Routing Speaker Wires for 4 channel amp
 

Ok, well, no, i'm no expert on this matter... infact, i'm a complete retard on the matter. i hooked up my 4 channel amp to all of my speakers and ran new 14 gauge wires for all four chanels, channeling wire in the best possible way i could. the back, i just kinda draped the wires down to the amp:rolleyes:and the front doors, i couldn't get the wires ran without them being exposed. my question is this, how the hell do you typically wire a 4 channel amp off of the stock wires? my other question is, keeping the current setup i have for my sound system, what downfalls does my wiring scheme possess? aslo, if running new wires to the front door speakers, whats the best method of doing so? because i tried running them with the old stock wires through the wiring loom that connects to the inner part of the door and the front lower pillar of the cabin, but this leaves very little, to no room at all to route ANY wires. what do you guys suggest?
peace

Most people use the stock wires in the doors, unless they are running very high power (over 100 watts). It is a tough job fitting in new speaker wires in our cars.

I just finished adding a 4 channel amp to my factory head unit. I used 2 wiring harnesses - a standard and a reverse - to take the speaker leads out of the head unit, pass them on to the amp, and hook back into the factory wiring with the outputs from the amp. All the other wires on the harnesses just got connected straight across.

This was pretty easy, with most of the wiring connections done to the harnesses outside the car. I much prefer working at the kitchen table to working in the dash of a car.

I routed the speaker wires behind the dash to the passenger side of the car. The door sills just pop off, and thre is plenty of room for the speaker wires under them.

My amp is in the trunk, so I just went from the rear door sill behind the fold down rear seat into the trunk. Same with the wires going back from the amp.

You can get the harnesses from Vector Audio. Both are about $9 each. One word of warning however, the harnesses do not have all the wires needed for the illumination and dimming function of your factory deck (why, I don't know). I ended up needing to order two reverse harnesses to be able to move the wires to the needed holes in the harness. Not hard, but it shouldn't be needed.

The standard harness had the right number of wires, but they were in the wrong holes. I had to relocate one wire to the dimmer wire spot to get everything back to factory function.

The sticky at the top of the car audio topic is really helpful in showing the pin outs for the harness.

You can connect the speaker leads directly to the amp, if your amp has speaker level inputs, or use a line output converter to convert the speaker level signals to line level - which all amps accept. I used the line output converter right before the amp, as I felt it gave me better sound quality. Your mileage on this may be different.