It has the "premium sound option" which means an onboard
Ford amplifier & 6 speakers. Slowly over the last year I have been losing sound as one speaker after another died; when I was down to 1 speaker (rear right) I decided time to do something.

I bought new speakers & installed them (I thought that anyway 16 year
old speakers would benefit from being replaced) but this did not fix the
problem.

Then I pulled out the radio & found whoever had fitted the Kenwood radio did not have a suitable connector that matched the connector on the
wiring harness & they had just pushed the speaker feed wires into the
female sockets in the grey connector (after the amp - which amp was not there any more). I spent some weeks trying to buy the correct grey 8 wire connector without success. So I cut the connector off the wiring harness & spliced the speaker feed wires direct to the wiring harness. Still only one speaker working!!

So I checked the wires & my multi meter showed no continuity on one wire out of each speaker pair on the failed speakers.
So I spent last weekend running new wires to the speakers & now they
all work; sound quality is also better. I bought a new Kenwood car radio that has a USB socket for my IPOD and ran the USB cable into the glove box so the IPOD is locked away from sight.

Anyway the point is I now have paranoia about why the wiring harness
failed & what electrical component will fail next. I checked as best
i could but the harness looks OK; I mean no bite marks or obvious
fraying.
Anybody got any ideas or comments about this wiring harness failure? usual, unusual, where to check??

Thanks

Marton

 

Its a little hard to understand exactly what you did to be honest.

the hrns you were looking for probably looked exactly like the one I point to on page 2 of my cardomain page. Checking for continuity helps, but throw your meter to ohms and see how many ohms you get on each speaker.

 

Thanks for your reply.
I checked your photo as sugegsted.
I have the black rectangular connector in your photo & I connected my 8 speaker wires to this using a black connector spliced in to the speaker wires coming from the plug in the back of the radio. The speakers did not work; I assume the reason was coming out of the back of the black connector are only 5 wires that is part of the existing auto wire harness - 1 per speaker plus a black wire (I assume this is an earth?). I was expecting 8 wires out of the back?

I connected my power wires & such to the grey rectangular connector that looks the same as yours & that worked OK.

In addition I have 2 small square grey connectors; I do not have a small square black connector. The grey connectors look larger than the small black one in your phot (& other photos I have seen).

One small square grey connector carries the same power connections as the rectangular grey connector.
The other small square grey connector has 8 speaker wires going into it. I tested the continuity & Ohm readings on these 4 pairs. Only one speaker pair gave a reading - that was the working speaker (right rear). The other pairs gave no ohm reading but one wire in each pair had continuity to the relevant speaker.

What I did was run a new pair to each speaker in the dash which also gave me connection to the door speakers. Plus a new pair to the left rear.

Marton

 

sorry for the delay, I missed this.

your wiring is a little confusing but it makes sence the way you explain it. Is this a european model mustang or was it converted? The first hrns that you connected to for your speakers that did not work only had 5 wires? This is strange as it means that there is a common ground wiring system in the car, or you had the wrong hrns. A common ground system was common in the 80s and means that there is only one ground shared between the 4 speakers. These systems worked fine when they are matched with the proper componants but moder floating ground decks do not play on these wiring systems.

I am not sure about the two other hrns's. Any chance you can take a pic? You did the right thing running wire to the speakers as that is the easy way around the common ground system you described.

 

Hi
Thanks for your interest.
My Mustang is not a European model & was not built in the 80's; in fact it is a 1992 Ford Mustang 5.0L Vibrant Red Limited Edition Convertible.
Maybe they had some old ones they ran through the special edition program
I enclose a link to the photo of the HRN ; hard to get an idea of the size but if you look at the wires out the back or the bolt hole for the old amp you get the idea .
http://www.hasenberg.ch/speaker/index.html

Marton

 

its strange but that is the old wiring hrns from 80s fox body common ground premium sound system. I believe the amp for that system was under the seat rather then in the dash if that sounds familiar to you. I have seen a couple of mustangs that stock stereo system confused me before but I think that is the first time I have seen that one. You have everything working now?

 

Yes thanks, everything is working now. It was just a pain to run the wires.
Luckily it has the 6 speaker system so for the front I could just run wires to the dash speaker which is connected to the door speaker & I did not have to worry about getting wires into the door.

Amp under the seat? I will have a look - I had assumed the amp was under the radio and was removed by a PO. Hence the 2 empty bolt holes...

Marton