[jimmelo]

I’m writing up this DIY more for the casual DIY’er who maybe hasn’t installed a stereo in their car for a while. I’m personally a little more than a casual DIY’er as I enjoy doing things myself. It’s not really about the money for me so much as just the sheer fun of taking things apart, making them better, and putting it back together. Seems like there’s a lot of people lurking around here after discovering their E90 stereo is a piece of junk and they really want to upgrade.

Personally I don’t think this DIY is that difficult. It is mostly just time consuming. Be prepared to have at least 15-20 hours of time on your hand. I personally did this over the course of several evenings with one big push on Friday night and then Saturday morning.

I have a 2011 335D (O5/2010 build) with a Base Stereo. That means no amp, no logic 7, no tweeters, and only 6 speakers total. Total garbage. I DO NOT have PDC so I had no concern for the back speakers coming from the Head Unit (HU). I have NAV, SAT radio, Bluetooth, and the AUX/USB input in my armrest.

This DIY is only for the “TECHNIC Harness,” a Center Channel, and the JBL MS-8 DSP/AMP for a base stereo. Please see the FAQ if you don’t know what that means. For those of you looking to upgrade your radio but yet you want to build a solid base from which you can add other parts over time. I highly recommend this upgrade. You are looking at about $750 dollars total for this upgrade. I am surprised at how much of a difference just these two things made. If I was on a budget and I only had the $750 to spend I would start and stop here, for now.

Save up your money and in a year add new front speakers and tweeters. You could even keep your eyes open in the for sale section and wait for one of the regulars on here whom can’t be satisfied to sell of their speakers as they search for that perfect set. Once you have that new front end wait another year and finally take the plunge and buy some good under seat 8” woofers and maybe now an amp to add on top of the MS-8. Or switch around that recommendation, whatever floats your boat. Point is, this DIY will give you that base from which to build off of and will still make a difference today in your music listening enjoyment. I’m not saying this will blow you away, I’m just saying it should make you happier.

Personally, I am waiting for my front speakers and my woofers to arrive and they’ll be installed as soon as they arrive. Should only take me about 2 hours given that I’ve all ready done this DIY. That would be the same for you in the future when you start adding new speakers. This DIY is the hard part for upgrading. Once you do this you’ve set yourself up for very easy upgrading in the future. Get the hard part over with now.

A couple of things to point out. I made the decision to power ALL of my speakers through the MS-8. I enjoy rear speakers, regardless of the very vocal opinion of others on here who insist they add nothing. They add something for me and I am the only one who matters in this debate. I also made the decision to mount my crossovers in the trunk.

If you even remotely THINK you might do either of those things in the future lay the cable down now. If you end up changing your mind you can quickly pull or cut the cables. If however you don’t install the cables now and later change your mind, then guess what? You’re going to have to do all of this again later. Better to avoid it by just putting the cable down now.

On to the DIY.

Tools needed:
1. Plastic Trim Removal tools. Invaluable. You must have these unless you want to mark up your car with screwdrivers.
2. Phillips head screwdriver, various sized tips and lengths.
3. Metric Socket set with extensions. 8mm, 10mm, and 12mm are the usual suspects for this DIY. I tend to use 1/4 drives.
4. Torx set. T20 and T50 especially.
5. Wire Cutter
6. Wire stripper
7. Wire Crimper
8. Soldering gun/pen
9. Solder
10. Fish tape or wire hanger.
11. Dremel or tin snips
12. Heat gun or blow dryer
13. Various Towels/Pads
14. Patience, lots of it.
15. If you’re really anal a torque wrench.

