An Easy Upgrade Proving to be More Difficult Than Expected

I’m replacing what I thought to be my factory radio in my 07 non-jbl truck with a kenwood dmx908s only to find someone had previously t taped the s#!% out of the factory wire harness. To my knowledge the first owner before us didn’t like how he ordered the non jbl tundra and thought to add a factory amp to his non factory harness by t taping it in. Here’s some pictures…

 

Sooooo what part do you need help with?

 

It looks like they didn't cut any factory wires, but just T-tapped probably to get the high-level audio output from the stock radio to their added factory amplifier (maybe some power too). If I remember your other thread correctly, you are going to add an aftermarket amp. Why not just remove all the T-Taps and the wiring going back to the added factory amp and start fresh? Probably best to put some insulation over the small areas on the factory wiring that may have a tiny amount of copper exposed from the taps. Then use the wiring adapters I assume you got to plug into the factory harness.

 

Sorry for my over reaction it's just crazy to me that for 12 years my family and I had no idea the audio system had ever been touched. My main concern now is I'm just hoping none of the T-taps have somehow "lost connection" with the wire they were tapped into thus starting a fire (I know that's probably very rare and unlikely but in my experience T taps have been very annoying to work with) Also, I have no idea where he put the amp at, because it's no where to be found under the seats or in the dash under the stock radio. The wires just go off to the left by the gauge cluster and that's it. I did check the kick plates on both sides but didn't see anything that looked out of place it was just the factory grommet wrapped wiring harness. I'm really hoping it's not tucked up behind the gauge cluster or even up on the top of the dash because I had no intention on ever going that deep with the build on this truck.

One question I have is does anyone know what the wattage is on the factory amplifiers?

 

Around 15w iirc.

 

Dang that’s way worse than I thought it’d be. That’s getting yanked out lol. I’m probably just gonna replace speakers first then see how they handle that low of power but I’ll most likely just do a new amp too.

Would it be recommended to just wrap the t tapped wires or to cut them just before and repin the whole harness?

 

Did you purchase a plug and play harness for your install? If so, I’d find where those wires go to see what’s going on there. Assuming you’ll no longer use that equipment/ wires, I’d remove the tap and tape the harness. If you have any sort of issue moving forward cut out where the tap was and splice it.

 

Yes I did I bought from Crutchfield.com and paid for their “ready harness” which just prewired everything for me. I believe the amp is just for the front speakers because there is 6 wires tapped off (2 for front left door speaker and tweeter wired in series, another 2 for the other side, then positive and negative for power) The original plan was just to buy another set of plugs that goes into both the factory harness and the back of the HU so I could just prewire a new harness to go to the speed wire from the amp and install when ready without having to have the truck down without a radio for a day or two since I daily drive it. Still might end up doing the same thing, I’ll have to think it over for a bit until I decide on speakers and an amp.

 

I have a 2018 JBL and the amp is 19A

 

All installed and cranking the tunes now?

 

Apologies for the silence my week got real busy and I forgot to update.

Radio is working fantastic, no complaints whatsoever (other than the disappointing lack of bass coming from the stock speakers :/) Just debating on whether going with subs and mono amp under the rear seat first or replacing the door speakers and adding a 4/5 channel amp is a better bet...

I have a buddy with practically the exact same spec tundra as mine just with the console shifter that's also debating which to do first along side me. Maybe waiting for some black Friday deals to come around would be the best bet since it's right around the corner...

 

Although you won't get the instant boom of going straight to adding a sub, aftermarket speakers do sound a lot better and will sound fine being powered from the head unit until you can go to a multi-channel amp and add a subwoofer.

 

Here's some pictures of the HU installed since I didn't add them earlier... (apologies for the fingerprints XD)
Dash kit matches extremely well for only costing $20. Fits really snug and hugs all the corners perfectly. I couldn't be happier. And FYI the specs on the kit are just dust and not imperfections in the paint. All it would take is one alcohol wipe to clean it up nicely, which I would have done if I don't use this truck everyday for work knowing it'll just get dirty again.
Carplay works flawlessly, both wireless and wired (there is a slight delay when using strictly wireless which is to be expected but I always plug my phone in to charge it so it doesn't affect me at all)
Lots of EQ and cross over settings that are fun to play with and I'm excited to get new speakers and amp to use this HUs full potential.
I've decided to go with doing speakers and sound deadening in the front doors first just to see the small differences made between upgrades. Eventually, I'll tear out the HU again and wire in a new amp and some cameras I'd just like to get everything ordered and figure out where I want them to be at before I start taking everything apart again that way I only have to do it once.









