I am going to start with what...
I am going to start with what not to do. Don’t ever put a head unit in your Jeep like this one. If you had a Toyota Prius or an FJ Cruiser or something else that never saw dirt, this would be fine and last a long tim. But a head unit with an opening for a tape or a CD like this one is the fastest way to put another head unit in within one wheeling season. No matter what its benefits are, don’t buy one. If it is free to you and you just want to re-do the install job in a few months, then go for it.
Stop paying other people $50 (if you are lucky) to put a stereo in your girlfriend’s car. Well, that is, if you are the lucky 1-percent of Jp magazine readers who actually have a girlfriend. If you are unlucky, you are paying some 16-year-old who knows way less than you to do a crappy job putting a stereo in your Jeep. I’ve talked about soldering here. I’ve covered other good ways to connect wires. I guarantee you that the teenager you pay to install your stereo isn’t using any of my good advice. You might not believe me. One guy told me once he didn’t believe in plastic. I’ve seen plastic. It exists. And I am right about wiring a radio.
Oh, let’s get one thing straight right now. The stereo in your Jeep and the radio you listen to are different. In a Jeep, the “stereo” is all the parts that make up your “system.” There is the “head unit” which is the thing in the dash that you put eight-tracks into (Editor’s note: or last decade, rather than four decades ago, you put CDs into). The radio is that thing that pulls stuff out of the air to give you music, and right when a good song comes on, you drop into another valley or canyon and lose it. Then there are the speakers, which, if you aren’t Editor Hazel, you have more than one—four at least, I’d say, but we covered how to hook them up already.
So, I am really talking about how to wire-up a head unit. And, if you can hook up fog lights, “auxiliary,” or “driving” lights, or if you wear khaki shirts with too many pockets, you can put a head unit in too. The thing that makes Jeeps special is the amount of dirt they see, and picking a head unit is a unique experience to the Jeep owner. Unless your Jeep sees a lot of water on the inside, most “marine” radios will do you no good. They protect the electronics against water spray—not against dust or dirt. Someone needs to make a dirt-resistant head unit. Until then, I always pick head units like the one included here from Sony. They won’t guarantee a kryptonite-proof radio experience, but they go a long way from some other head units.
I guess I am covering a lot of things here with this column. Some things I’ve picked up by being with this Jeep magazine for so long, and some things are just really easy, but you just don’t know it yet. I hope you can take something away from how I pick and put “stereos” in Jeeps.
In a Jeep you need to look...
In a Jeep you need to look for several things to actually enjoy your stereo. The first thing is you need to have a drop-down face. Even with large clouds of dust, a drop-down face will do wonders about protecting your unit from dying in a big dust cloud. This is a bit less successful in a YJ or CJ than in TJs and JKs, but in any of them it works very well. Another thing that is important with your big mud tires, no tops, no doors, and loud exhausts, is the power output. You want the one with the best power output you can afford. This Sony CDX-GT66OUP has the flip-down face and a 52-watt by four-channel power rating.
Wiring a head unit is easy....
Wiring a head unit is easy. Just remember it needs a wire for its memory for things like the clock and station presets and that means constant power, which is usually a yellow wire from the head unit. Then it needs to know when to turn on so you don’t have to install another switch and that one is a red wire most of the time. The last of the three most important wires is the ground, and that one you already know. It is black. We talked about speaker wires a couple of months ago, and the only one you care about after that is the illumination, which is normally orange. Recently, I’ve been leaving that one unhooked and just manually setting the head unit for “dim” because of how bad some of these Jeep’s electrical systems are.
Once you get the yellow, red,...
Once you get the yellow, red, and black wires hooked up and the speakers attached, all that you might want to do is hook in some kind of “source” that doesn’t care if you are in the middle of nowhere. This unit has Pandora, which is usually useless where you guys go wheeling. Fortunately, it also has inputs for an iPod (A), good anywhere, and for any 1⁄8-inch sound source (B), with a satellite radio connection on the back.