Parts Needed:
1. Technic Harness for Base Stereo ($80) + wiring for under seat woofers with pigtails included for woofers ($35) + Pigtails for Speakers ($5 each). I would not purchase the center speaker wiring from him, nor would I purchase the center speaker trim piece from him. ($55 combined). Otherwise the main harness is well built and he sends you beefy wiring with plugs for the 8” woofers. You can get the center speaker trim piece for $25 from getbmwparts.com and speaker wire is cheap.
2. JBL MS-8 ($500 at soniceletronix.com).
3. Center channel speaker ($50-60??). I bought mine from board member QuickSR20 who bought a pair of DLS 424 Coaxial speakers and only needed to use one as he was installing a center speaker only. You can probably find others doing the same thing.
4. 50 FT of 16g Speaker wire.
5. Small plastic cups or similar to label and put screws/bolts etc into.
6. BMW PN 65156945072 ($14) Bracket for amp in left well of trunk if you install your amp there. The 335d really has no choice as we have no spare room in the center of the trunk.
7. BMW PN 07119902932 x 4 ($.50) Hex bolt for amp bracket. These are really just M5 bolts that you can pick up at Lowe’s as well.
8. BMW PN 51477139049 ($11) Storage shelf in left trunk. This is assuming you have that little recessed storage “box” in the left side of your boot. You’ll have to replace it with this “shelf” that will cover up your amp underneath.
9. BMW PN 51457123750 ($26) Center Speaker Cover for NAV/I-DRIVE. Non-NAV/I-Drive cars should order 51457123749 ($24)
10. BMW PN 61136920092 ($1.62) Battery flat connector.
11. BMW PN 61136925166 ($1) Battery flat connector housing for 2 connections (2 pole) or 61136925176 ($1.40) for 1 connection (single pole). You may not need these. Personally I did not and I ordered them by mistake. You should check your battery first to see if you need to order any. Either way it’s only a $1.
12. BMW PN 51477117532 ($.58) Inner sill clip. You may not need these if you don’t break one. I didn’t. But here is the part number just in case you do need to order one. They are for the trim pieces along the door sills. Pictures later.
13. BMW PN 51478184135 ($.52) Expanding plastic rivet (grey). These are used all over the place, especially in the trunk to secure the trim and carpet. I lost one part of one when it went flying off. I just picked one up at the dealer.
14. BMW PN 07129905172 ($.72) Speaker grill screw.
15. 5 ft x 2 of 8 or 10 gauge wire for the power and ground. I recommend red colored cable for the battery + connection to stay consistent with the other terminals in the car.
16. Inline 25 AMP fuse connection.
17. Heat Shrink tubing.
18. Diverse terminal end rings (my preference, you may prefer other types).
19. Cloth electrical tape or “gaffer’s tape” if you want. ($2).
20. Mortite Weatherstrip and Caulking Cord ($2.50).
20. If you’re really anal BMW PN 07149156953 ($.1.36) T50 Bolt to mount front seats. Supposedly they are only single use and you need to replace them if you remove them with new bolts. I did not do this but I am just putting it out there as general knowledge. Do what you want with that.

If you want to make your own pigtails to connect to non-factory speakers order:
61138373583 x 1 for each pigtail you need ($2.30). This is the plastic connector piece. For this DIY you will only need one right now as we are only adding the center channel.
61131393723 x 2 metal pin (no wire) ($1.60)
61130006664 x 2 metal pin (wire attached) ($1.60). I would recommend buying it with the wire attached as it will make your life easier. All you have to do is push them in, cut to length and attach to your speakers as needed.

I personally wanted to make the center speaker wiring be as BMW OEM looking as possible so I added a “reverse pigtail” to the speaker wiring that I added from the MS-8 to the center speaker. This is basically the other end of the plug that is usually on the cars harness. Again for now you only need one.
61136925634 x 1 ($1.40) for the plastic socket housing
61131393724 x 2 ($.66) (no wire attached)
61130006663 x 2 ($1.50) (wire attached)
In this case I would get the one without the wire attached as you will be soldering on the speaker wire to the bare connector. It’s always best to reduce the number of connections.

