Tag Amazon Stereo Review

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage, and this is my project for the weekend. This obviously is a brand new stereo system for the truck, and this is a $15 head unit from Amazon. You see it’s got the old retro look. It’s supposed to have Bluetooth and hands-free calling. We’re going to see if it actually works for $15. I don’t know, there’s not even a picture of it on the box. It is super crazy light, like there’s nothing to this thing. But for 15 bucks, you know, we’re going to see if it’s worth your time. So I’m going to put that in, see how it goes.

The other interesting thing as part of this project this weekend is this speaker right here. It is by far the most expensive thing on this entire table. You can get a 5×7 speaker from Amazon for like $10 or $15. This one here was about 80 or 90 bucks, but the reason is because it’s actually a dual voice coil speaker that has both left and right channels built in. It’s specifically made for old vehicles with a dash single dash speaker like my truck or older car. So we’re going to see if that’s worth the money once I get all this stuff put in. And these are obviously like just cheapo JVC 6 and a half inch speakers, the cheapest ones I can find on Amazon. So at some point in the future, I’m going to put a real stereo system in this truck that’s really nice with some subwoofers and amplifiers and the whole bit. For now, I just want to be able to listen to Pandora while I’m driving, so that’s the goal I’m trying to reach today. Let’s see if I can get there. Stick around.

Hello! All right, so the first thing is to get this door panel off. It’s pretty simple. There’s a screw here that holds this on, and then there’s a bunch of these little clips back behind the door here that go into the panel, and then the door clips onto these. If you’ve got an older truck like this, I highly recommend going out and getting you some of these clips. I’ll put the link in the description. Before you get these, these break pretty easy, and if they do break while you’re taking this off and you put it back on without using these clips, the door is going to flop around a little bit and rattle. It’s just going to add to the general cacophony these old trucks make. So, uh, get them secured, and they’re pretty cheap. They’re not very expensive, so make sure you do that. All right, let’s get this thing off.

All right, there we go. And here you can see where those clips just pop in here. Especially if you got an older door panel, you don’t want to be too rough with these. This is actually pretty nice plastic, so it doesn’t break real easy, but it’s possible. So you just want to be careful taking these off. Here is the speaker. These speakers as well are aftermarket. They’re Polk, and they don’t sound too bad, but since I’m doing the entire system, I’m just going to go ahead and replace some of the speakers that I know, so I know what the RMS and the wattage are of them. That way, I can match them to my head unit and not have to worry about them. But like I said, these are pretty good speakers, actually. They sound pretty good, so I’m going to save them, but I’m not going to use them for this.

If you’ve never done stereo installation before, it is really simple. All these speakers just have two wires, a positive and a negative. You just have to make sure that you wire the positive to the positive side, the negative to the negative side, and that’s pretty much it. It does get a little bit more complicated when you start talking about crossovers and amps and, you know, different capabilities of head units and RMS wattage and all that stuff. But for the most part, if you’re just swapping out some stock parts, it’s real simple. It’s got the two plugs here. Whoa! They’re pretty old. Come on, there we go. Yeah, busted that off. It’s okay, it’s just the mounting point. If I want to use it again, I could maybe super glue that. They’re pretty old, but otherwise that still works. It’s still connected to the speaker, so it would be okay.

So while I got the door open and off the panel off, I’m going to go ahead and pop that new speaker in. For those of you curious, this is a set that I got from Amazon. They are really cheap. They’re like 25 bucks, JVC CSJ 620. We’re going to see how they sound. They got pretty good reviews. They’re just a cheap speaker I can use until I get the real thing put in this truck, you know, once I’m done with the engine and everything else. So let’s see how they go. This one’s actually missing a couple of screws. I’ll go see if I can find some that’ll work. When you’re working on old vehicles like this, a lot of times you’ll find missing screws and stuff because this is behind a panel you’re never going to see it. I don’t really care that they’re different colors. I don’t really care that this one here is a little bit crooked. Like I said, you’re never going to see it, so it doesn’t really matter. But having the screw in there is a good idea because it’ll stop things from rattling around, and like I said before, in the cacophony of noise these old trucks make, anything that you can stop from rattling is always a bonus. They are loud enough as they are. Let’s get the old radio in, so I’m going to go check to see if it works.

Okay, it is possible it’s the speaker itself, but it may also be the wiring. So to verify whether it’s the wiring or the speaker, I am going to swap this speaker to the other side of the truck and see if it gives me the same problem. If it does not give you the same problem, that means it’s a problem with my wiring. So if it’s a problem with the wiring, it’s probably here in the door. It may actually be these connectors that are back behind here, just old and corroded and not giving a really good connection. If that’s the case, then I can swap the ends out and put new connectors on. I’ve got those. So, uh, but yeah, we’re going to go see on the other side if this is a speaker problem or a wiring problem.

