OK,

I am the new owner of an '85 Targa. The previous owner had a gaudy Alpine CDA-7892 head unit installed. I bought an older Blaupunkt head unit CD148 Manhatten on Ebay. I installed the Blau the exact same way the Alpine came out. Constant Power, Ignition Power, Ground, Remote Power are all as I expected. The alpine was only hooked up with the front speaker(s) output. I did the same thing with the Blau. I can turn it on, play a cd, search for stations etc but I get no sound. I have checked volume and fade. The speaker wires going through the body of the car are obviously factory wires i.e. brownish with stripes.

Here are my questions:

1. I can only find 2 pair of factory speaker wires. They were hooked up to the "front" of the alpine. Is that normal?

2. I am assuming the front and rear speakers are wired together.(unfortunately I never climbed in back to see if the backs were working) Are they wired in series or parallel? Are they likely 4 or 8 ohms?(my multi tester is at my office today of course)

3. Am I obviously doing something wrong or is it more likely that the Blau has a bad amplifier or something? Did I fry it?

Any help would be appreciated.

Chris Thomas
1985 Targa, Black
Gone - '87 951, Guards Red - Loved that car
Gone - 2003 SLK Kompressor - Very Disappointing
Gone - 2007 335i Sport Package - Love and Hate (needed a LSD)

P.S. It has been a long time since I dealt with ohms and speakers and I cant remember how the ohms change when you wire them up differently.

 

I am assuming the alpine head unit worked. If you were getting sound out of the alpine and you are not getting sound out of the blaupunkt, it sounds like you have a bad amp in the radio. If you have a bad speaker in the car that will also shut down the amp in the radio. Even if the rear speakers are wired into the fronts in parallel the ohm reading would be 2 ohms and the radio would still give out sound. If you have a 9v battery you can disconnet the speaker wires from the radio and tap them to the 9v batery and you should get a sound( a static thup sound). If you get that you have an issue with the new radio. I know that the blaupunkt is oem equip but I was an blaupunkt dealer for years and I am not really fond on them. You will get much better results with almost any other name brand manufacters radio.

John

 

Yes, the alpine unit worked fine.

 

And I used the battery method to test the speakers. They are working

 

couple of things .. i never buy electronics from ebay for this exact reason .. the usual line is " it was working when it was removed " ..yeah right ...

if you hooked up the speaker wrong when you hooked it up ( like wired the speaker to ground for exmaple instead of the retun line in the amp . then you would blow your output amps allmost immediately. As mentioned earlier resistors or speaker impedance is addative when connected in series and divisaible wen connected in parallel

My old 78 actually had 8 ohm speakers in them believe it or not...

Anyway good luck but i think your amps are fried . I would look closely at your wiring then put the alpine back and see if you have sound....

 

The amp in the radio is no good.

 

I was going to say that Blaupunkt is crap unless you buy the really high end ones. The Alpine might be better. I have a nice Blau that comes with 3 pre-amp outputs, a calibration mic for tuning the Eq, and some other nice features, but honestly some of the nicer Sony and Pioneer stuff is awfully attractive right now. And then there is the Kenwood stuff....

 

I put a new Alpine in my '84 a couple years back. I've always liked Alpines, and it lacked any bright trim that would look too out of place.

If your 85 is similar, is there a thumbwheel in the center console? If so, that is the front/rear fader so it's entirely possibly the "front" channel of the head unit was feeding the fader. I set up my Alpine that way, and it still have plenty of volume for my purposes...