A note on parts. I used getbmwparts.com (Tischer I believe) to order all of my parts. They were very fast. With them it is best to make sure of what you are ordering and order it all at once. I found that O’Reilly autoparts had a much better stock of wiring goods, for the amp power and ground and inline fuse, than the other auto parts stores. The cables were good quality and their gauge size was accurate. They also had good assortments of different size ring terminals, etc. I actually was out of some sizes in my garage as I am usually pretty well stocked so I had to go back and get some.

Total added up was about $750. If you need to get tools or other parts then of course that price goes up. You may want to order pigtails now from Technic for your future speakers. For example I need 6 additional pigtails based on my future additions. 4 for the front (2 for the tweeters and 2 for the mids, I am adding reverse pigtails to the tweeters wire as well) and 2 for the back speakers (absolute last upgrade).

Ok now for the actual DIY. I am going to point out that many many DIY’s say that you need to remove the entire front panel on your car. I did not remove anything besides the stereo and it’s trim on the front dash. It’s up to you but it is not necessary. Do not unplug your battery until I point it out later in the DIY. It should be obvious why you shouldn’t unplug until then when you get to that section.

I started with the center speaker installation because that arrived first even though I didn’t have the speaker grill. Very easy and well documented so I’m not really going to bother with pictures.

See this thread and this thread for a good description and discussion.


Do remove the glove box first. Sorry no pics here as this is all fairly straight forward. First remove the panel under the glove box. Should be 2 phillips screws as well. Now get your T20 torx ready. Open the glove box. You will remove 6 Torx screws in total. 4 on the top inside the glove box. Then 1 on each outside edge (half way down). These are hard to reach and you need a good extension.

Now remove the cup holders. You need to pry the trim off around the cup holders first. Just slide in one of your plastic tools and gently pry them off. It is just held on by a couple of rods. Underneath you will see the phillips screws holding on the cup holders. Once you remove the cup holders the glove box should fall down so be careful and hold it.

Once you’ve undone the torx screws you need to undo all the plugs for the various electrics in the glove box. All the plugs on a BMW are pretty straight forward. It’s either a clip that just slides out or it could be that you need to push in on a small latch that keeps it tight, or finally it could be a “rocker” latch. The rocker latches you just depress a latch and then slide them down and they will push out the connector. BMW does a good job of color coding or using different connector shapes and sizes in the same area. It’s pretty hard to forget what goes where as it’s all pretty unique and easy to figure out.

The only thing I would add is that I went at it from the passenger side after I had removed the glove box. I found a very clear and easy line to follow. I used the fish tape to go up from the bottom and was able to grab the fish tape at the center speaker location. I then attached my wire and used electric tape to tape it to the fish tape and cover the fish tapes hook. I didn’t want it snagging any other wires.

I also used this window sealer instead of the standard window trim. This stuff seems more secure as it is a little sticky and also pliable. That thick foam I think would raise the coaxial too much and cause the tweeter to hit the grill.

In my case my center speaker has a cross over that I mounted to the right side of the center console. If you reach around you will feel a very large empty space. I blindly attached Velcro there and “feel” mounted the crossover. It was actually very easy to do although I did it all without really being able to see what I was doing. You can see in this pic the area that I am talking about.

I then attached a technic pigtail to the crossover, which will then connect to a reverse pigtail I attached to the new speaker wire we are going to run with Technic’s harness. If you don’t have a crossover (maybe you are using an L7 speaker?) then you will want to do the above technique with the new center speaker wire we are installing. Also another good reason to put a reverse pigtail on that center speaker wire. Put the reverse pigtail on about 20ft of speaker wire and leave it on the passenger floor. We will deal with it later.

Ok, that was the easy part. Now get ready for the hard part. It’s up to you where you want to start. Personally I started with the trunk. As I said I did this over a couple of nights so I wanted to be able to still drive my card during the day until the big push on Friday night and Saturday morning. It was also 100 degrees here in NC and I did not want to work during the day in my non AC garage.

