Bose with aftermarket HU

[vettatude]

Ok, so I'm thinking of replacing just the HU of my Bose system. I have seen several different adapters and level adjusters to do this hookup easily. Are these adjusters like the PAC OEM-1 necessary to do this? Can I just get a harness that plugs into the factory harness? Is wiring the high level outputs of the aftermarket HU straight to the factory harness too much signal? I have a 2000 Mustang GT with the Mach system and just made some RCA to speaker wire adapters to retain the factory amps and it worked great. I only had to put a reisistor in the amp turn on line to drop the voltage to 7 from 12, got rid of a popping noise. Does the corvette HU turn on the Bose amps? How much voltage does it take to turn on the amps? Whew, I guess that's about all. Thanks for any insight you might have.

 

[VAmagred01]

We've been talking about this very subject in a different thread. See "C5 Mods/ Bose Speaker Replacements."

Hope this helps!

-Kenny

 

[torchred]

The stock head unit has two connectors on it. I'm not 100% sure of this but I believe the Bose amplifiers may be turned on by the extra connector on the stock head unit. If somone could obtain a good wiring diagram from the service manual this could probably be solved fairly easily (turning on the Bose amplifiers with the aftermarket hu).

The real problem in this whole system is that the Bose speakers are said to be 1 Ohm speakers making the twiddler and the woofer in parallel run at about 1/2 Ohm. If you have an aftermarket head unit that puts out say 47 Watts from a 4 Ohm internal Amplifier you will see around 6 amps of reflected out of phase current going back through your amplifier. This is why impedance matching the load to the speaker is important as this current can shorten the life of your amplifier through overheating.

I have seen the OEM Pac-1 adapters advertised but have no experience with them. Everyone I talked to concerning this issue did not encourage the use of a Pac-1 adapter simply due to noise they add to the system. I would like to find a set of 8" woofers that are correctly impedanced to replace the Bose stock door woofers. Crutchfield does not have any that will fit the stock enclosure that are free air (with the exception of a pair of Kicker free air midbass speakers that I believe will fit -> they do not state they will though). I'm still trying to decide how important this issue is to me... I replaced my stock head unit for Sirius radio & mp3 capability but find myself hardly listening to the stereo & listening more to my exhaust.

We are discussing this in the following thread:

http://corvetteactioncenter.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=31642

Best of luck,

Matt