How To Install a Car Stereo (Single & Double DIN)

[Music] hey guys it's Brent from Sonic Electronix and today we're gonna be doing a radio install in this Toyota to show you how to replace your factory radio now there's a few things that you need to get ready before tackling this job which is actually pretty easy the first step is our tools we need wire strippers our wire crimpers possibly some pry tools maybe a nut driver a Phillips head screwdriver and a flat head screwdriver typically the the tools that are required for the radio installation now the great thing is sonic electronics does carry every tool here that you see on the table and the next thing you need is your installation accessory starting with your zip ties 18 to 22 gauge pink buck connectors 14 to 16 gauge blue buck connectors and your stereo installation kit as well as wiring harness great thing is sonic electronics when you buy a radio we give you the dash kit and harness for free and we carry all the variety of connectors and zip ties you could possibly imagine so the first step to installing your car stereo is disconnecting your battery the reason for disconnecting the batteries from one we don't want power flowing through the vehicle just in case if we short out of wire a week a pop fuses is just a nightmare so let's disconnect the battery here now you can do either side you need the negative side or the positive side it's fine typically disconnecting the negative side is the most common so we're gonna go ahead and do that here now if you do do the positive side let me just give you a hint here obviously my ratchet is metal right so if I'm here and I hit the battery hold-down bracket or anything accessory-wise you get short out the battery pops and fuses or have some problems so be sure when you're ratcheting this not to hit any metal accessories that are near it you don't want to short anything out so step two of your radio install is removing the factory radio now some cars are different in the case where you may start from the top to the bottom most cars that I've worked on usually start at the bottom and then work their way up now the one thing you want to be careful of is finding your resistance points on the panel making sure that you're not prying on something that's screwed down like for example right below here if I pull off this AC switch that screws holding the panel in the place so if I pry on this panel I'm gonna break some plastic around here so we want to make sure that we're very very careful so I'm gonna go ahead and remove these knobs like I said I'm gonna start at the bottom here so we got our pride tools from X scorpion and I'm gonna go ahead and pry this panel up perfect now most of time you can actually do it with your hands much easier you could feel the resistance on the panel as well as you can see this just slides right out you do have some connections here which are a cigarette lighter some plugs now one thing I want to point out we got panel Clips here a lot of times these plastic dashes are held in by these panel clips so if you hear something fall inside the dash more unlikely it's these panel clips falling off so go hunting next we take our Phillips head screwdriver we see that this particular vehicle has two Phillips head screws holding the panel in here as well as two here these screws alright so next step since we got all the screws removed from the panel so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start from the bottom I'm going to pull up as we can see past plastic panel clips are just holding this in cool perfect now one thing before I disconnect this panel I just want to point some things out and this is why we disconnect the battery as you see here we have a passenger the passenger light is basically for the passenger airbag turns it on or off etc and if we don't disconnect the battery and unplug this panel and we start the car we're gonna have an airbag light on our dash column which the dealer has to clear dependent a couple hundred bucks just the clear lights not fun so make sure you disconnect the battery if you're not disconnecting the battery make sure the car is in opposition then unplug this panel okay so once we have the panel removed we have four 10 mils holding this radio in on the top and the bottom area now some radios may be held in with 7 mils Phillips head cetera every car is a little bit different so this car we're gonna have our nut driver move these screws so let's say we have a stubborn screw bolt cetera so I've unscrewed it all the way but it doesn't want to come out so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna keep my nut driver here on top of that screw I'll pull the radio out that way that screw doesn't fall into the dash and you're gonna have to go hunting for it so the next step here is just unplugging the factory connections here's our AM and FM antenna and this is our main car stereo harness right here so this is the factory harness of the vehicle with our installation accessories we're gonna go ahead and plug in the wiring harness that's provided for this vehicle which is a female plugs right into here and decodes the color of the wires for us that we we're not guessing alright guys so step three of our car stereo installation is prepping the first step is doing our vehicle wiring harness to our aftermarket radio harness which you see here share all the same colors so literally all we're doing is matching color for color utilizing our buck connectors or crimp caps or soldering heat shrink whichever method that you use the next step is our dash kit for this particular vehicle it only came with two side mounts and this is called an ISO mount since we're doing a double din it's typically a little bit larger and has a lot more weight so we need to support it so with this - kit it's telling us to utilize the factory mounting brackets that come with the factory radio so we're just be mounting these to our aftermarket radio and utilizing these side brackets to basically fill in the trim that way it doesn't