Need car stereo tech advice.

[Lmandrake]

My son's car is an 84 Chrysler and he put a nice Clarion head unit in it and hooked it up using an adapter kit that plugged into the Chrysler wiring harness. We replaced the rear speakers with some decent Polks and fired it up. Sounded like crap.

I get a wiring diagram for the car. The wiring harness adapter he got and the instructions with it must have been for a later model year and some of the connections had to be redone. Although I would prefer to run new wires for the speakers, I have so many hours in this car now that I will leave that to him. In the interim, I got a factory wiring diagram for the car and found that both sets of speakers have a common ground wire in the factory system. Seeing that, I went to the outputs for the head unit and tied the ground sides together for each set of speakers and attached them to the appropriate wire in the factory harness. Still sounded like crap. So I went back to drawing board and just attached one ground wire from the rear output to the factory common ground for the rear and one wire from the front output to the factory common ground to front pair.

Fired it up and it sounded good to me. All the speakers respond appropriately to Fade and Balance adjustments and I haven't released any of the "magic blue smoke" from the head unit.

My question is whether using a single ground from each of the sets of outputs from the head unit is going to do any harm. It sounds ok to me and nothing untoward seems to be happening.


Thanks...

[PreDatoR]

From my experience if you tear apart most stereo's all of the grounds are common to each other so i doubt it will hurt anything.

[CaterpillarAssassin]

i'd run new wires anyways. I had an 83 cordoba i had put a system into Yeah i'd just run new wires. I mean if it sounds good you really shouldnt be hurting anything though.