Im replacing just the HU in my 05. Does the rest of the system need two sets of rca cables? Two for the door subs and two for the trunk subs. Or is it mono for each? Probably going with the metra harness, but all the ones Ive seen only have one red and one white. Will be installing a pioneer avh-p3200dvd.

 

IIRC the plug that goes to the door subs also would send signal to the Shaker 1000 subs in the back. I'd have to look, but I think the factory harness split left and right where one channel sent signal to the door and the other channel sent signal to the trunk.

 

So they are basiclly mono. The new head unit has three sets of pre outs, guess I will either have to us one set and have the same sound on all four woofers. Or mono out of different ones and control them independently. Could I use a "Y" connector to hook up one RCA to one set of preouts? Would this even improve the sound?

 

I wouldn't even worry about it on the subwoofers. If your aftermarket head unit is capable of performing a mono sum on the sub out, like my Alpine is, I'd just run the subwoofer out mono if I were retaining the stock Shaker 1000 stuff. Why? Because it is no different than what Ford was doing from the factory.

The only reason I could think to split between front/rear/sub would be to have a degree of control over how loud the door subwoofers play and how loud the trunk subwoofers play. Then again, my Alpine has independent gain controls on EVERY channel but I am not certain if your Pioneer does and I am too lazy to check it out online.

 

Yea I want to have seperate control of the doors and trunk subs. Pretty sure the HU has seperate settings for front/rear/sub. Probably just play with it a bit during the install to see what sounds best. That way I can drive the trunk subs harder then the doors.

 

you will need to look into a little toy called a line driver. The factory amps like a high-voltage input that most decks just can't put out. This will lead to the bass being weak, for $20-30 on ebay you can fix it.

 

Which wires would I hook into? Your the first person I've heard suggest this.

 

Are you certain about this? The Pioneer deck that the OP is looking at has 4 volt pre amp outputs and so does my Alpine CDA-9887. I dang near blew my Shaker 500 subwoofers out of the door when I had them connected to my 9887. In fact, I had to attenuate them at -6 to -8 dB on the 9887's electronic crossover to get them to blend properly.

 

the factory system basically takes a regular speaker output and feeds it into the amps. From my experience if you can get it above the 6v range you can then take the bass out of the 3.5s which are then limiting the system with too much bass. I did it in my 94 before I yanked the system and currently have another line driver comming to complete a friends deck install. Been doin this a while, trust me........