stand out of place alright so when we come to connecting the harness the first step here since I'm using Buck connectors is we strip the wire back using our wire strippers and I'll give you an example here make sure you choose the correct gauge that way you don't cut through the whole entire wire just pull the wire right off the actual installation around the wire and when using Buck connectors you want to make sure you twist the wire that way it's nice and uniform if we have a wire like this you know with strands coming out it's not gonna sit in the bucket nectar perfectly and we're not going to get a good crimp so the next step is after we twist the wire take our buck connector and we're just going to set it on the wire we got our crimps and typically the crimps will have a nice little V groove here with a tooth that's for our buck connector slide that in cramp now we have a properly connected wire to a buck connector I'm going to terminate the rest of the wires with this now if we have any stragglers left over say the colors don't match up what we usually do is just terminate the end with a basically a buck connector or I could use a crimp cap just a cap off the wire the reason why we do this is we want to make sure that we don't have any bare wires inside the dash 40 now even if you cut the wire you can still possibly short out I've done it in the past and it's a pain in the butt having to go back and fix it alright guys once I've connected the harness color for color as you see here with my buck connectors I'm gonna go ahead and make it look pretty because if we just put it in the car like this we got a bunch of wire strangling around we got our ones that are capped off just laying around it looks really hokey so I always like the zip tie it make it look nice and uniform that way it fits in the dash nicely when you put the radio back in so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna Scyther all my wires together take one zip tie so we only need one zip tie on each end some guys like using tape but here's the downside about tape guys you tape up this whole entire harness and you have a problem and you need that troubleshoot it what you got to do with the tape to remove all the tape so my suggestion is if you want to tape your harness put it in the car make sure it works fine then tape your harness very basic completed harness and wires are capped off everything's wired to color to color it's a good way of managing your wires as well make it look like a nice clean professional install alright so once we connected the car stereo harness it's now time to mount our unit in this particular application since we're doing a double din replacement with a factory double din we're gonna be utilizing Metro supplied brackets here that are just side mounts and we need to do an ISO mount so we're gonna be utilizing the factory brackets off the factory car stereo first we got to remove those I'm gonna take my nut driver right so we look at the stereo here and we see that left hand so that tells me this is the left side of the stereo if you're looking at it directly so we're gonna take the car new car stereo up side by side just gonna basically move this bracket right over and it's gonna slide and up there we go slid right into its spot and now the dash kit that we're using from Metro just basically sandwiches on to the factory mounting bracket and this isoh mount application so we're gonna go ahead and put it on in place perfect you can see how it has three mounting holes actually for that all line up so the screws that are provided with the JBC unit Kenwood unit whatever unit that you're utilizing they're usually a panhead screws like this a Phillips we don't use the factory eight Mills that came on the Toyota because they typically strip out they may be too long you could damage your unit so we're just gonna go ahead and mount our u so now alright guys so we're just gonna go ahead and flip this over and replicate it on the right-hand side alright guys so we already to the case of a Ison mount with our doubled ends here from doubled in to doubled in now I just wanted to show you one extra step here that if you're doing a single din radio installation it's a tad bit different typically you'll get a dash kit here that just has a single din opening with a pocket for storage so if we're going from double din to single din this is what we're gonna be doing alright guys so the first step of caging your unit is making sure we got the proper sized opening and we got our cage the cage is gonna slide in now doesn't matter if it's this way or that way it's universal so just slides into place and the one thing that you want to make sure when you're caging the unit is that the cage rests on the actual plastic lip of the single din dash kit so we got it resting on the lip now on the cage you'll see teeth there's a little teeth all wrapping around it these teeth are bent into place by a flathead screwdriver that way it locks the cage into the dash kit and doesn't fall out of the dash once it's installed so we're gonna start at the bottom and make sure the dash gets all we have to at the very lip just gonna push down these tabs now once we successfully caged the unit we'll just slide in right through the front pass up we have here's a little locking side tabs which will lock into place once this area is all the way and you'll hear it click hear that click stereo is now successfully caged the dash kit gives you a nice sleek look and we're golden so once we successfully ISO mounted our car stereo here and wired up our harness we are now ready to put the radio into the vehicle as well go on to our next step alright guys so on step four the radio installation this would be the time to run any additional accessories such as your Bluetooth microphone your satellite radio antenna or run your rear USB to your love box your center console however for this installation we're just doing a basic radio replacement alright guys so step 5 is installed in your car stereo we already got our pre-wired