Okay, so, uh, I can’t let you listen to this because YouTube will give you a copyright strike, but, uh, it’s coming through fine on this side of the truck. So I’m going to swap this back over to the other side, run it again, just verify that I think it’s probably the wiring, and then we’ll go through the troubleshooting steps over there to figure out why the wiring over there might be kind of janky. Yeah, so there is clearly a problem somewhere in this wiring. So the easiest thing to do is just cut these off, assume that these are the problem, cut these off and replace them, and we’ll see if that does it. Normally, I like to do solder connections for most of this stuff, but because this is just a really kind of cheap, almost temporary repair, temporary for a few years, I’ll just go ahead and crimp like, you know, everybody else does. They’re doing car audio.

Always nice when your first instinct is correct. That’s awesome. Here we go, classic hits 101 gold. Now for the rest of this, you got to pull apart the dash, and there’s several screws up underneath here that you got to use to take. You take the screws out, and then you can pop this top off, and then these dash panels will come out so you can get behind here and do what you got to do. That’s it to the top speaker here and also old trucks. All right, best get to the speaker up here and to get back behind the radio, obviously. So let’s go ahead and get started.

Interesting story, when I first bought this truck, I had a hell of a time trying to get it registered in New Mexico from Texas because I bought it in Texas. One of the problems was the VIN number, and for some reason, I’m not sure if all the ’85 or Bullnose trucks are like this. In this particular truck, you can’t see the VIN number and the dash plate through the windshield, and I suspect it’s because this is an aftermarket windshield, and it’s got this black border all the way around it. Now, maybe not, I’m not sure, but for whatever reason, you can’t see the VIN number from the outside. So I had to actually take this dash panel off, the top dash pad off, before I went to the DMV so that they could actually see the VIN by crawling into the truck and looking through the top.

So you don’t have to take all these screws out of here. I took a whole bunch of them out because I wasn’t sure which ones I had to take out, so just took a long, and that piece comes off real easy. And so there’s my radio, pretty rough. That’s actually going to be a problem. All righty then, uh, let’s see what we got here. Well, there’s a ground there. Ooh, is there no antenna adapter? There may not be an antenna adapter. I may have to go buy one of those. And here is the wiring harness, and that one there is cut. I’m not sure where that used to go to or what that does. Power, ground, and remote is here, and that’s what the harness is still there, but all of the speakers have been cut at some point, and I’m not sure if this center speaker is wired in. I’ll have to dig into that, open this up and take a look at it. And see, it also looks like I’m going to have to get a new mounting for this. If the original harness was back there, I could rewire it back in, but it’s not. He just cut this. Whatever the original harness was, he just cut it. Yeah, see, there’s four, these are the four speaker wires that went to the center speaker. He just cut them. He’s like, I need that, just cut them, which means I got to rewire them. He probably, he may even pulled them out. Who knows? Hell, he may have rewired this whole thing.

So first of all, I got to get the mount for this so this will go in here and mount correctly, and I got to wire these together. This has been rewired. Okay, guys, so let me talk briefly about the situation that I found here. When you’re working on an old vehicle like this, especially if you’re doing wiring, changing out the stereo is a prime example. You never know what you’re going to find. So the previous owner, at some point, whether it was the one before me or somebody even before him, looks like they wired this whole thing. So these speaker wires are not original to the truck. Looks like they’ve also disconnected this top speaker here completely, and here’s where you can see originally where it wired in, and they just cut them. They just cut those wires, and unfortunately, they didn’t leave me the old harness, so I don’t have a harness that I can plug into my harness piece that I bought from Amazon. Don’t do that, guys. Please, if you’re wiring a radio, don’t just cut the wires. Unplug the harness and leave the original harness. Go out and buy the correct harness adapter for your vehicle. They’re not expensive. They’re like 10 or $15 at the worst. That’ll save you so much time and energy, and anybody who comes behind you, it’s just a courtesy, you know?

Now this radio is probably changed 20 years ago, so who knows what they were thinking back then. But now what this means is not only do I have to rewire this top speaker completely, but I have to figure out what I’m going to do in terms of these speakers because do I just do like they did and just wire it directly into the speaker wires, or do I actually build a harness? In my case, I think I’m just going to wire it directly into the wires, and the reason is because I think when I upgrade the audio next time on this truck, which will be a serious upgrade, we’re talking amplifiers, crossovers, the whole bit, I will probably, excuse me, I will probably rewire all of these to be new wires. And so when I do that, I will build a harness when that happens. But for now, I just want to get this working, so I think I’m just going to go ahead and cut these and rewire them directly. The power and the ground and the remote are all still hooked up, so I’ve got the wiring harness for that that I can plug into the radio harness and do that on my bench.

