Re: Urgent stereo help needed

[lcheng@watson.ibm.com]

In my '88 90 Quattro, the rear speakers are powered - however, you
can easily bypass that in a couple of ways:

1. Find the line in pins on the connector - I don't have the diagram
   around, as I threw it away (shame), but it should be pretty obvious
   from looking at the circuit board.  The other pins are power and
   ground, maybe a sense pin to turn on the amp.  Regardless of the
   dealer's claim, it's no different from an ordinary line input -
   you just have to find the appropriate connector.

2. Bypass the amplifier totally.  This is what I did.  My car has
   separate woofer/midrange and tweeter, so initially I was worried
   about building a crossover, but I discovered that the built-in amp
   doesn't use an electronic crossover anyway - it's mechanical, with
   the midrange rolling off at some frequency.  I desoldered the
   speakers' connections to the amp and jumped them directly to the
   connector, which is hooked to the radio.  The tweeters are wired
   in parallel.  (The built-in amp looked not very sophisticated anyway.)

3. Install better speakers.  This is what I would have like to do,
   except that the dimensions didn't allow for anything bigger without
   some rear shelf surgery.

Setup #2 works fine for my non-golden ears.  The receiver is a Sony
XR-something with about 4 watts per channel.

- Lawrence Cheng
  lcheng@watson.ibm.com