Any recommendations for a USB-C blank to fill the factory location? I just upgraded to the brand new iPhone which got rid of the Lightning charger so I strictly use USB-C now and would like to keep it that way. Only things I've seen so far are just the old USB-A blanks and I wasn't sure if USB-C blanks even existed at all. If not I might just buy another blank and try to custom-cut a USB-C hole that way.

 

Just ordered the new speakers for it. Decided on getting the 7" Kenwood excelon KFC-XP184C components for the front and the same coaxials for the rear. Also bought 2 dynamatt extreme door kits all for about $550 on Crutchfield. Says it'll ship by Thursday and I couldn't be more excited!

 

Got her all finished up and it sounds great. There is a tremendous amount of mid-bass now even without a good enough amp to push these 7" woofers. Really impressed overall even though I came into this with high expectations. Debating on whether it's worth it to even get an amp now after hearing it all setup but I probably will end up doing it anyways just to keep myself busy with this truck. Sound deadening was the biggest PITA for the whole project as it took me close to 2 and a half hours per door but it was definitely worth it in the long run as there is much less road noise and door rattle going on.

All in all, was definitely worth the $600 total for everything and would definitely recommend everyone to at least look into replacing the factory speakers because honestly anything is better than the stock junk.

(here's some pictures)









I bought two 12 square foot Dynamatt Sound Deadening kits off of crutchfield and ended up using close to 23 for both the inside and outside of all the doors. Only had one casualty when installing which was breaking one of the brittle plastic door lock mechanisms which isn't too big of a deal as it doesn't prevent the truck from locking/unlocking the door as well as opening it. It only makes it weird to unlock the door from the inside by hand which I feel nobody does anyway since the doors automatically unlock when I put it in park. Probably could have superglued it or something but I just don't see that being a long term solution anyway so I just left it for now and will probably end up fixing it later when it starts to keep me up at night.

 

One thing I forgot to add was with the 7" component speakers it didn't clarify that they wanted the tweeter wires to go back through the door boot to plug into the woofer in the door, so I had to cut the harness off of the OEM tweeter, crimp the harness to the new tweeter and then plug it back in. The way the factory wiring works is there's two wires coming from the headunit that go to the tweeter first at a single plug, then two more wires go from that plug to the door speaker to power the doors. The 4 wires inside of the plug minimize down to 2 thicker wires and are then soldered to the tweeter. If for some reason you mix up the power from the headunit with the wires being ran to the speaker you won't get any sound out of those two speakers. And toyota didn't help by making both pairs red and black and changing colors somewhere behind the dash when it meets the HU and the door speaker so you kind of have to guess. Not a big deal if you get it wrong as you can just flip them around and it'll work fine like I did. Once installed the tweeters sound great!

Also, Crutchfield forgot to ship me the tweeter mounting brackets so currently they are being held in by one 10mm but the mounts get here Friday so I'm not too worried about it. There is a slight buzz coming from the drivers side tweeter and I'm wondering if the interference is coming from a larger power wire coming from behind the gauge cluster so I'm gonna double wrap everything in electrical tape to hopefully fix it.

 

*Update*
*adding pictures soon*


Finally coming back to updating this forum with my setup and there is a lot to add compared to what I last showed off so let's get started.



First off, I ended up wanting a "full-active" front stage with my setup to get the maximum amount of detail and control over my setup. Went with the 4 channel Kenwood XR401-4 amplifier (75 watts RMS x 4 @ 4 ohms). Planned on doing 2 channels for the dash speakers and 2 channels for the doors.



I unplugged the factory dash tweeters, cutting off the 4 wires that made the tweeter run in parallel with the door speaker and tied the positives and negatives together to allow only the woofer to play off of that channel. I then ran 2 new wires from each corner of the dash to the back of the radio to eventually tie them into the amp. I wanted to mount my amplifier under the drivers seat, so I ran the crutchfield "speed wire" with 9 wires wrapped in a very durable insulation (4 pairs plus remote turn on) from the back of the radio to under the seat to eventually tie them in.



Backing up a little bit, I received the maestro RR kit as a Christmas gift to put into my truck to allow me to see gauges and such on my head unit.

Has two different presets to chose from and allows them to be changed out for others.





