monsoon headache

[craignelsons]

98 TA WS6 with monsoon.Speakers are shot, would like to keep steering wheel controls. Does not everything run through the amp, therefore I should be able to cut the wires right before they go into the amp and use low level inputs on a new amp to control the crossover and all other aspects of the speaker output while maintaing those steering wheel controls? Yes I may pretty much clueless, But that is why I am here asking all of you knowledgeable people.

[White Rascal]

The POS Monsoon amp uses speaker level inputs to power the door woofers and sail panel subwoofers. (Subwoofers? Yeah right). There are no RCA or "low level" inputs used in the factory stereo. The reason your speakers are blown is because of the HUGE amount of distortion poroduced by the HU and amp. The HU's distorted output gets fed to the inputs of the amp which in turn adds it's own distortion on top of that. This is why the factory woofers are blowing all the time. Simply upgrading the speakers will do little to improve this situation. That is whay I always recommend upgrading the entire POS Monsoon system with after-market equipment. If you insist on keeping the factory setup there are 2 things you can do to help protect the new speakers. First, ease up on the volume control. I hooked my factory deck up to my O-scope and with a calibrated test CD I found that the HU began to distort after only 23 clicks of the volume control. Second, back off the bass controls of the EQ.

[DrMilhouse]

You can still use the steering wheel controls by using an add on. It's like 70 bucks, if you're really interested, post back and I'll go looking for info on it. You have to replace the head unit with another head unit that is able to work with a remote control.

You can "jumper" the wires together that are the input and the output of the amp so that the output comes directly from the new head unit but after it's all said and done, it's easier to just run new wires (IMHO of course). Tracking down which wires come from and go to where can be a time consuming thing.

Ditto again on what the white rascal said - except the o-scope part - I don't have one of those.

[Scooch]

Crutchfield has an adapter made just for this, so you can keep your steering wheel controls.