Aftermarket Headunit Options for Mach 460 - Pioneer DEH vs. ???

[patman0911]

One more update on this:

Finally got my USB cable run to the armrest storage compartment. I looked at a couple ways of doing it but ended up just drilling a hole and feeding it through. I ran the cable out of the radio down behind the center stack, around the shifter and then zip-tied it to the existing harness under the console then I took an USB extension cable and cut it down to the length I needed to reach from the storage bin to the radio's USB cable with enough slack to get the bin in and out easily but not so much it bunches up and gets in the way of installing the bin.

The back of the bin is about the only place you can do this because the other 2 sides and the bottom are all blocked in and the front has the cup holder mech in the way. There is a little space on the bottom at the back where you could run something but I thought it'd be better to have it near the top.

With a USB drive in there, you can let it hang straight down and it's pretty much out of the way. The retractable iPod cable lets you pull the iPod out and play with it if you need to without having to have a tangle of wires in the storage bin. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Next I gotta decide where to put my Aux input.

 

[Dkblue98GT]

That looks good Patman. Where did you find the usb cable you ran from the headunit to the storage compartment? I have looked all over and can't seem to find one.

Thanks

 

[patman0911]

It's just a regular USB extension cable - you should be able to find them at Office Depot or Best Buy or anywhere really. Male A to Female A is what you're looking for.

The Kenwood has a hardwired USB cable that comes out of the back of it that's maybe 3 feet long. It wasn't quite long enough to reach the storage compartment so I needed the extension cable. It would easily reach the glove box by itself though, or the storage tray underneath the radio of course.

I did have to cut the extension and solder it back together to be able to pass it neatly through the hole in the storage bin. Without cutting, I would've needed a much larger hole and a big ugly firewall-style grommet seal to fill it up with.

 

[D-BOI]

im thinking of replacing my head unit as well. i want to put in some pioneer components and a kenwood deck. can i reuse the factory am so i dont have to put in a 4 channel amp in the mustang? i dont want to have to rewire everything

 

[patman0911]

Absolutely. Just get the correct harness adapters and it's really easy. There's only a handfull of wires that need to be tied together between the harness from your new radio to the adapter for the main factory and then there's another adapter that has RCAs for your preamp outputs from the radio and plugs into the factory amp harness.

I think there were only 5 wires I had to solder and no hacking up of the factory harness.