. And the screw is sometimes rusted into the kick plate, which doesn't help.

Many times, just meticulous digging out with a pick or anything pointed like a finishing nail, will dig those years of rust and sand out, leaving you with enough to grab onto with either a larger Philips or square-drive bit. YMMV.

 

Appreciate that but ATL to BDL is a long way for some silly clips. Found a parts truck locally, I may just try to replace the whole thing and harvest all the hardware.

 

I never mind shipping freebies on my dime if I've got 'em. Enough guys around here have showed the same generosity with me. If you come up short, holler, I'll go digging.

 

Appreciate that, but I'm hoping I can salvage a few from the door panel I'm looking to grab, already got the wheels/tires from the truck a while back so hopefully it's got the same door panel.

Ordered a bunch of connectors as I think I'll try putting in the passenger speakers before I throw it to the shop, but given those wires seem untouched and the speaker at least was working to begin with I should be able to wire them both up like I did the driver's side and have them work yes? (Assuming there's nothing wrong with the harness to the tweeter which never worked)

 

Yes, in theory. In fact, you should just be able to swap them over right now, I guess, since you've already spliced things on the other side.

And given you mentioned so many other speakers were blown in the truck, maybe the tweeter was just blown? My driver tweeter wasn't working, so I got all new speakers, only to find that the last person in the door actually forgot to plug it back in.

Wonder wtf could've possibly blown all of the speakers like that, though? I don't think I've ever seen such a thing in my life. Any time I've seen that many speakers non-functional, it's because the head unit or the OEM amp blew one or more channels.

 

Ah damn, shouldn't have buttoned up the driver's side but good to know. Pretty much everything on this truck was well used and they look like stock terrible speakers from 2000 so I'm not terribly surprised but it's odd they had one of six working and didn't bother to replace any of them.

 

I have a ton of spare clips.
PM me your address and I'll send you some 1st class and I'll cover shipping.

 

Appreciate that and I'll let you all know if I don't end up getting some with the door panel I'm hoping to grab