Car Stereos: Installing a CD player in a 94 Lincoln, subwoofer amp, rca cables

Question
I recently decided to upgrade my stereo system in my 94 Lincoln Continental, but I mistakenly cut the speaker wires along with the amp wire that is ran with it. How do I go about alleviating this issue. I was told that I may have to rewire the entire car with new speakers, but i am really trying to avoid doing this. Thanks ahead of time for your help.

Answer
Hi Dre,

Are you saying that you cut the thick gray cable (terminating in the small, square 8-pin plug) that carries the audio signals to the factory amplifier?  If so, then there are a couple ways to proceed.

You certainly don't need to replace the factory speakers, or run all new speaker wiring.  You need to decide whether you want to bypass the factory amplifier, or keep it working.  In your Continental, there are actually two different amplifiers: a 4-channel amp drives the front and rear door speakers, and a separate mono amplifier runs the two 6x9" subwoofers on the rear deck.

If you decide to bypass the amp, you can do this by unplugging the 4-channel amp in the trunk, and extending the speaker wires at the amp location up to the front so you can connect them to the new head unit.  You can buy a special harness to make this easier: Scosche's FD12B harness fits the speaker plug at the factory amp, and includes 18' of wire that can be routed up to the front.  However, the subwoofer amp gets its audio signal directly from the stock 4-channel amp. If you bypass the 4-channel amp, you'll either need to give up the subwoofer amp, or find a way to splice in some RCA cables so you can connect it directly to the new head unit's subwoofer RCA jacks.  (This would be the ideal solution, but would require some custom wiring work).

Alternately, you can keep the factory amplifiers working by splicing your new head unit's speaker outputs directly to the signal wires in the gray cable.  Ford factory amplifiers usually work fairly well with an after-market deck's speaker outputs as an audio source.  If you decide on this option, let me know and I'll try to find the signal wire colors in the gray cable.

Hope this helps!

Brian