I bought this car over a year ago from it's previous owner and just got around to start working on it now. (theft claim, SMOG trouble, priorities, pushed it over a year!). Well I lost contact with the previous owner and he's avoiding me now haha (he's on this board). I started tearing into the car last week and I got a new impression of what the system entailed. At first I thought it was just a messy harness job for the stereo (my impression about a year ago), but last week when I started, I noticed that there were some wires missing. The wires/RCA's were present in the trunk and I assumed lead to the HU. After digging through all the wires, I find some of the sloppiest wiring/audio work I've ever seen, second only to the alarm wiring on this car.

I'll take pictures later, but in essence I followed all the wires, sorted them out, and checked all the basics, then fired up and got power to the HU, but no sound.

I'll get specifics and model#'s later, but its:
JVC MP3/CD/DVD player with built-in HDD and Navigation
Alpine 7" Display (hack job in-dash setup)
(2) 2-channel amps (Orion and Alpine)
Kicker 10" sub
and speakers since I found RCAs (?)

Power wire leads from the battery to the trunk, where it's split to 2 fuses, 1 for each amp. Grounds look good (bolted to a hard part of the chassis) and the fuses aren't shorting.

I'll get pictures soon too, but does anyone have a good place to start? I noticed the HU didn't have a ground to it, I was looking at the wiring schematics and the black wire was supposed to lead to a chassis ground, but instead it's wired into the harness (eletric taped ). Didn't wanna try stuff until I got the other stuff sorted. Spent hours mounting and unmounting the 7" setup only to say **** it and start over with the bezel and monitor. Gonna run my own bracket/setup since this is the worst job I've ever seen and I don't want to sell the car to my friend with this kind of faultiness in it.

Thanks in advance for any help you electronics gurus can offer

 

Personally i would gut it and start over, it's probably your quickest option also. I hate trying to figure out other peoples wiring, it's amazing how sloppy some people can be.

 

i totally agree... Starting fresh to clear your head and also new wires... who knows what kind of crappy wiring he did.

grounding your new deck directly to the chassis doesn't matter. you can ground it back into the harness via black wire.

 

I've never completely gutted the dash harness before lol, if it comes to it I guess that's an option though I'd like to avoid it. I'm gonna take another look at the alarm tomorrow while I'm troubleshooting the audio. If it does become to overbearingly messy and can't be sorted out, I'll start over from scratch.