02 Dodge Ram Std Cad w/ Infinity

Help, Please! I have the "premium" infinity sound system in my car and I decided to replace the entire system.  I put in an Alpine head unit and 5 channel amp, eclipse speakers in the doors and rear.  I ran 3 RCAs (Front/Rear/Sub), remote turn on cable, and 4 sets or speaker wire all to the head unit to utilize the existing speaker wires in the factory harness.  I then ran 6 gauge power to the battery (with fuse), and grounded to the chassis.  I then replaced all the speakers taking in to consideration polarity.  Well, I finally got finished hooking up the hole thing and I get no audio from the speakers just the subwoofer (which runs directly from the amp to the sub.  After a little searching on the net, I have found some references to the fact that the infinity sound system has an external amplifier.  If this is the case, I apparently need to bypass this, or remove it all together.  After an inspection of the factory speaker wires, It looks like it would be a pain in the ass to run new speaker wire, so I am back to possibly bypassing the amp. One last caviot is that I would like to utilize the 3.5" speakers in the dash which means that if I were to run new speaker wire, I would have to remove the entrire dash to get to the 3.5" speakers ... any suggestions?

If you're gonna be putting in aftermarket speakers as well as aftermarket amps you can still use the existing speaker wiring, you'll just need to  be able to access the infinity amplifier because that's where the bypass will have to take place.  I'm not sure exactly where the infinity amplifier is located, but try under one of the seats or behind the dash somewhere.  A lot of times you can hear a clicking noise when you first turn on your factory system.  Try to locate that clicking noise because that's actually the relay in the infinity amplifier, so if you can find where the noise is you'll find the amp.

Once you've found the amp, you'll have to figure out which wires are the speaker wires.  You should use a multimeter to first determine the constant and switched power wires, as well as the ground wire, and just make sure you don't mess with any of those.  A lot of times the amp will have a plug for the power and ground and signal inputs, and then another plug just for the 8 speaker output wires.  Or they may all be in one plug, but either way there will be a total of 8 signal input wires and 8 signal output wires and they will need to be cut and connected directly to each other (thus eliminating the infinity amplifier).

If you use a multimeter you can check for resistance between different pairs of wires and when you get a reading of approx. 4 ohms you know you've found the amp's speaker output wires that lead directly to the speaker's positive and negative wiring terminals.  Then to figure out which speaker each pair of wires goes to you can use a speaker popper.  Finally, for polarity plug the harness back in to the amp and turn the system on.  Check for voltage across the pair of wires--positive voltage means the wire touching the red test lead is the positive speaker wire, and negative voltage means the wire touching the black test lead is the positive speaker wire.  Continue to do this for the remaining 3 pairs of wires.

Make sure you do that resistance check first though because it's important that you get the wires leading directly to the speakers and not to the head unit or into the amp.  Only the wires going straight to the speakers will give you much of a resistance, let alone the 4 ohms that it should read.  Because once you use the speaker popper, if you've accidently picked wires going to the head unit you could damage it.  The speakers can handle being popped just fine, but not the head unit and/or amp.

Now to determine which of the wires are the input wires on the infinity amplifier, you can use a test speaker and turn the head unit up to about half volume and just start trying out different pairs of wires until you hear sound coming from the test speaker.  you'll have to listen very carefully because it might be hard to hear it, but once you've found a pair you'll hear sound come through your test speaker.  Then, use the fade/balance control to determine which area of the vehicle (front left, front right, rear left, rear right) that particular pair of wires goes to.  And then for polarity just repeat the process I described above for the infinity amplifier's output wires.

Just FYI the infinity amps use a high level input signal which means that technically you can use an aftermarket head unit with no problems as long as the factory amplifier gets a proper turn on signal like Jeff mentioned above.  However, since you have aftermarket speakers and are also gonna power them using an aftermarket external amplifier, you can't (and wouldn't want to) run the signal through the factory amp like might be the case if it's just a head unit.  This is because the infinity amps can only handle a limited amount of power going into them, before they will distort very easily; needless to say an aftermarket external amp will present way too high of an input signal for the infinity amp. Basically it'd be like amplifying the signal twice.

The remote turn on of your aftermarket head unit will need to be hooked up to the remote turn on for your aftermarket amplifier.

As for the dash 3.5" speakers, you shouldn't have to worry about those at all actually, because they're wired up in parallel with the door speakers.  Once you bypass the amplifier like I described above, essentially both pairs of speakers are hooked up to the same 4 speaker wires in the radio's harness (these are the wires that should obviously be hooked up directly to your 5-channel amplifier).  With the speakers wired in parallel they present a 2 ohm stereo load to the amplifier which it can handle very easily.

All,

Thanks for all the great input, esp. esmith69!

