STEREO UPGRADE:
As I said, the stereo that was in there was decent, but I wanted bluetooth hands free cell phone, sirius satellite radio, and a bit of a cleaner look and the greyness of the Alpine unit didn't do it for me. I then did my research and settled on Pioneer DEH-P9800BT. This thing has every feature under the sun and I like it.
- I had the headliners redone in black, so I was able to run the handsfree mic and sirius antenna cable through the roof. I was going to run the antenna through the sunroof but it doesn't seem to want to close completely with the wire in the way.
- My rear window is tinted so I'm going to have to put the antenna through the trunk, then up the window gasket to the roof, or something like that. Anyone had better luck running a satellite radio antenna on their E34?
Then the fun begins...
Whoever did the stereo upgrade before did some really weird ****, running RCA cables off the deck wiring harness when there were pre-amp RCA connectors already on the headunit. Whoever did it obviously had some money to spend, but I want to use the factory speaker wire harness to clean up the install. However, I can only find 4 of the 8 speaker wires I need. I'm going to tie the 8 OEM speaker wires into this Quad Phono Jack.
The more and more I delve into it, the more of the interior I have to take out, so I'm just taking it ALL out.
I'm going to track the wires from the trunk back to the front of the car, cleaning out any clutter that I come across. I'm still going to use one set of RCA cables from the headunit to the back for the subwoofer.
That little black 8-pin plug are the only stereo speakers I can find. It was tucked way up under the dash. I can only hope the other speaker wires were tucked away like that too.
I'm also going to have to treat some surface rust, but for as expensive the materials were for the stereo upgrade, you would have thought the installer would have made it look cleaner.