Toyota Matrix DIYs

Many of you might be thinking Why would I want to loose the “Premium Audio System” the came factory installed… well two words, iPod Connection.

The Auxilliary adaptor for the factory stereo costs upwards of $80. Since I already had a decent stereo lying around with an auxilliary input on it I figured I could swap them out for about $30 and save some money.

At the time I didn’t think it would be such a project because I didn’t know the factory stereo was a common ground system and most if not all aftermarket stereos are not. But the guy at Circuit City was quick to dash my hopes by saying I would have to rewire my whole car to do it. There was some rewiring involved but it went suprisingly smoothly, I just couldn’t accept no for an answer when I had already set my mind on not paying $80.

So here it is (Note: Following this how-to disables your Subwoofer, however reconnecting your subwoofer to your ne HU should not be that hard, I only skiped it for time purposes I will probably go back and hook it up later),

The Standard Wire Harness for aftermarket stereos looks like this:

Yellow = Battery 12V+
Red = Ignition Switch 12V+
Blue = Power Antenna
Black = Ground
White = LF+
White/Black = LF-
Gray = RF+
Gray/Black = RF-
Green = LR+
Green/Black = LR-
Violet = RR+
Violet/Black = RR-

The Factory Wire Harness is as follows:

1 Blue/White = Battery 12V+
2 Green = ?
3 NA
4 NA
5 Pink = TX+
6 NA
7 White = Mute
8 Red = R+
9 Black = L+
10 Taped Black = SLD
11 Gray = Ignition Switch
12 Black/White = ?
13 Black = Antenna Amp
14 NA
15 Violet = TX-
16 NA
17 NA
18 White = R-
19 Green = L-
20 Brown = Ground

As you can see we cant just hook the speaker wires from the aftermarket harnes to the factory one because they are split differently. So most of these wires we are not going to use at all, just pins 1, 11, and 20.

But before we do that, we need to build our cable that we are going to use to bypass the Amp.

You need about a 6-7 foot cable to reach the Amp’s housing under the passenger seat. I used Monster Cable Speaker Wire for this and for that I needed 4 7′ pieces. The benefit of the speaker wire was that it is allready paired up and since we are connecting pairs to pairs it made it easier to identify. What ever you decide to use for wire you will need to have 8 wires on each side of the cable.

Get it all bundled together and strip the ends so they are ready to go. On one end you are connecting your aftermarket harness and on the other end you will be connecting the wires that go from the amp to the speaker, essentially taking the Amp out of the equation.

So splice a pair from your cable to each of the following sets of wires on the harness:

White and White/Black
Gray and Gray/Black
Green and Green/Black
and
Violet and Violet/Black

To connect them I used wire crimpers and they came out very secure, i would highly reccomend the same.

At this time you can also prep the 3 wires that are going to be connected to the existing harness, the Yellow, the Red and the Black on the aftermarket harness.

Next you want to label the other ends of the cable before you run the wire through the car and cant tell where they are coming from. I found the best way was to lable them with the wires they are going to instead of the ones they are coming from. All the wires on the Amp Harness (there are two harnesses on the amp you only need the bigger one) are paired off already so it makes it easy.

But here are the correlations you can figure out how you want to lable them:

Aftermarket -> Factory Amp Harness
Singles (1->1):
Green = Black on pin 4
Green/Black = Yellow on pin 13
Violet = Red on pin 5
Violet/Black = White on pin 14
Doubles (1->2):
White = Red/White on pin 6 and Pink on pin 8
White/Black = Blue/White on pin17 and Violet on pin 19
Gray = Green/White on pin 7 and Light Green on pin 9
Gray/Black = Brown on pin 18 and Blue on pin 20

Now that your cable is all preped and labled its time to start taking apart your car!

First you want to remove the factory stereo:

-Just pop the outter plate where you clock and AC buttons are off by gently pulling from the bottom or wedging in a taped knife to avoid scratching your dash.

-Disconnect the four cables attached to it and set it aside.

-there are 4 screws holding in your HU, remove them and the two cables in the back to take out the old unit (Note: you may want to take out your CD’s first if you have any left in there.)

Now that thats done you need to remove the center armrest and cupholder console, this is actually easier than you might think.

-Under the carpet in the front compartment of the console is 2 screws and the are two more in the bottom of the arm rest where the power adaptor is, take those out.

-before just pulling the console out you need to disconnect the power adaptor, if you are in the back seat you should be able to see the white clip connector near the middle on the floor.

