I have had to manage the rehab and selling of my recently departed son's 2005 Mustang V6 Automatic. It's a nice car with about 66k on it. The stereo system in it, while working fine, looked horrible. Amazing to me that Ford would have something so ridiculously poor wearing in this car. The buttons were worn badly and the little display window was cracked... I came to various mustang forums to see if I could find replacement buttons and found nothing easy as a remedy outside of simply replacing it... After getting an appx 500 dollar number from the Ford dealer for the radio alone, I went to ebay. There I found a virtually new 2009 Shaker500 from the Saleen people for about 140 bucks.. (much better) After being concerned about compatibility and such, the Saleen people assured it would work fine, I made the purchase. The only additional thing I needed to buy was a 30 dollar adapter for the radio antenna input. Ford directed me to a source for the adapter which was a little less expensive but I'd need to wait for shipping... So I went to a local car stereo place and ponied up the 30 bucks.
After studying a couple youtube videos on how to perform the replacement I decided I could give it a try. I'm not a mechanic or stereo guy but have basic skills and as the saying goes, I ain't skeered. Worse comes to worse I tuck my tail between my legs and truck on over to the car stereo place and have them do the install. Turns out the videos showed me everything I needed and the install went smoothly. The only tiny hiccup was that the 2009 head unit brackets are set back just a tiny bit further than the 2005. This results in the unit sticking out a tiny bit further than the 2005 but if you didn't know it, you wouldn't know it. The difference is really that small. All the plugs matched perfectly. My mustang has no stereo controls on the steering wheel or steering column. This 2009 fired up perfectly. No additional programming or 'flashing' was needed. All the buttons worked. The display also works fine. I would recommend this change to anyone that wanted to or needed to replace their crappy looking stereo.
Additionally, the 2009 unit has attractive chrome rings on some of the controls which compliments the rest of the trim in the car...
After studying a couple youtube videos on how to perform the replacement I decided I could give it a try. I'm not a mechanic or stereo guy but have basic skills and as the saying goes, I ain't skeered. Worse comes to worse I tuck my tail between my legs and truck on over to the car stereo place and have them do the install. Turns out the videos showed me everything I needed and the install went smoothly. The only tiny hiccup was that the 2009 head unit brackets are set back just a tiny bit further than the 2005. This results in the unit sticking out a tiny bit further than the 2005 but if you didn't know it, you wouldn't know it. The difference is really that small. All the plugs matched perfectly. My mustang has no stereo controls on the steering wheel or steering column. This 2009 fired up perfectly. No additional programming or 'flashing' was needed. All the buttons worked. The display also works fine. I would recommend this change to anyone that wanted to or needed to replace their crappy looking stereo.
Additionally, the 2009 unit has attractive chrome rings on some of the controls which compliments the rest of the trim in the car...