harness here which will plug in right into the factory connection makes it nice and easy for you it's once you hear the click you know that's successfully connected perfect so we got our stereo now all we have to do is connect it but forgot our harness already plugged into the vehicle plug it right in the back here we got our AM and FM antenna also putting that in the back of the stereo alright so once we got everything plugged in it's now time to slide the radio into place make sure that you don't have any wire strangling down here on the bottom so you pinch them make sure you get them all tucked slide the stereo into place since we use the factory mounting brackets in this application it's actually gonna be pretty darn easy it's gonna slide right into place all we have to do is bolt it right back in all right so the final steps here is basically reassembling the vehicle just make sure that you have all your screws and everything set asides didn't lose any and just making sure that everything is plugged in and this panel slides right back so we just want to make sure that we get all the screws right in the correct place here that's why I usually put them in the cup holder just in case that way I don't lose them now it's time just to reconnect the shifter plate make sure you don't forget to plug anything in because your cigarette lighter may not work and this panel just snaps right back in and voila all right guys we got the finished product here the radios installed working flawlessly we got the vehicle put back together now there's one thing I want you guys remember this is not too difficult for the do-it-yourselfer a radio install is very straightforward and the great thing about Sonic Electronix is when you buy a stereo like this you're gonna get a free dash kit and a free wiring harness which will come with your instructions and guide you step by step also check out our knowledgebase we have step-by-step guides on how to install car stereos amplifiers subs everything you could possibly imagine now if you guys have trouble choosing a stereo feel free to give one of our knowledgeable sales reps a call at one eight seven seven two eight nine seventy six sixty four and we more than happy to guide you along and get you in the right stereo that works for your application alright guys make sure you subscribe to our Channel once again this is Ben with Sonic Electronix have a great day - Hey, guys, it's Brent from Sonic Electronix, and today we're going to be doing a radio install in this Toyota, showing you how to replace your factory radio.
Now, there's a few things you need to get ready before tackling this job, which is actually pretty easy. The first step is our tools. We need wire strippers, our wire crimpers, possibly some pry tools, maybe a nut driver, a Phillips head screwdriver, and a flat-head screwdriver.
Typically the tools that are required for the radio installation. Now, the great thing is Sonic Eletronix does carry every tool here that you see on the table. And the next thing you need is your installation accessories, starting with your zip ties, 18 to 22-gauge pink butt connectors, 14 to 16-gauge blue butt connectors, and your stereo installation kit as well as wiring harness.
Great thing is, Sonic Eletronix, when you buy a radio, we give you the dash kit and the harness for free, and we carry all the variety of connectors and zip ties you could possibly imagine. So the first step to installing your car stereo is disconnecting your battery.
The reason for disconnecting the battery is for one, we don't want power flowing through the vehicle, just in case if we short out a wire, we could pop fuses, it's just a nightmare. So let's disconnect the battery here.
Now, you could do either side, you could do the negative side or the positive side, it's fine. Typically disconnecting the negative side is the most common. So we're gonna go ahead and do that here.
Now if you do do the positive side, lemme just give you a hint here. Obviously my ratchet is metal, right? So if I'm here and I hit the battery hold-down bracket or anything accessory-wise, it could short out the battery, pop some fuses, or have some problems.
So be sure, when you're ratcheting this, not to hit any metal accessories that are near it, 'cause you don't wanna short anything out. So step two of your radio install is removing the factory radio.
Now, some cars are different, in the case where you may start from the top to the bottom, most cars that I've worked on usually start at the bottom and then work their way up. Now, the one thing you wanna be careful of is finding the resistance points on the panel, making sure that you're not prying on something that's screwed down, like, for example, right below here, if I pull off this A/C switch, that screw is holding the panel into place.
So if I pry on this panel, I'm gonna break some plastic around here, so we wanna make sure that we're very, very careful. So I'm gonna go ahead and remove these knobs. And like I said, I'm gonna start on the bottom here, so we've got our pry tools from Mech Scorpion, and I'm gonna go ahead and pry this panel up.
Perfect. Now most of the time you can actually do it with your hands, it's much easier, you can feel the resistance on the panel as well, as you can see, this just slides right out. We do have some connections here, to our cigarette lighter.
This unplugs. Now, one thing I wanna point out, we got panel clips here. A lot of times these plastic dashes are held in by these panel clips. So if you hear something fall inside the dash, more than likely it's these panel clips falling off, so go hunting.
Next we take our Phillips head screwdriver, we see that this particular vehicle has two Phillips head screws holding the panel in here, as well as two here. Remove these screws. All right, so next step, since we got all the screws removed from the panel, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start from the bottom, I'm gonna pull up, as we can see, the plastic panel clips are just holding this in.
