Car Stereos: 1996 jeep grand chreokee limited with infinity gold pkg, infinity gold, wire colors

Question
can i bypass the factory amp ? we have installed a JVC head unit. there is a crackling coming from the rear speakers and nothing from the front.if so, how do we do it ? thanks

Answer
Hi Mike,

You can certainly bypass the factory amplifier; it's not very hard to do.  However, you'll either have to give up the dash speakers or install in-line crossover filters to keep them from getting bass signals.

The factory amp is located under the rear seat.  There should be either one or two plugs at the amp.  To bypass the amp, unplug it.  Then identify the signal input wires coming from the head unit, and connect them directly to the output wires running to the speakers.

There will be eight signal input wires at the amp, corresponding to (+) and (-) wires for left front, left rear, right front, and right rear.  They should already be connected to the appropriate speaker wires from your JVC head unit.  The easiest way to identify the wires at the amp is to check the color of the wires behind the head unit; they'll be the same color in each location.

You'll have a total of 12 output wires to the factory speakers; two wires each for the dash tweeters, front door speakers, and rear door speakers.  Unfortunately, I don't have wire colors for these.  The (+) and (-) wire for each speaker should be paired side-by-side in the plug.   You can try going to each speaker location and trying to match wire colors, but it's possible that the wire colors change between the amp and the speakers.  If that's the case, you can use the "continuity" function on a multimeter to match the wires between the amp and the speaker location.  I suspect you're going to need to replace your front door speakers in any case, and very possibly the rear speakers as well.

If you put a good 2-way or 3-way speaker in the front door, you won't really miss the dash speakers.  However, if you want to put new tweeters in the dash, you can just combine the tweeter wires and the front door speaker wires at the amplifier location.  In this case, you'll either need to use tweeters with built-in crossovers, or install in-line crossovers on the tweeter wires.

In addition to the speaker input and output wires at the amp, there will also be one or more 12v power wires, one or more ground wires, and a green/red wire that comes from the head unit and carries the amp turn-on signal.  You don't have to do anything with these wires at all.

Hope this helps!

Brian