Also bought a Kenwood CMOS-320 camera to use as a front facing camera and a Master Tailgaters backup camera that replaces the factory Tailgate handle and planned on wiring both of them in to always have power so I could look at the cameras whenever I wanted. With the Maestro ready harness, I bought the Ken1 adapter that allowed the maestro harness to just plug right into the back of the HU without matching up and soldering the wires. On this harness, I soldered in some wires off of the red 12v accessory, black ground, and purple white reverse trigger so I could add in a reverse trigger to the HU since my truck didn't come with a factory backup camera. I had to run a 12v accessory, ground, and reverse trigger to the back of the truck to power the backup camera and tie in the reverse trigger to the reverse light.



Handle is super high quality and feels just like OEM. To switch the key lock holder all it took was one little U clip holding it in and swapping it over.




Both cameras have pretty decent camera quality and weren't too complicated installation wise, the hardest part being running the actual wires to the cameras. The CMOS-320 has 4 different camera modes: Ultra wide, Wide, overhead view (looks down) and a corner view. Since I had a compatible HU I can use the HU to switch between modes by pressing the right side of the screen but if I didn't it comes with a handy button remote that can be used to setup and change position of the camera:

Ultra Wide-



Wide (normal)-


Overhead View (worst of the 4 in terms of quality)-


Corner View-


Wide View with directional lines turned on by pressing left side of the screen-


Backup Camera with and without HU backup lines-




No complaints with either cameras or the maestro RR gauges other than the fact it won't show me transmission temperatures but I don't think it's a problem with the module and rather just not an option for my truck. Also one thing I forgot to mention is when I tied in my reverse trigger to the HU and RR, for some reason when I put it into reverse the RR would always show the backup camera on the screen and turned on my reverse lights even when the truck was off so I had to cut the reverse trigger going into the module and only have it go into the HU and it seemed to fix it. Not sure what caused it to go haywire and I tried reflashing it and even removing the advanced camera features off the flash thinking it had something to do with it and nothing. I didn't lose any features off of the HU so I don't see why it needed a reverse trigger anyways but if anyone knows why it might have been doing that let me know.



Coming back to running the speaker wires, the maestro harness had a neat little plug between the HU and the factory plugs that was strictly for the front speakers with the intention of unplugging the HU's connection to the speakers to add an amp. So I unplugged them and soldered in my speed wire to the 4 white and gray door speaker wires and then my 4 extra dash speaker wires to the purple and green wires. The harness also had a remote turn on wire coming off to go to the amp so I tied in my blues to complete the speed wire installation.



Under the seat, I measured and cut out some 1/4" ABS plastic to make a custom amplifier mount so the amp doesn't bounce around and become a projectile in the case of an accident (god forbid). At the amp, I tied in the 2 dash speakers to the first 2 channels using wire ferrules and set the High Pass Filter to 2.5Khz and the 2 door speakers to the remaining channels and set the Low Pass Filter to 2.5Khz also. For the amplifier power, I ordered the Stinger 6000 series 4 gauge amp kit that's rated for 175 amps and ran the power wire through the factory grommet and up to the battery. I grounded the amp to a predrilled and threaded hole right under the door jam which turned out perfect.

(the left midranges in the dash were accidentally hooked up out of polarity so I just flipped them at the amp as a temporary solution with every intention of going back and fixing it later)


I wrapped every wire running through the vehicle in wire loom I bought off of Amazon. I think a roll of 100 foot of 1/4" loom was like $20 and 50 foot of 1/2" was even less. Makes me feel a lot better about the protection of the wires and in my opinion is a no brainer because it's barely any added cost.

There was already a little hole to run wires through in the factory grommet, all I had to do was cut a little nipple off and slip it through. It was a little tight on the engine side of the firewall but with a metal coat hanger it didn't take to long to get it through.





After the installation of the amp, needless to say I was a little... disappointed. Partly due to me not researching enough I found out that the speakers I bought don't play at their best based off the crossovers on the amp. The midbass is playing too high and the tweeter is trying to meet it too low and it sounds a little funny in the higher midrange frequencies. The amp has a LPF or HPF for each channel going from 50Hz-200Hz or 2.5kHz-10kHz. To battle this problem I ended up buying Audio frog's GS25 2.5" midrange speakers which are rated to play frequencies from 200Hz-20kHz and they sound great but it still didn't solve my crossover problem for the midbass. The amazing thing about Crutchfield.com (which is where I've bought mostly everything audio related for my truck) has a 60 day return policy so I plan on returning the Kenwood amplifier for something a little more expensive with much more adjustability. DSP TIME BABY