In addition to the screws that you have on the front here, there’s also some screws back up in here in the air vent area. You got to be careful with these because you don’t want to drop them. This dash pad is slated for replacement too at some point, but that’s in the future. And then once you got all the screws, it just comes right out. Oh, yep, there are those wires you cut right there. Yeah, all right, we’ll get something in through there, and we can rewire this speaker. I want to save that because I might be able to use that. Is that this? Because if that’s this? Yeah, okay, all right, of course, here we go. Okay, is that this? It is this. All right, so that means that I can use this when I do my audio upgrade next time. I don’t have to worry about trying to find that harness somewhere. Let’s see how this works. Not bad. So this is clearly the original speaker. I can use this harness, so I’m going to use it. Interestingly, also, this is only a single voice coil speaker, so it’s never designed to have stereo. So no matter what I was going to do, I was going to have to rewire part of this. Well, it should sound way better. We’re going to find out.

So here’s the new one. It’s a D572 5×7 from Retro Sound. It’s dual voice coil, got left and right channels going into the same speaker. We’re going to see how it does. They are not paying me for this. I bought this with my own money. It’s the only one that I can find that was reasonably priced. I’m kind of excited to check it out. And there she is, my new center channel speaker. As you can see, it’s got a connection for both left and right, two separate tweeters there to do left and right channel. Now, obviously, you’re not going to get great stereo surround sound from this because it’s coming from the same location, but I’m hoping it’ll bounce off the window, the windshield, and give me a little bit of more full sound than what came from stock. So let’s see how it fits. Factory, pretty much. Now, obviously, I got to wire it, run new wires, and all that jazz. But yeah, as a matter of fact, it came with wires. I think I might just be able to use these. They may be long enough. Oh yeah, yeah, that’s what we’re doing. We’re using these. I just got to make sure that I mark them.

One nice thing about older vehicles is that the dash is way simpler than in new ones. Man, I know some of these newer trucks, you have to want to wire something from up top here down through the dash, you have to take half the dash apart, run it through the door panel, come back in. It’s not quite that bad, but there’s still, I got plenty of room back here, so I’m just going to keep this wire the same length. I’m not going to worry about cutting it. It’s just open all the way through here. There’s just nothing. Oh, 1980s, you were a fun time. All right, that’s good. Putting it back in was actually easier than taking it out, so cool, that’s in there. I am going to wire this. The front goes to the dash, and the rear goes to the doors, which is kind of odd, but I think in this truck, in this case, just the way I need to go.

All right, so real quick, guys, I’m going to go over the wiring. This is the radio that I bought, and this is the harness that I bought for the truck. And there’s only two wires that these two connect to. One is constant power, and one is switched power, and that’s it. So constant power is the yellow, switched power is the red. The black, the ground actually goes to a ground that’s inside the truck. It’s not part of the actual wiring harness that comes from the truck. You have to ground it to a wire that’s in the truck there, so I’ve got that plugged there. This is an antenna wire, which the ’85 doesn’t use, and also this is an antenna wire, and this is a dimmer wire, and the radio doesn’t use a dimmer. So all we got is just constant, switched, and ground, and I’m going to go into the truck and hook up the ground now.

So this is the ground that I was talking about that’s already in the truck. It’s just simply bolted to a chassis bolt back here. Well, not really chassis, but there’s some metal framing back in here, and that’s all it’s bolted to. And I know it works because it worked for the old radio. Most vehicles that I’ve worked on have a ground built into the wiring harness for the radio, but this one doesn’t.

All right, and with that, we should be ready to test it. Just for now, I got power. I got power. Try again. 29% financing for 60 months plus $1,000 bonus cash. Don’t miss the B-Tough sale. Oh, perfect. Okay, so I’m going to turn that down so you can hear me. So the screen is really dim. I don’t know if there’s a way to make it brighter or not. That’s just a thing. This screen is really kind of dim, so that is what it is. As far as sound goes, it actually sounds pretty good. Let me see if I can figure out how to pair a phone with it, and I will be right back.

There we go, BT on. Okay, does it work? My God, old school. She’s an ’85. Paint’s a little… um, yeah, that’s a preview of something that’s coming. Uh, yeah, hello? Hey, sorry, what’s up? Nothing, I’m just actually testing my hands-free calling in my truck, so how do I sound? Okay, yeah, you sound fine. Okay, cool. For she’s rated the radio.

