1995 Corolla Stereo Installation

I recently got a 1995 Toyota Corolla DX from a friend and decided to put my amps and speakers from my old Mustang into it.  The Corolla already has a decent factory unit that is split into a casette/radio unit on the top panel and a cd player on the bottom panel.  Upon inspection of the wires for the stereo itself, I noticed there wasn't an amp remote power wire or any RCA low input cables.  What I was trying to hook up were two amplifiers and three speakers: the first amp is 250 watts and is going to two 8" speaker boxes that are 100 watts each.  The other amplifier is 400 watts and is going to a 10" sub that is 300 watts.  To power the amps, I spliced into the factory wiring's switched 12 volt and ran two cables back: one for the amp remote power, and one for the 12 volt.  Only one amp needs remote power (the 400 watt) so I ran the spliced wire to that.  As for the other 12 volt that I ran from the front, I spliced that into two more cables that ran to the 12+ on the amplifiers.  As for the RCA dilemna, I discussed it with a friend and his suggestion was that I cut the RCA heads off the ends of the cables, and splice them into the rear factory speaker wires.  I spliced the 400 watt amp into the passenger rear speaker, the 250 into the driver's side.  When all was said and done, it worked....for a few minutes.  The problem is that after being on for only a short amount of time, all of the audio in the rear of the car (including the sub and 8"s) cuts out and does not come back on.  This is strange because the amps protection does not click on, nor does their power go out.  All of the speakers just go out and do not come back on (including the rear factory speakers!).  I haven't a clue as to what's going wrong, because no wires are touching together, the grounds are good...so I am at a loss.  If anyone can help with this problem, it would be greatly appreciated!

if you took the speaker level input straight from the rear speakers and put RCA connectors on them and ran them to the low level inputs (RCA jacks)  chance's are you prob blew the inputs, the rca inputs on the amps are only rated for a smal amout of power (signal only, .2 - 4volt on most i've seen ) the only way you run wires straight from the factory deck like that is if the amp has a high level input meant for speaker level inputs. i have one question though...did you run a seperate power wire to your battery for your amps? from what you mentiond it sounded like you took the 12volt from your ignition wires in your car. which if that's the case, i would take it all out and run a proper power wire, your cars stock ignition wires will not handle the power needed to run those amps.

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Tri County KustomZ
certified installer

The 400 watt amplifier has a high input plug that I will try tomorrow.  The 250 watt also has one but I do not have the connector plug for it.  It's a 5 pin split up into L- L+ Ground R- R+  Does anyone know where I might be able to get one of these?  I was thinking about soldering, but the pins are very small and it would have to be too precise a job.  I will also try running the power for the amps directly off of the battery through a toggle switch.

What I ended up doing was splicing both rear speaker cables into the high input plug on the 400 watt, and then ran RCA's from the 400 watt's low output into the 250's low inputs.  It sounds pretty damn good and seems to be working now so thank you very much for your advice!

when you said you spliced into the power wire; do you mean the constant wire behind the deck? what gauge wire did you run to the back?

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