-Set the console aside and move on to the passenger seat.

-Before touching the passenger seat you should disconnect the Negative power on the car battery (The Black side, but if you didn’t know that you probably shouldn’t be doing this install on your own)

-There are 3 cables connected to the passenger seat in the front underneath. You really only need to remove 2 but you might as well unplug them all seeing as how it might not be easy to tell which one can stay. One of the cables is also clipped to the seat with a plastic clip, you need to free it to get the seat out.

-Once you get those unplugged, unscrew the 4 bolt holding in the seat, 2 in front in plain sight and 2 in back under plastic caps. the plastic caps pop right off with a little force.

-Now you should be able to pull the seat out the passenger door, easiest to have it in its collapsed forward possition.

now you should be able to see the amp housing

-remove the 2 harnesses and the 3 bolts holding it in. There is a plastic clip on the cable on this housing as well.

Take a step back… your car looks like you just got robbed, but dont worry its pretty easy to put back.

Now to run your cable. If you dont already have someone helping you at this point you should find someone now, it will make this a whole lot easier.

-Use electrical tape to wrap the end of the cable you made (side without the harness) up really well covering all the wire ends so it has nothing to get caught on.

-Feed it down behind the stereo housing, the goal right now is to be able to grab it from the area under the glove box behind the center of the dash and pull the excess cable through, leaving yourself at least as much slack as the cable that came from your old system.

-Once you get it there you need to feed it under the rug along the side of the center console, one person should feed it through and the other should reach up under the carpet from the hole where the console used to be. Don’t be affraid to pull up a significant area of carpet to do this, it will go back just fine. You should be able to reach you arm in at least up to your elbow when you do this.

-Once you have it pulled through to the center console area, you can feed it over to where the amp was. MAKE SURE YOU have it pass over the metal hump where the seat is towards the inside of the seat, so that when you screw the seat back in, it doesn’t crush your cable.

Now that the hard part is done, time for the tedious splicing of wires.

-Clip the three wires you need from the old stereo harness and crimp them to your three wires from your new harness as follows (Make sure you crimp the side of the wire comming from the car not the side comming from the old harness):

New -> Old
Yellow = Blue/White
Red = Gray
and
Black = Brown

Tape off the ends from the harness and you can now install the stereo.

-Plug in your stereo to your new harness, and don’t forget to plug in the antenna cable that was in the old stereo as well.

- Remount everything using the 4 screws you pulled out before.

-Plug the 4 plugs back into the frame piece and pop it back into place. (Should look good now if you have a nice stereo)

Now more splicing:

-On the other side of your cable, hopefully you followed my advice and labled the wires with the colors and pins they are going to, because it will make it a whole lot easier.

-Its best to start by finding the Violet and Pink wires on the harness because they are the only ones of those colors, and they represent pins 19 and 8 respectively. You should be able to figure out the rest of the wires from that, just remember that you only have 8 wires on your cable and you are splicing to 12 wires on the harness. And keep in mind that you want to splice to the car side of the wire not the harness side.

This is because the Front Speakers and the Tweeters get the same signal from the stereo, so the FR+ is connected to the Front Right Speaker+ and the Right Tweeter+ (Same with the negatives and the left side) the four singles will be for the 2 back speakers 2 wires per speaker. Refer to the correlation that i wrote out earlier for the rest of the connections.

-When you finish splicing all those make sure to tape up the loose ends.

- clean all the loose junk that i am sure you have on your floor now and then get the cables organized so that when you put the chair back in your passengers wont step on the wires or get caught on them.

-put the seat back in by screwing the 4 bolts back in and reattaching the cables underneath the front.

-Lastly put the center console back in with the 4 screws from that (the small ones go in front an the larger ones go in the back) don’t forget to reconnect your power addaptor first.

-ok so it wasn’t the last thing. You still need to reconnect the negative terminal on your car battery.

Start your car and see if it all worked… If it did great! If not, I don’t envy you.

Most of this mod is fairly easy stuff, just take your time and make sure you have the right tools for the job, it will be time consuming. Took me about 4.5 hours with the help of a friend who’s father is an electritian, so we had all the tools we needed. i have taken the dash out before and the center console so that stuff went fast for me, the seat was something I hadn’t done before but I think it went well.

If when you turn your car back on, your airbag light doesn’t turn off, it means you forgot to reconnect one of the cables under the seat or the ones behind the stereo frame. (Happened to me) but once you plug them in and turn the car back on it should be fine.