Remove ALL the trim in the trunk. This is very easy and should take you about one hour going slow and about 30 minutes at a normal pace once you know what you are doing. For many reasons I’ve taken apart several BMW trunks before so I had a pretty good idea what was going on.

Go in this order:
1. take out the tool kit holder/battery cover on the right (plastic turn latch),
2. take out the floor cover of the trunk,
3. take off the plastic cover on the rear of the trunk (covering the latch, 2 phillips screws are hiding underneath two plastic covers, just pry off with one of your handy trim tools, and 4 plastic rivets).
4. take out the "felt" panel covering the right wall to expose the wiring (plastic rivets),
5. take out the felt panel covering the left wall to expose the wiring

Here’s a good YouTube video on the process. Of course you don’t need to worry about the parts about the bumper.

The plastic rivet is a two-piece part and you have to pull out the "nail" for the whole rivet to come out. Use the trim removal tool to pry in between the two parts. Once you figure out one the rest will go very quickly.

The next part is the seat removal. I do not have fold down seats so I had to remove the whole thing. If you have fold down seats this should go much easier for you and I think you can ignore this section. First remove the bottom seat section. To do so just grab the cushion firmly in the center of the left or right seat and pull up firmly. You'll feel it pop. Do the same thing on the other side.

Now the back seat cushion. First remove the two very large torx screws in the middle (T50 in my case). Now you have to crawl into the trunk and throw the two latches with a flat head screwdriver. This is really hard to describe but there is a good youtube video of course.

Next I would remove the front seats. First slide the seats all the way back or forward (doesn’t matter as we are completely taking out the seats). Remove the two T50 torx bolts that you exposed. Now slide the seats all the way the other way and remove the next set of T50 torx bolts. I would slide the seats towards the middle of the rails now.

Make sure you do this for both seats before you unplug the battery, which is the next step. Leave your trunk open and make sure all of your doors are unlocked. Once you disconnect the seats you can’t plug the battery back up until you are done or you will set off all sorts of airbag lights when you start the car. Some have said they were able to over come this and others had to go to the dealer. Personally I didn’t want to find out and the surefire way of making sure you’re not going to the dealer is to unplug the battery first, then unplug the seats and not plug the battery back in until the seats are plugged in again. That is known to work 100% of the time.

To disconnect the seats there is a black piece at the top of the large yellow connector. I used a small dental pic to get the black piece to start sliding up and off. Once it starts moving you can grab it and pull on it and the yellow connector will pop off. Then there is a small white connection that you also need to unplug. This was a really weird connect that was kind of frustrating but eventually I got it to disconnect. I’m still not sure how that worked.
Here’s a pic of my dental work:



You may want this to be your absolute last step before you start putting wire down but this was when I did it. You may want to leave the seats in the car but unplugged while you remove the stereo. It gives you something to sit on comfortably.

Next step is to remove the trim along the door sills, both front and back doors. I some how got lucky with these and figured them out on my own. Start with the front door sill piece as it is easier than the back one and will give you an idea of what is going on. Grab. the piece and slide it to the right or left. Doesn’t matter at all which direction and you’ll see why in a sec. If you slide right, pull up on the left side of the piece and it should pop off, then slide it left and the whole thing should come off. You’ll notice underneath the expanding slots. 2 that face right and 2 that face left, which explains why it doesn’t matter which direction you slide. Here’s a pic of the problem:



If you look closely you can see that one widens in one direction and the other widens in the other direction.

You’ll need to remove the fasteners that are still in the door frame. They are very tightly in there and they were the most problematic to remove. I had to use two tools prying up from both sides to get them to pop out. I did not break any of them with this technique. Here’s a pic of my technique:



The rear door panel trim is very much the same except it is on a curve and it has one plastic rivet under the rear seat that you have to remove. Other than that the technique is exactly the same. I found no difference because of the curve.

