A couple of issues surfaced now that I've had time to tinker with the empeg in the new Subaru. The display didn't dim when the headlights were turned on, and the player turned off far too quickly (instantly) when the ignition was switched off. A clue to both problems was that the player didn't seem to be detecting that it was on car power automatically (thinking instead it was on AC power).

So tonight I pulled it all out and fiddled for a while. Turns out the sled harness that was used was one of the ones wired incorrectly from the factory, with the ACC/BAT lines reversed, and the headlight sense connected to the wrong pin.

So I fixed all of that, and also removed all of the unused connections from the harness, by pushing the pins out of the docking connector. This way, they can be re-inserted at some future date, as if that's likely to ever happen!

Doing all of that fixed the dimmer issue, but also resulted in the player not turning off at all when the key is removed from the ignition. Since it was still reporting the wrong power source, I just swapped it out for another player from the collection, and everything started working correctly. Yay! At some point I'll replace the borked AC-power jack in the original one.

I've updated/added some photos of the revamped wiring harness, and night photos of the empeg with its new red lens and smoke buttons.