Started prep on the installation for sound equipment. The PO before my buddy owned it had some funky ideas about what passes for suitable stereo hardware. I had to take a lot of time to go through the car to 'reset' a lot of the factory wiring. I found a lot of wiring land mines and interesting use of materials that person used on the sound system. One of my favorite solutions? Phone wire to bypass the OE speaker wires to the rear.

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This car came with factory 'premium sound', which by 1988 standards is pretty good. It has a tiny factory amp in the trunk, but today's CEA-compliant headunits produce more wattage per channel. It also had '80 tech cellular phone cabling. It was mostly removed, but I dug out more as I delved into this. I removed the amp and prepped it's input/output for the new system.

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Fortunately, I was able to find the OE speaker wires mostly intact, I just had to find them and re-splice some of them back together. BMW uses interesting electronic logic and their factory sound equipment is no different. The speakers are all grounded to a common ground on a fader control on the dash. Most aftermarket equipment doesn't play well with this configuration, and the PO created a lot more work for himself running odd cabling through the car. The best and simplest solution was to split apart the common ground and wire them as pairs, like most systems. That's what I did.

I also saw the headunit has been changed at least twice, so I also had to go through the patch harness and reconnect the OE wiring and split grounds to that.

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Dealing with more of the PO's mess, I fit the rear speakers in (Infinity Reference 5032cf) without much fuss. I put the fronts in, but the space is tight. The rears are Infinity 509 CS components and I like them very much! I may try to get another set of these for the rear instead of the 5032s. The tweeters *just* fit in the factory locations, too.

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I am seriously thinking of adding an 8" sub in the trunk made especially for this car. I prepped the trunk, by knocking out the ski passthrough in the rear bulk head.

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Finally, I prepped the amp for installation.

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I will test the system after wiring in the amp. The stereo arrives Monday and I am going to lay in the RCA cables too.