Car Stereos: 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee, jeep grand cherokee, continuity test

Question
The amp in the Jeep we just got is fried so I took it out.Can I re wire my radio bypassing the amp? If so. How? none of the wire match in color and everything keeps messin up

Answer
Hi,

You can certainly bypass the factory amplifier in your Jeep; it's not a very difficult job, if you can identify the correct wire colors.  I can give you the wire color information I have, but it might not be correct.

The best way to approach this would be to strip all the audio components, so you can test the wires.  Basically, the factory amplifier has eight input wires coming from the head unit, and eight output wires going to the speakers.  Your job would be to find, for example, the left front (+) wire coming from the head unit, and connect it directly to the left front (+) speaker wire going to the speaker (and so on through the list).  If you can't find the wires any other way, you can identify them with a multimeter: for example, you can identify the left front (+) wire at the speaker, and connect a multimeter probe to it.  Then set the meter for continuity test, and probe each wire at the amplifier until you find the one that's connected to the speaker wire.  This is a pretty labor-intensive way to do it, though.

Here's the wire colors I have; hopefully this will turn out to be correct.

Left front (+):  from head unit: dark green.  To speaker: light green/red
Left front (-):  from head unit: brown/red.   To speaker: light green/black
Right front (+): from head unit: violet.      To speaker: light blue/red
Right front (-): from head unit: dark blue.   To speaker: light blue/black

Left rear (+):   from head unit: brown/yellow. To speaker: white/red
Left rear (-):   from head unit: brown/blue    To speaker: white/black
Right rear (+):  from head unit: dk. blu/white  To speaker: tan/red
Right rear (-):  from head unit: dk. blu/orange  To speaker: tan/black

Hope this helps!

Brian