The situation: nothing comes out of my left rear speaker. My front right speaker is flakey. I've suspected all along that ths is related to the Mk2's sled's known bug with poor crimping of the wires in the connector. However, the problem seems uglier than that.

Here's what we found when my father and I had a look inside my dashboard. In a nutshell, I spent some extra bucks for my installer to use a BMW-compatible connector (seen in the first photo), such that I could unplug the empeg sled and eventually return the car to perfectly stock condition if I ever indended to sell it. The installer then tapped these outputs with some weird connectors and tried to splice those wires onto some hacked-off RCA cables (orange wire). They used electrical tape which didn't hang together well in the heat of the dashboard. That white wire is, I believe, the ground for the rear left speaker. The front-right speaker, I'll bet, is suffering from the Mk2 sled bug.

I'm not sure the best way to go about fixing this. It would be nice if I could reuse the taps on the BMW-compatible connector, but I need something better than the kludge they used to convert these to RCA cables. Likewise, it would be nice to get my Mk2a sled in there. On the flip side, I don't want to throw a lot of money at the problem since my car continues to have all manner of problems unrelated to the stereo and is likely to be replaced next year.

Thoughts? Advice?

Those are just 3M taps. I used them on my install. Sometimes those taps work a little loose. Get some pliers and squeeze them really well closed. top and bottom. It will make them sqeeze on the wire more tightly for a better connection.

The right tools and a little experience count for a lot, but geez, there's no subsititute for doing the job yourself when it comes to the details. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's really possible to do a car stereo install that can quickly disconnect back to pure stock condition.

If the car really has less than a year before you get rid of it, then just tighten everything up, maybe solder some of the wire-splices together and see what happens.

Otherwise, you might want to consider terminating both the sled harness and the BMW harness in some kind of quick-release crimpons and building your own adapters to sit in between. Basically replacing the orange RCA cables, and you'll probably need to create some kind of octopus ground lead with a single attachement to the car-side, but that can connect to all of the RCA grounds.

--Nathan

I used similar taps with great success on my Subaru installation.

To help these connections to survive the test of time (after fixing the obviously broken connection), just wrap the works in 2" wide PVC (electrical) tape, and zip a cable tie (or three) around the tape afterwards to keep it from ever unravelling. Should outlast much of the rest of the vehicle.

Cheers