Next is the radio. Take one of your removal tools and gently pry in around the framing that surrounds the radio. Gently pry at it and go around the frame. It will slowly start to slide out until it eventually comes out completely.

Now take a phillips head screw driver and undo the four screws holding in the HU. It will just gently slide out. You may want to remove your gear shifter to give yourself some more room. Just pull straight up on the shifter with some force. It will just pop off. Don’t put your face in front of it or you will give yourself a bloody lip or a black eye. Here’s a pic of mine just before I pulled it out with the gear shift and center console removed.



That’s it the radio is now out. Just unplug all the bits and pieces. The main harness is a rocker latch. You have to lift up and slide it and it will pop out the main harness. Personally I disconnected all of the other wires connected to the back of the HU so I could have some room to work and also so I could get a good look at what was going on back there and to plan my strategy for fitting Technic’s harness.

There is no install guide when you buy Technic’s harness so you need to figure this out on your own. The worst part of the install was getting the harness to fit behind the radio and close everything up. There is not a whole lot of extra room back there and I spent about an hour trying to find the sweet spot.

First a description of the harness. The big bundle has two big plastic pieces, I believe they call these quadralocks. You’ll also see two smaller plastic connectors and a small fuse box and jumpers. You’ll notice that one of the big black pieces, quadralock, has a rocker connector on it and the other doesn’t. The one with the rocker will now go to your radio HU and the other one will accept the rocker from the car’s harness (the one that was originally connected to the HU). You will need to disconnect the MOST connector, if you have one. That is the green wire in the photos. I had to use a small dental pick to get the latch to undo so the connector would slide out. I then had to use the dental pick to get the blue release lever on the MOST connector to release the wires. Now transfer those wires to the new MOST connector that Technic provides. Don’t transfer the new MOST connector yet. Here’s a pic of me using the dental tool to get the MOST connector out:



Next there will be two connectors with very long wires attached, one has 8 wires and the other has 9 wires (an extra blue wire). The 9 wire connector is the HU output and will connect to the MS-8 input. The blue wire is switched power and will connect to the MS-8 REM IN. The 8 wire connector is the return amped signal from the MS-8.

The wires are all labeled. You can’t see it at first and you’ll think to yourself WTF Technic. But if you look closely on the wires you will see the lettering telling you what they are for. The colors correspond. In other words, White is LF+, white with black stripe is LF-, Grey is RF+, Grey with black stripe is RF-, and so on and so on. Some of the lettering is hard to read so knowing the colors correspond is helpful.

I took each wire bundle and wrapped it with cloth electrical tape from the plastic connector to about 3-4 ft from the end. I did this to make the bundle more manageable and easy to deal with as I laid it down in the car and passed it through different points. I highly recommend it but that’s up to you. Here’s a pic of my cloth taped wire bundle.



Now that the wire bundles are wrapped in cloth tape I would pass them through the radio opening. One on the left, drivers, side and one on the right, passengers, side. Doesn’t really matter for this particular DIY. At the same time take the wire that you have for the center speaker and match it up with the bundle you just passed through to the passenger’s side. Now take those bundles and push them underneath the plastic of the center console.

If you really want more room I suggest loosening the center console. It will add about 20-30 minutes to your install. To do so remove the walnut trim. Open the arm rest, take a trim removal tool and slowly start prying at the back of the walnut trim by the arm rest console. From there just lift up and forward and it should just come right off. Unplug the electrics. Should come right off if you removed the gear shifter. Wrap it in a towel or something. By the gear shifter you will see two black plastic covers. You should be able to pop those right off revealing two 10mm bolts. Undo those.

Next, go to the back seats. You will see where the AC vents are. That is a separate piece of plastic. On the bottom squeeze on the plastic piece and pull the piece out. It should pop off with not much force. You will see two 10mm bolts. Undo those.

