Adding an aftermarket head unit to the mach 460 system

krispy521

New Member
Dec 9, 2005
20
0
2
Hey guys,

I just bought a Kenwood head unit to replace my factory mach 460 head unit. I have the Metra 70-5519 harness. It has one white rca and one red rca. My new head unit has a hook ups for front, rear, and subwoofer rca's. How do I hook up the two from the harness to get the best sound? Right now I have them plugged into the front rca's but the sound quality kinda blows. Do I need y-splitters or something?

BTW this is a 2002 Mustang GT.

Thanks:shrug:
 
  • Sponsors (?)


Rca's are for aftermarket amps.. all you need to do is match colors with the wiring harness and the cars wires and connect them and the harness plugs into the back of your headunit.. if I'm wrong guys correct me but this seems right to me.
 
What do you mean by "the sound quality kinda blows"? Are all the speakers functioning to some degree?

It looks like the 2002 Mach460 uses one RCA to feed the front woofers' amp and the other to feed the rear - the woofers run in mono. There's a couple of ways to hook them up:

- you can just plug it up to the sub-outputs on the headunit but the amps already have crossovers built in set to the correct frequency and slope for the system and you might get phase issues and weird frequency response around the crossover frequency with stacked crossover filters.

- connect them to either the front or back outputs but you lose proper fade control on the woofers

- connect them to one of the front and one of the rear outputs (ie., front-left and rear-right) so you get all the stereo information and still have (mostly) proper fading

- use y-adapters to combine the front and rear left & right signals into one mono signal each to feed the front and rear amps. This is the most correct solution. For best results, you should use true summing cables and not just a simple y-adapter as you could get noise and bad things could potentially happen when one output can drive another but it'd probably be fine.

It may be that you've hooked everything up correctly and it just needs to be EQed - the factory heads have built-in processing to tailor them for the Mach460 system. My Kenwood sounded thin and weak straight out of the box but after a lot of fiddling, sounds great. You will need to play with the EQ for a while to get an aftermarket headunit to as good as the factory head. Boost the lows, cut a little from the mids (4KHz worked good for me) and season to taste on the highs. If it has a parametric EQ, dial in a big, really narrow boost at 60Hz for some kick drum thump. Don't be afraid to play with the EQs and other DSP processing to get it to sound like you want.