So I'm gonna pull, perfect. Now one thing before I disconnect this panel, I just wanna point some things out, and this is why we disconnect the battery. 'Cause you see here, we have a passenger.
And the passenger light is basically for the passenger airbag. Turns it on or off, et cetera. And if we don't disconnect the battery and unplug this panel, and we start the car, we're gonna have an airbag light on our dash column, which the dealer has to clear.
Spending a couple hundred bucks just to clear a light, it's not fun. So make sure you disconnect the battery, if you're not disconnecting the battery, make sure the car is in off position, then unplug this panel.
So I'll go ahead and unplug it. Okay. So once we have the panel removed, we have four 10-mils holding this radio in on the top and the bottom area. Now, some radios may be held in with 7-mils, Phillips head, et cetera, every car is a little bit different, so this car we're gonna have our nut driver, remove these screws.
So let's say we have a stubborn screw, bolt, et cetera. So I've unscrewed it all the way, but it doesn't want to come out, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna keep my nut driver here, on top of that screw, and I'll pull the radio out.
That way that screw doesn't fall into the dash and you don't have to go hunting for it. So the next step here is just unplugging the factory connections, here's our AM and FM antenna, and this is our main car stereo harness, right here.
So this is our factory harness of the vehicle, with our installation accessories we're gonna go ahead and plug in the wiring harness that's provided for this vehicle, which is a female, plugs right into here, and decodes the color of the wires for us, so that way we're not guessing.
All right, guys, so step three of our car stereo installation is prepping. The first step is doing our vehicle wiring harness to our aftermarket radio harness, which you see here, share all the same colors.
So literally all we're doing is matching color for color, utilizing our butt connectors or crimp caps or solder and heat shrink, whichever method that you use. The next step is our dash kit. For this particular vehicle, it only came with two side mounts, and this is called an ISO mount.
Since we're doing a double din, it's typically a little bit larger, and has a lot more weight, so we need to support it. So with this dash kit it's telling us to utilize the factory mounting brackets that come with the factory radio.
So we're just gonna be mounting these to our aftermarket radio, and utilizing these side brackets to basically fill in the trim, that way it doesn't stand out of place. All right, so when we come to connecting the harness, the first step here, since I'm using butt connectors, is we strip the wire back using our wire strippers.
And I'll give you an example here. Make sure you choose the correct gauge, that way you don't cut through the whole entire wire. And just pulls this wire right off, the actual insulation around the wire.
And when using butt connectors, you wanna make sure that you twist the wire. That way it's nice and uniform. If we have a wire like this, you know, a strand's coming out, it's not going to sit in the butt connector perfectly and we're not gonna get a good crimp.
So the next step is, after we twist the wire, take our butt connector and we're just gonna set it on the wire, we've got our crimps, and typically the crimps will have a nice little V groove here with a tooth, that's for our butt connector.
I'll slide that in and crimp, and now we have a properly connected wire to a butt connector. I'm gonna terminate the rest of the wires with this, now if we have any stragglers left over, say the colors don't match up, what we usually do is just terminate the end with basically a butt connector or I could use a crimp cap, just to cap off the wire.
The reason that we do this is we just want to make sure that we don't have any bare wires inside the dash shorting out. Even if you cut the wire, it could still possibly short out. I've done it in the past and it's a pain in the butt having to go back and fix it.
All right, guys, once I've connected the harness color for color, as you see here, with my butt connectors, I'm gonna go ahead and make it look pretty, 'cause if we just put it in the car like this we got a bunch of wires dangling around, we got our ones that are capped off laying around, it looks really hokey.
So I always like to zip tie it and make it look nice and uniform, that way it fits in the dash nicely when you put the radio back in. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna gather all my wires together, take one zip tie, so we only need one zip tie on each end, some guys like using tape, but here's the downside about tape, guys.
If you tape up this whole entire harness and you have a problem and you need to troubleshoot it, what do you gotta do with the tape? You gotta remove all the tape. So my suggestion is, if you wanna tape your harness, put it in the car, make sure it works fine, then tape your harness.
Very basic, completed harness, and wires are capped off. Everything's wired color to color. It's a good way of managing your wires as well, make it look like a nice, clean, professional install.
All right, so once we've connected the car stereo harness, it's now time to mount our unit. And this particular application, since we're doing a double din replacement with a factory double din, we're gonna be utilizing Metra-supplied brackets here that are just side mounts, and we need to do an ISO mount, so we're gonna be utilizing the factory brackets off the factory car stereo.
