picking a new headunit

Ah, but you have a Honda, I have a Chevy :D  And to clarify, I am having light dimming issues with ONLY the MRP-M500 as I havent gotten the 300 yet.  I dont know how to multi quote here, but the head unit is on hold.  I couldnt find a headunit that I thought was an upgrade over what I have now.  There have been headunits that I have found, and that have been suggested, that had some better features but there was some negative that outweighed it.  For example Eclipse, I have had an Eclipse in the past and LOVED it probably the best deck I have ever had sound quality wise.  I would love to get a new one, but the displays look like they are from 82 and are small.  Yes it is an upgrade in many ways over what I have but by getting an amp I can get what I want and still have a nice looking deck.  The plan for now is as follows:

Kinetic KHC800 to help with power

Alpine MRP-F300 which takes care of crossovers (and gives me more headroom to go louder)

Stinger wiring for the new amp, and upgrade grounds

I am going to start with that, and see if that takes care of my "problems"  If not I can always change the headunit after.  I will be sure to update with pictures and results of everything.

Sean

OK, I got the battery Friday and ordered the wire yesterday.  The plan is to obviously change out the battery to the Kinetic HC800 and upgrade the ground.  Currently the stock ground is just an 8ga to a ring terminal, so I'm going to change it to a 4ga and bring it to one of [URL=" http://www.stingerelectronics.com/productDetails.aspx?delineate=475&CategoryID=-1&Parentid=-1"]these[/URL].  We will see how that works for now because upgrading the rest will be a big pain in the butt.  The main wire coming into the battery is a 4ga, but I am not sure that it is straight from the alternator.  For all I know it could be 16ga from the alternator into a distribution center, then 4ga to the battery from there.  When I start doing all the work I will look into the factory wiring a little more, but I have already been told from some cobalt experts that I shouldn't have to upgrade the main power wire.  Anyway thats all for now, just figured I'd give you all an update.  I'll post pics when I'm installing it all in a couple weeks.

Sean

broke ef, for multi quotes:

type capitalized QUOTE = (no spaces).  After the = you type in the name of the poster you are quoting.  Flank this command with brackets [ and ].  At the end of the pasted quote, put a / before the word QUOTE within the same type brackets.

Good stuff, broke.  ;)

OK on with the install!!!

We will start with the door wiring.  Since I have a 0 option car I ony had 2 small (20ga?) wires going to the door as seen here.

I took that out and was greeted with this.

I then decided that I could just taket that out since I dont need it for anything now, so I got this

And here is the stock wiring that came out

I then ran my new stinger 14ga wire through the stock gromets and threw in the new speakers (JL Audio C2-650x)

Moving on to the trunk I was changing the battery to a new Kinetic KHC800 battery, adding a ground, and redoing the amp wiring.

Here you can see the battery mocked up with the pices I had to make inorder to hold the battery with the factory tie down.

Here is the battery without the top piece (The wires were from a battery tender)

Here is the bottom piece to hold the battery from side to side and front to back movement.

Here is the new Stinger distrobution block that has 2 seprate fuses because each amp needs a different rating.  It has 4ga in and 2 8ga out.

Here is new 4ga ground lug I added (the paint was ground off underneith it)

Here is a shot of all the power side of things

Here is the ground side

And over all

Next came running the new RCA's adding my Sirius box, and cleaning up some of my wiring behind the headunit.  I didnt get many pics of all of this but you can see the sirius box on the bottom left and the strat of cleaning up the wiring.

Now the best part, installing the new amp!!  Here is just seeing how it will look (you can see some of the mess in this pic)

Installed

And both together

Well thats all the pics I took, I was to busy working to get very many.  Over all I am VERY happy with it, sounds a lot better and is a lot louder!  Sorry for the long post, but Im excited about my stereo.

Sean