Now the center console is loose and you can lift if up and work underneath it enough to tuck your wires in. Run the wires until where you see the carpet coming from the back tucking in under the carpet from the front. Run your cables under this tuck. Now lift up the entire rear carpet from the back seats grab the cable and run it along the center channel of the car. This is much easier than it sounds. I did it this way because I wanted to avoid the power cable running on the right side of the car. And once I lifted up that carpet I realized how much room was there and how easy this was. Don’t forget your center speaker wire. Here’s an idea of where you are head on the passengers side. The drivers side is exactly the same.



Here is the carpet completely lifted up. You can see the under seat speaker at the top of the picture.



Also at this point take the new wiring provided by Technic for the under seat woofers and lay that down. You’ll want to tuck it away for now and have it there for when you are ready to install new 8” woofers under the seats, but at least they will be there and you don’t have to do any of this again later. Have it follow your wire bundles.

From the passenger side I ran the cables along the center column and then at the rear seats there is actually a very handy covering right in the middle where the wire bundle and under seat woofer wire can pass through and be held in place. Very convenient. I then took that bundle and ran it along the rear seat in the obvious channel and met the drivers side bundle at the drivers side passenger door and ran all of this up and over the rear tire well and into the trunk. Securing it as I went with plastic wire ties.

Here’s a pics of the back seat channel:



For the drivers side I did sort of the same thing. I ran the bundle to the overlap in the carpet and then down to the drivers seat. From here I did not keep going the center channel. I went under the drivers seat in the middle, right along the edge of the woofer. Picked up the new woofer cable and around the back of the rear seat rail and over to the driver’s die door sill. Deep under the carpet I found a plastic flat tube where all the wires were all ready running and just passed the bundle in there. Fit perfectly. I don’t have pics but it is real obvious when you lift the carpet what I am talking about.

I will advise to go ahead and run two other new speaker wires as well for the tweeters (or midranges) if you are even remotely considering mounting the crossovers in the trunk. As I said it will be easier to remove or ignore them later than it will be to install them later.

For the drivers side just run it up the door sill the entire way. When you get to the footwell area just took an extra 3-4 ft under the carpet and forget about it until you need it. For the passengers side do the same thing except follow the wire for the center speaker into the glove box. Leave about 3-4 extra feet behind the glove box. You can tape it away easily and out of the way. In the trunk you will do the same thing and just tuck away an extra 3-4 ft and out of the way for now. Same thing with the new woofer cables. Lots of room behind that felt panel.

It really is a lot easier and obvious than it sounds. Everything tucks away real nice and when you put the car back together you won’t notice. I was surprised that thick bundle didn’t cause problems at the drivers side in the back seat but it was easily covered up by the rear seat and trim.

Now that you have the wiring laid down it’s time to connect the HU. Go ahead and add the MOST connector to the new quadralock. Attach the new quadralock to the HU. Don’t forget to attach the new wire bundles to their respective connectors. Should be obvious as one is 8 wires and one is 9 wires. Plus only one of them has a blue wire and that blue wire corresponds to the plug with the blue wire from the main harness. Reconnect everything else if you disconnected all the other plugs.

Now comes the most frustrating part of the install, pushing the HU back into place with all the new wires and connectors. I would love to hear what others have done to solve this puzzle. Here is my solution. I took about a 4 ft section of speaker wire (just a single strand) and created a lasso. I pushed the lasso in from the passenger’s side into the area behind the HU. I took that lasso and wrapped it around the big quadralock (the old rocker connector and the its mate on the new harness). Then as I slowly pushed the HU back in I also pulled on the lasso. I was trying to get that block into the far right bottom corner behind the HU as this seemed the only place that it would fit. By using the lasso I was able to force it over there.

Here’s a pic. You can barely see the lasso. Look for the single speaker wire wrapped around the plastic block. That speaker wire leads down and out on the passengers side center console (towards the back) where I could pull on it and direct.



