Testarossa Stereo Upgrade

Well it's time to upgrade. The old Sony head unit and blaupunkt amp running into the genuine Ferrari 18 year old speakers have had their day.


Here's the plan:

JVC KD-AVX2 head unit fitted into the dash. This is a single DIN unit with a 3.5" widescreen LCD built in and 5 x 45w power output.

It will take a reverse camera input so I will run both front and rear cameras on the car for parking purposes and maybe for a bit of 'on track' footage.

The front speakers will be replaced with a set of 6.5" MB Quart reference series RVF 216 splits behind the original leather covers. These speakers have a 19mm titanium tweeter which will replace the original factory tweeters and use the original tweeter grills.

The old blaupunkt amp comes out, and the new amp is one of the latest Alpine PDX4-150 digital amps. With 4 x 150w RMS it packs a good punch for a small footprint amp.

First part of the process was to get power into the car to run the amplifier. Start at the battery of course! Okay, battery is getting down, time for a new one. Hmm, battery terminals looking decidedly second hand so took the oportuinty to replace those at the same time.

Jack her up and rip off the front wheel. A few 6mm bolts and the front access panel comes away giving great access to the battery area.

Hmmm....two large sheathed wires to the positive and a strange flat earth strap disapearing up into the guard.

Checking the positive side first, I find a large 2 gauge wire coming off the terminal and winding down under the car before disapearing into a tube in the centre of the car. Okay, that goes way down the back to the starter. Cool.

Now the other one, I follow it and it meets the earth strap and goes up into the guard also. Aha! Then it comes out again near the firewall and goes around the brake booster into the back of the fuse area. I pop the cover of the fuse area and I'm looking for a big fat battery cable, but can't find it.

Going back to the battery end I roll back the outer sheath, and it's actually two red 8 gauge wires into one 4G connector. Back to the fuse box, and there they are. Two large red 8G wires going onto two large blade connectors on the fuse panel. The main supply lines to the fuse board. Excellent.

A plan is formed to connect up another 4G wire to the battery and get this into the car via an inline fuse holder to run the new stereo system. Great plan, but not so easy to execute I was to find.

 

Here's the JVC head unit in place.
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A bit more done today.

Replaced the battery with a new unit. A little more power, but maintained the proper Euro design and shape.

Changed out both of the old lead based terminals with proper coated copper units. This also allowed a much neater conection of the two x 8 gauge red wires that feed to the fuse board.

There are two main wires from the battery. The larger one goes down the back and feeds the starter motor.

The other is actually two smaller wires in one large outer sheath. These two 8 gauge wires feed the entire fuse board.

You can see these wires in the second picture.

When you remove them from the battery it's a bit confusing as they both actually join to the one terminal, but roll the sheath back a little and underneath are two seperate wires.

To fit them into the new battery terminal I grabbed some small gold lated copper collets that are specifically designed to slip over the exposed wires so that when a screw type clamp is used, the screw doesn't tear all of the wires and make a mess rather than a perfect contact.
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Once the new battery and terminal were in place, the next step was to try and get two 8 gauge wires into the cabin of the car to hook up the new stereo system.

Not as easy as you would think.

In the end I chose to join in the new wires at the fuse box rather than the battery as there is great access to the cabin from the fuse area.

First step was to remove the fuse box to give some working space.

Once that was done, the plan was to break into the primary fuse box feed and splice in another set of 8 gauge wires using a quality power distribution block.

Really large amplifiers would require their own supply from the battery, but I'm using a relatively small unit with low power requirements.

Once the fuse board was removed I was able to locate a suitable mounting area for the distribution block. I drilled and test fitted the unit, then moved on to cut the primary red feed wires to the fuse board. These were fitted into the block, and then the tails that feed the board were fitted, effectively joining them again.

I used a single 4 gauge input to 4 x 8 gauge output distribution block, so the remaining two were fitted with new high quality fine strand 8 gauge power cables which were fed down into the cabin.

A also wrapped these in some protective plastic shielding to prevent rubbing from road vibrations etc.

Once that was done, the fuse panel was refitted and the car returned to normal. The next step is the actual fitting of the inline fuse block and the amps themselves once they arrive from the dealer.

Watch this space.
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Thanks Jeff.

Pretty happy so far. Yep, one of the fuse panel plugs had (another) burnt pin. This time to the right hand side radiator fan which required quite a lot of work to fix actually as the pin had been melted as well.

See: http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/showthread.php?t=134426&page=2

I had to remanufacture a pin from a strip of brass, and then solder the new pin into the board and connect using a 4.8mm blade terminal. It was too cold last night to actually prompt the fans into action so I'll try again today and see that they both start okay.