96 escort lx

You are describing it good, just straight down from the radio in that sorta columny thing there. :)

I thought I checked everything there, but on the other hand I was looking for something that looked amp like AND matched the bypass cable they gave me.

It's possible that they also changed the cable on the amp. , the closest  thing I found was a blue box with two cables going in that looked very close but didn't match up.

well if you are unsure if it is the amp, try looking for anything identifiable. usually everything in a car has some sort of label or marking, by studying the box marking you can at least tell if it is not the amp. if you read it and it says something about airbags or srs or anything else that isnt audio related then you know that it isnt the amp. also you can look for things like a few pairs of twisted wires which are usually the speaker wires, USUALLY BUT NOT ALWAYS. other devices also have twisted wires, but you can look at the color of the twisted wires and compare the colors to what the speaker wire colors should be, if they match then you have your amp. also i dont know why you keep saying something about the cables being changed on the amp, i dont know why anybody would ever do this unless they used a factory amp out of a different car and rigged it into your car, if that is the case then you should just go ahead and run new wire because there will be no telling what else they decided needed to be rigged up to make a different amp work in your car. honestly sometimes its just not worth integrating or bypassing the factory amp, sometimes its just way easier to run new wire, even if you just tap onto the speaker wire going into each door without running the wire through the boot, it will still be easier and just as good.

Sorry I wasn't clear about the cables being changed. The wire harness kit came with a bypass cable kit for the amp. Since they don't seem to have settled on a standard location for the amp I am wondering if maybe they didn't settle on a standard connector for it as well. In that case the bypass cable that I have might not fit. Your idea about tapping onto the existing speaker wires might work as well. Another possibility is to leave the amp there and use the pre-amp out of the deck, but like you said it is probably not a great amp. Unless someone happens to wander over here that has the same awesome car and happened to snap a pic of the amp I don't think there is much more I can do until I actually pull it all apart again. If I do find it I will try and put a pic up. Thanks everyone

you wont be able to use the pre-amp outputs to send a signal to the factory amp. if it was that easy then they would make a special harness with rca's already on it like they do for other cars that will accept a low level signal for the factory amp.

oh man, well that sucks. Any chance the existing amp is smart enough to just know that the signal coming into it is already amplified and just leave it alone?

chances are, no, because if the amp would accept an amplified signal then there would be no need for the jumper harness

yeah, makes sense. I guess it's time to dive in again. thanks for the advise.