I'm planning on going all out with an Audio Control DSP integrated amplifier I'm just waiting on Crutchfield to restock them on their website. Plans are to either go with the D6-1200 or the D4-800. If I do the D4-800 I won't change anything wiring wise but just switch out the amps and tune all the DSP goodies on my laptop. If I go with the D6-1200 I have the option to either run the rear doors through the 5th and 6th channel or run a set of wires through the door grommets in the front doors and add tweeters in the sail panels to have a full active 3 way setup! I do also plan on adding a subwoofer but I'm gonna go with a cheaper option and get either a

$280 Rockford Fosgate P300-8P Punch 8" 300-Watt Amplified Subwoofer in Ported Enclosure - Slim Design for Tight Spaces - Black

Rockford Fosgate P300-8P or

$310 P300-10T Single 10" 300-Watt Amplified Truck Sealed Box Subwoofer - Black

P300-10T for ease of installation and so I could still keep as much room under the rear seat as possible. If I can fit the larger P300-10T then that's what I'll get but I'm worried clearance wise because I haven't heard of anyone else that's fit one under the double cab rear seats. Either way, all I would have to do to add a sub would be to run the remote turn on from the DSP amp to the subs, RCA output out of the DSP, and add a fused distribution block off of the 4 gauge wire I ran to the DSP amp to add the 8 gauge recommended wire for the subs.


If anyone else has done anything similar to this I'd love to hear about it!

 

The audio control amp dsp is not one of the better units out there. For the cost you can do better with just about any unit. The jbl/infinity 4080 is a fantastic amp with dsp in it. I guess I’m not an audio control fan at all. Over priced and not the quality it used to be.
Also the software is not intuitive and out dated.

The Sony, alpine,jl and jbl are going to be easier to deal with.

however, if you buy through james at tech12volts he will set you dsp and amp up and send it to you already tuned and ready to go. You will make a few tweaks but your miles ahead.

Just a few thoughts. Or get one from crutchfield and learn to tune.

 

I appreciate the insight but based off of the research I've done, Audio control seems to really care about their image and listens to their customers. I will agree they have had complaints with the intuitiveness and ease of use with their software but after downloading the software and taking a look at it for myself it doesn't seem all that bad and they have made changes that even I have noticed based off of what some installers have shown in videos from years ago.


I'm not scared at all to dig in to tuning the system myself from scratch, and it's mostly the reason I began doing this whole audio "restoration" myself in the first place. I WANT to learn how to do all of this myself, and in order to learn this I feel I have to just jump into it and start doing it. It's best to know how things operate and how changing a certain something affects the system as a whole incase problems arise so I can diagnose and fix them myself.


I did look into the amps you mentioned and maybe I'm just being stubborn but there is no way a $400-$500 amp is going to come close to this one (I know I've never owned or seen any of them but there must be a reason one costs almost three times as much) I looked at all of the other dsp's from the companies you mentioned and to be honest the only ones that caught my attention were the JL audio VX600 and the JL audio VX400. The rest just don't seem to be on the same level IMHO. Again, I haven't had any experience with any of these before so I'm saying this solely based on the information I can find online about them.


Also another thing to add is I have heard great things about tech12volts and the great products he puts out BUT I also have heard he's been more on the unreliable side recently. From not answering emails to leaving people hanging on their systems that order online via email. Either way, I want to learn this for myself and the whole point in me doing this is so I don't have to pay someone else to do a job I can accomplish.

 

Fair enough but price doesn’t necessarily equate to quality. I have been in this hobby since the late 80s. It’s fun. But things like undefeatable subsonic filters and other things frustrate many with audio control. Learning to tune is frustrating but fun. Just need a laptop, rew, a good mic and some patience.

 

The install is coming along nicely. Clean that battery!
It does seem like Audio Control is a bit pricey compared to the competition, but I love my Audio Control Epicenter. It does an amazing job at "restoring" bass. I was skeptical when I first heard about it (15 years ago), but their method is sound.

For Audio Control DSP/amps, check out this guy if you haven't already. I think AC sponsors him and he has a lot of AC related how-to videos.... especially with the DSPs. https://www.youtube.com/@CarAudioFabrication

Matt

 

Yes the battery needs replaced XD I've got a brand new one sitting in my living room I just want to try to wait this cold winter out just to see how much life I can get out of this interstate battery. Bought it in 2018.

I have watched loads of Car Audio Fabrication and he definitely has loads of videos on the dsp amps from audio control as well as many others. I will say him being sponsored by Audio Control does make me a little skeptical but he still does put out great informative content with little to no bias on how he informs his viewers. My personal favorite being https://www.youtube.com/@FiveStarCarStereoInc as they have no company bias and only install whatever their customers buy (with the exception of them pointing each customer in a certain direction to match their needs)