All right, guys, so I figured something out. Got her all mounted up nice and tight into the bezel. Doesn’t move or rattle or nothing, and I don’t have to use a mounting plate that you would buy from Amazon or from O’Reilly’s or any of those auto part stores. This radio is light enough, this particular model is light enough that it will mount right into this without any problem. It’s still super light, right? And here’s how I did it, a little bit of down-home engineering. Okay, so the metal bracket that comes… Make sure you guys can see this. Yeah, you can. So the metal bracket that comes with the radio right here, right? If you, uh, it’s just slightly bigger than this. This bezel is just a little bit, but the radio front around here is also just slightly bigger. So what you can do is you can sandwich this in between this metal piece and the radio bezel itself right here. The problem is that this metal piece won’t move forward far enough to clip into here like it’s supposed to because this bezel here is too thick. So all I did was put a couple of screws in here on the top. Right now, you think, oh my God, don’t screw your radio. Well, the thing is that there’s so little electronics inside this thing that there’s plenty of room in here. These screws aren’t even touching any of the boards or electronics or anything inside the radio, and that holds the body of the radio from moving back and forth, right? It’s not going to move.

Okay, now here’s the other thing is that the radio is actually just a little bit too thin this way for this opening, so it slides up and down unless… uh, let me go get something real quick. I’ll be right back. Unless you put something in here to keep it from sliding up and down. So all I did was I put a piece of airline tubing that I use for my airbags in my other truck, slit it right in there. Okay, that goes up from down to up. Sorry, I got this in my mouth. See, it goes down and up and down, right? It moves. Well, take a piece of air hose, get it to the right size. It’s a little bit tight, which is what you want. You pop that in there, push it down, and now it’s black. It matches everything else, and this doesn’t move up or down at all. It is not going anywhere, and I can just pop that right back into the truck, and away we go. And this isn’t going to rattle on me or move, and when I go to push the button, that’s going to have nice solid feedback. Not to worry about it rattling or moving around on me. That is great. I had no idea it was going to turn out that way. I love when things like this happen.

So there you go, guys. If you happen to get this particular radio and you have this particular dash piece, you can do this the exact same way with just a couple of screws and some air tubing. The more you know.

All right, guys, here we are paired. Now you can see that the… you can’t really see it. It’s very, very dim right there. You can kind of see it. Let me turn it down a little bit. Okay, but that’s how it looks. I’m pretty happy with it. Obviously, you can’t hear it, but it sounds good, I think. So I’ve already used it to make a phone call, and according to the person on the other side, I sound pretty good. I’m imagining that this is the little microphone here. I have really no idea, but I would think so. Um, yeah, I mean, so the interface is not great. It’s got a lot of glare, and it’s really kind of hard to see, and the background illumination is nowhere near bright enough to see in the daytime. But for my purposes, I think it’s going to be fantastic for $15, and pretty simple installation is definitely worth the money and your time to do. I do think it looks nice. I love the look inside the truck. You know, I’m super happy with that. It’s so nice to have Bluetooth that I can listen to music on my phone now. I’ll probably never use the radio again, really, because the radio reception around here is not great anyway. So yeah, I’m super happy with that.

All right, guys, well there you go. Weekend project officially a success. Got everything put in. I’m really happy with it. I think for 15 bucks, you can’t go wrong. Yeah, it’s got a couple of issues, but man, it’s $15. It works pretty good. It installs super simple. It’s a huge upgrade for me. Bluetooth hands-free calling, yeah, definitely worth it. The front speakers that I put in, the JVCs, they’re pretty nice. They sound really good for $25. They can’t be beat. And then that dash speaker, you know, I’ll have to listen to that for a while and figure it out. Right now, it sounds really good, but I didn’t have one hooked up before, so anything I put in there is going to sound better than that. But yeah, I don’t know if it’s worth the 80 bucks I spent on it, but we’re going to find out. Regardless, it sounds way better in here. So, guys, hopefully you learned something today. I know it’s a simple radio installation, and a thousand guys do them. There’s probably videos all over YouTube, but this one’s mine. At least you get a chance to see one of those vintage radios in action, the really, really cheap ones from Amazon. Yeah, I think it’s probably worth it. So, uh, yeah, if you got any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks again for watching, guys, and we will see you next time. She’s rough around the edges, but she’s doing fine, tinkering away, getting things to shine. No G, she’s considered divine. Thanks again for watching. We will see you next time. Thanks again for watching. We will see you next next time.