Update: I found the amplifier in the dash on the passenger side behind the glove box (for removal, there are two black tabs at the top of the glove box that have to be bent below the retaining clips for removal.  Then the glove box rests on two hooks, rotate the glove box toward you almost 180deg from closed position and then pull toward you).  On another forum, I found the wire diagram from the head unit (i.e. the inputs to the Infinity amp).  Then, since I had all the speakers removed, I had the wire colors and I looked at the factory speakers to reveal the polarity of the speakers.  For future reference here is what I have found:

Infinity Ouput Speaker Wire Colors (go to the speakers):

The systems works great now!  The only thing is that the 3 1/2s do not seem to use the same wires are the front door panel speakers, at least, I am getting no audio out of them.  There were 4 more wires comming out of the infinity outputs, but they did not exist in colored pairs like the other speaker wires.  I do not know where these wires go, perhaps the dash speakers.

NEW QUESTIONS:

2. The front 6 x 9 speakers used to be louder than the rear speakers and now it seems to be the opposite.  The rear speakers seem to overpower the fronts and I was wondering if perhaps the infinity amp pushed more power to the 6 x 9s or if the absence of the 3.5" dash speakers are the missing element.  I know that I can turn down the gain on the rear speakers via the amp, or fade the music to the front using the fader in the head unit, but this seems like a band-aid.  Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in Advance,

All the info I have says that the 3.5's are "attached to the dash...but then again that could mean just about anything.  I'm sure I could figure it out if I had the vehicle in front of me but without having it here it's kinda hard to know what to suggest exactly.  I bet that the whole top panel just pops out, but if it's like some of the other chrysler vehicles you'll want to know that 1)it's REALLY hard to get it to pop out, you have to yank on it really hard, and 2)you'll most likely break at least one of the spring clips in the process, but you can break as many as 2 or 3 of them and it'll still fit back in fine.  Try to pry up on the panel along the edge and see where the most resistance is, then use a flathead screwdriver or a panel removal tool to apply prying force to that area.

As for the question about the volume of the rear vs. the front, I would not be surprised if it is indeed that there is only one pair of speakers up front.  Because when there's 4 speakers up front they're wired in parallel which makes the amp run at 2 ohms stereo and that puts out more power overall for those front channels.  The rear channels are probably running a 4 ohm stereo load but they probably use more efficient speakers to account for the extra speakers up front (so that the sound is more balanced).

Now to actually get sound to come out of those speakers, you'll want to make sure that you leave the factory speaker plugs for the door speakers intact, including all the wiring going to them.  Sometimes there's 4 wires going into the plug, but two of the pins have two wires in each pin because these are the wires that run to the 3.5's.  If you cut off the factory speaker connector  then you'll have to connect those 2 extra wires up accordingly.  At least that's the way it was for my 96 caravan that was prewired for the infinity system in the rear.

Most likely though it's just gonna be a matter of hooking up those 4 extra wires on the amp's output harness.  You can use a speaker popper on the wires as long as they're not plugged into the amp while you do it; that'll allow you to determine which wires are for each speaker.   Since you already have the infinity amp bypassed and stuff, to determine polarity it'll be easier to just do a visual check.  You might be able to see through the factory speaker grilles in the dash but I assumed you'd be taking that off anyways and replacing them with aftermarkets.

anyways, what you do is just do the speaker popper and look at the cone of the speaker.  If it moves outward (towards you and away from its magnet) then the speaker popper's positive wire is touching the speaker's positive wire.  If the cone moves inward (away from you and towards its magnet) then the wire touching the speaker popper's negative wire is touching the speaker's positive wire.

All,

Update #2: (for the benefit of others)

1) Getting to the 3.5" speakers: There is a small strip on the top of the dash about 8in wide that extends from the middle top of the dash to the windshield.  I was able to place a flat head screw driver in the crevice and pop-up the panel covering the speakers.  There are indeed 3 speakers (Right - Center - Left).  As far as the wires running to these speakers:

I hooked the dash R+L speakers up to the Right Front and Left Front channels respectively and they work great.  That, incidently solved question #2.  With the dash speakers connected, the sound is much more evenly placed in the vehicle.  Only problem now is that I have a little too much treble.  Luckily the Alpine head unit has a comprensive eq built in, I just need to spend a little time learning to use it.

One thought I had was to hook the dash speakers up to the head unit (about 20W rms - according to the manual) and then use the amp to drive the 6 x 9s that way I never over power the 3.5s and that will perhaps reduce the volume of them, hence, reducing some of the twangy tweeter sound.  I don't know, I'll play with it this weekend.

Thanks everyone for your prompt help and attention.  As a newbie, I will be trying to do my part and contribute back to the community.

As a side note, if anyone is wondering about the Infinity Kappa series speakers in a 02+ Dodge Ram, the 6 x 9s will not fit, even with Dremmel modification!  The window mechanism will get caught on the large abs plastic basket on the back of the speaker.  luckily I did a comprehensive set of measurements before modifying my doors.  Real bummer.  As far as the rear panels, I fit the Kappa 63.5i 3-way coaxials today and they fit perfectly (the default speaker back there is a 5.25" - I actually did not have to modify the hole at all).  If you read the previous article, I had mentioned the Eclipse speakers ... yeah ... I blew those the first day.  The salesman that sold them to me said they could handle the power of my amp ... well ... I think he was wrong.  Kappas - no problem.