First we gotta remove those, so I'm gonna take my nut driver. All right. So we look at the stereo here and we see that left-hand, so that tells me that this is the left side of the stereo, if you're looking at it directly.
So we're gonna take the new car stereo, put it up side by side, we're just gonna basically move this bracket right over, and it's gonna slide in, oh, there we go, slid right into its spot.
Now the dash kit that we're using for Metra just basically sandwiches onto the factory mounting bracket, in this ISO mount application, so we're gonna go ahead and put it on in place, perfect.
You can see how it has three mounting holes, or actually four, that all line up. So the screws that are provided with the JVC unit, Kenwood unit, whatever unit that you're utilizing, are usually a panhead screw like this, a Phillips.
We don't use the factory 8-mils that came on the Toyota, because they typically strip out, they may be too long, you could damage your unit. So we're just gonna go ahead and mount our ISO now.
All right, guys, so we're just gonna go ahead and flip this over and replicate it on the right-hand side. All right, guys, so we already did the case of the ISO mount with our double dins here, from double din to double din, and I just wanted to show you one extra step here that, if you're doing a single din radio installation it's a tad bit different.
Typically you will get a dash kit here that just has a single din opening, with a pocket for storage. So if we're going from double din to single din, this is what we're gonna be doing. All right, guys, so the first step of caging your unit is making sure we got the proper size opening, and we have our cage.
The cage is just gonna slide in, now it doesn't matter if it's this way or that way, it's universal, so it just slides into place. And the one thing that you want to make sure when you're caging the unit is that the cage rests on the actual plastic lip of the single din dash kit.
So we got it resting on the lip, now, on the cage, you'll see teeth. There's little teeth all wrapping around it. These teeth are bent into place by a flat-head screwdriver, that way it locks the cage into the dash kit and doesn't fall out of the dash once it's installed.
So we're gonna start at the bottom, and make sure the dash kit's all the way at the very lip, we're just gonna push down these tabs. Now once we've successfully caged, the unit will just slide in right through the front as so.
What we have here is little locking side tabs, which will lock into place once the stereo is all the way in. And you'll hear it click. Hear that click? The stereo is now successfully caged to the dash kit, gives you a nice sleek look, and we're golden.
So once we've successfully ISO mounted our car stereo here, and wired up our harness, we are now ready to put the radio into the vehicle as well go onto our next step. All right, guys, so in step four, the radio installation, this would be the time to run any additional accessories such as your Bluetooth microphone, your satellite radio antenna, or run your rear USB to your glove box or center console.
However, for this installation, we're just doing a basic radio replacement. All right, guys, so step five is install the new car stereo. We've already got our pre-wired harness here, which will plug in right into the factory connection, makes it nice and easy for you.
So once you hear the click, you know that's successfully connected. Perfect. So we got our stereo, and now all we have to do is connect it. We've got our harness already plugged into the vehicle, plug it in right in the back here, we got our AM and FM antenna, also plugging that in the back of the stereo.
All right, so once we got everything plugged in, it's now time to slide the radio into place. Make sure that you don't have any wires dangling down here on the bottom so you pinch them. Make sure you get them all tucked.
Just slide the stereo into place. Since we used the factory mounting brackets in this application it's actually going to be pretty darn easy, it's just going to slide right into place, all we have to do is bolt it right back in.
All right, so the final steps here is basically reassembling the vehicle, just make sure that you have all of your screws and everything set aside so you didn't lose any, and just making sure that everything is plugged in.
And this panel slides right back in. So we just wanna make sure that we get all the screws right in the correct place, here. That's why I usually put them in the cup-holder, just in case, that way I don't lose them.
Now it's time just to reconnect the shifter plate. Make sure you don't forget to plug anything in, 'cause your cigarette lighter may not work. And this panel just snaps right back in. And voila.
All right, guys, we got the finished product here, the radio's installed, working flawlessly, we got the vehicle put back together, and there's one thing I want you guys to remember. This is not too difficult for the do-it-yourselfer.
And radio install is very straightforward, and the great thing about Sonic Eletronix is when you buy a stereo like this you're gonna get a free dash kit and a free wiring harness which will come with your instructions and guide you step by step.
Also, check out our knowledge base. We have step by step guides on how to install car stereos, amplifiers, subs, everything that you could possibly imagine. Now if you guys have trouble choosing a stereo, feel free to give one of our knowledgeable sales reps a call at 1-877-289-7664 and we'd be more than happy to guide you along and get you in the right stereo that works for your application.
All right, guys, make sure you subscribe to our channel, once again this is Brent with Sonic Electronix, have a great day.