There may be better ways to do it but I haven’t read them. If you have a trick to doing this please oh please chime in to help others with this part of the install. It literally took me at least an hour just to get this done. Once I figured out my system it wasn’t that bad. Had someone told me this earlier it might have gone faster as at least I would have had some direction to start with.

Once that is back in from here the rest is just detail work on connecting things. I won’t go into too much detail as this DIY is all ready very long. From here you should have the requisite skill to finish this up, or you probably shouldn’t be doing this DIY.

Here's a pic of the trunk with all of the craziness coming in.



I will point out the battery connections and grounds in this picture. That battery connector just slides in to one of the empty slots on the plastic connector. Just undo one from the battery. Don’t forget to undo the hinge on the side of the plastic connector or the terminal won’t slide in. I also circled where I connected my wiring for my OEM westfalia tow hitch that I imported from the UK and installed.




Here you can also see where my ground point for the battery is:



I also ran my battery power and my ground behind the rear plastic trim piece in the trunk. You can kind of see them running above the ground connection in the previous picture. Much shorter route and it lets me mount the MS-8 in a direction where the power cables don’t come anywhere near any of the inputs or outputs or any other electrical components.

I did have to solder on about 2-3 feet of wire to the blue wire, switched power, from technic’s harness as it did not quite reach and this let me route it better along the trunk. This was not a problem for the inputs or outputs as they easily reached given the extra wiring from the MS-8 harness and the location of their connection on the MS-8.

Personally I soldered all connections and used ring terminals to connect to the MS-8 for the power cables. You may NOT want to solder the front speaker cables just yet. You can however solder the rear speakers and the center speaker as those won’t change later.

Here's a pic of my trunk soldering station that I used.



I connected the inputs as follows:
LF -→ Channel 1
RF → Channel 2
LR → Channel 3
RR → Channel 4
Blue wire to the REM IN on the MS-8

Outputs were:
Channel 1 → Crossover → Tweeter/Midrange LF (you will go straight to the LF on Technic’s harness for now)
Channel 2 → Crossover → Tweeter/Midrange RF (you will go straight to the RF on Technic’s harness for now)
Channel 3 → LR on Technic’s harness
Channel 4 → RR on Technic’s harness
Channel 5 → Center Speaker via the new wiring
Channel 6 → L 8” woofer via the new wiring (You can ignore this for now)
Channel 7 →R 8” woofer via the new wiring (You can ignore this for now)
Channel 8 → nothing (cut off the exposed wire and put a little bit of electric tape or a dab of liquid electric tape on the tip).

I then just cut off the exposed wire for the remaining inputs and wire tied them together and out of the way.

If you eventually mount the crossovers in the trunk the front speaker output from the MS-8 will run first to the crossover and then you will attach the corresponding wire from technic’s harness and the new wire that you had lying around (you’ll also need to finish that wire into the door, see my other DIY on speaker install).

I mounted the MS-8 on the AMP bracket that I ordered. I had to remove the two side rails from the MS-8 to make it fit. I also had to take a Dremel tool to one side of it so I could make connections. Here’s some pics of the bracket. I used a lot of Velcro to secure the MS-8 to the bracket for now but that will change once I add an AMP to all of this.





That should be it. Just put it all back together the way you took it apart. Like I said this is a very long DIY. Plan on two whole days. Nothing is really that difficult it’s just time consuming and you need to go slow and deliberate.

Here it is about to close it up. You can see I got my Jehnert Flatline speakers all ready and installed the crossovers. Check out my Jehnert speaker DIY coming soon.






I personally hooked up all the wires with plastic screw connectors first before putting everything back together. This is fast and easy. Then I plugged in the seats but didn’t bolt them down. Connected the battery again and ran through the basic installation instructions for the MS-8. After all that I just put in the basic settings for the MS-8 as recommended in their installation guide. I figured I could tweak later. I just wanted to know if all the speakers were working and everything else in the car was working. Sure enough everything was in order and no problems so I put the car back together. Putting it back together is much faster.

Enjoy
Jim