I have an 08 clubman S with Hifi. I had planned to pick up the 4 channels coming in to the hifi amp and send 3 of them to a line out converter, feeding an aftermarket amp and disconnecting the speaker wire from the stock amp and running these wires to the aftermarket amp. Ultimately, my goal is to send all mids and highs to stock speakers and let subwoofer handle bass. I do plan to use a hot amp but will keep the gain way down on the loudspeakers so I can stick with stock speakers/wiring. Any experience with this? The dealer mentioned the HU sends to amp in fiber optic but I think that is nonsense after examining the amp inputs. looks like four twisted pairs in, 8 twisted pairs out and there is one skinny orange/green pair that i'm not sure about coming out of the amp. They seem smaller than the speaker wire. There also appears to be some extra grounds in the amp. Just wondered if anyone had any experience/success with this strategy.

 

I did find all the wires going to the speakers and replaced the speakers while I was there. Wow, the sound quality is incredible. I can't wait to actually power through a real amp.

 

The green/orange-green pair is a CAN data bus. It's not fiber optic as your dealer thought. There seems to be no issue with disconnecting it, except when a dealer tries to update the car's software. The software updater on the dealer's computer first checks that the car matches the expected configuration (including detecting presence of the HiFi amp) and refuses to proceed otherwise. It seems to be only an issue if the dealer tries to update software, but you should be prepared to reconnect the HiFi amp for that situation.

BTW, you've posted in the 1st gen section and this should be in the 2nd gen forum. There are numerous threads on upgrading the HiFi system.

 

Hi jitsman. do you happen to remember which color wires go to the rear woofers?

i'm planning to tap those for my sub and its cold outside so i'll just have time to put t-taps on them.

thanks!

 

The 6x9 wires for my 08 clubman were red/white-red/brown for the passenger and red/white-solid brown for the driver side. if you really want good sound, replace the speakers and the amp so you take all the bass out of the loudspeakers. Put all the bass to your sub. I clipped all my hifi amp wires and got my system going with a jl hd900/5, 6 memphis audio speakers and a jl w3 12" sub. It sound ridiculous! I can tell you the speaker change out helps, but the harman becker amp is a tin can of garbage. When you get on clean amp power, it makes all the difference in the world. I even stayed with the factory speaker wiring, more than ample. the tricky part is identifing the 4 pairs coming in to the amp, because they all have twins going out. I unplugged the amp and used a cheap test light to indentify them. I didn't even know that would work!

 

thank you very much!