decampos

So I have this SQR radio that I got in a box with my car. Though it powers up and scans, the din cable at the back has been totally butchered. Can anyone make any sense of these wires? Whatever shielding there was from the original cable is gone.

I’d like to try and get this working if I can. Hoping the experts can chime in and tell me whether it’s salvageable or whether I should put it on eBay as parts/not working.

Thanks

drooman

http://www.stereomanuals.com/man/rep/blaupunkt/

StratfordShark

Completely fine. I can't recall connection colours off top of my head, but you can look up standard for DIN connections of that period and just see what's in plug at radio end.

If you don't want to use existing wires (they don't require electrical shielding) then you'll be able to find ready made DIN plugs with pigtails. eBay good for obscure stuff like that (it's a long time since DIN was standard for car audio)

decampos

Thanks for the replies guys.

At the radio end, the wires converge with other wires and meet at a plug on a circuit board. Nothing is obvious for a lay person like myself to figure out.

I can’t find any information which talks about the colors inside the din cable. Does anyone know what these wires are and whether I can connect them to a speaker?

Thanks

Rob Edwards

I had a CR-1 with a butchered pre-amp out connector (ie- hacked off, just bare wires). I sent it to Massoud at Creative Car Audio here in Orange County, and he refurbed it with female RCA out connectors to link to a sharkwoofer amp. In your case, if you want to restore it back to stock, and have the factory amp and its 8-pin DIN preamp cable still in the stock positions, Massoud can do the connector repair.

You could source the circuit diagrams for a Monterey SQR22, identify which preamp out channel corresponds to which color wire, find a female DIN 8pin connector, learn the DIN pinout numbering convention for 8 pin connectors, figure out which of the preamp out channels need to be ganged together to feed the amp you're feeding, get good at soldering 22 gauge wire to fiddly connector pins, etc. Or you could send it to Massoud and have him deal with it.

I've tried doing all of the above and got as far as the soldering part and then found Massoud. Life is better now.

Kevin in Atlanta

or Call Stefan Weiss at SW Stereo - he is my go to guy on Blaupunkt radios.

decampos

Thanks for those two contacts, I'll reach out to them.

In the meantime, I'm going to trial and error connect the wires to a speaker and assume at least one is a speaker + and one's a speaker -. Surely I cannot do any damage here but please do chime in if you think I can.

Wires are peculiar as despite being such a tiny gauge, they have another insulated wire running inside of them.

Rob Edwards

Thery're not speaker wires, they're line-level (~0.775V) preamp outs. Hence the tiny wires. The loose wires around each of the jacketed wires are grounds. The bigger wires are likely amp remote turn-ons.

Got a pic of the faceplate and/or the Blaupunkt part number on the side of the radio? There may be pics of what this connector is supposed to look like on one of the vintage German radio sites if I can see the model # of the radio.

decampos

Thanks for your reply Rob. That’s very helpful. It’s a ‘Bamberg SQR 83’

I connected these tiny wires to a speaker (treating them as speaker wires for testing purposes) and was delighted to learn that the radio works, tunes to stations and is clear. None of the preset buttons work and I didn’t even bother testing the cassette function (who even has a tape these days?). It’s also rather quiet which is, I assume, why these cars shipped with an external amplifier. I connected it to a car amp I had laying around and couldn’t get decent results (low rumbling noise). Perhaps I connected it wrong or it is nowhere near the correct type, hence nothing but noise.

Dumb question: What’s the deal with requiring a separate amplifier? Other head units of the era were stand-alone. What’s the thinking behind this more complicated and cumbersome set up?

I’m not sure if I’m going to pursue restoring this arcane set up despite my strong desire for OE.

Dumb question two: Is it possible to replace the guts of these old head units with modern radio circuitry? (I know anything is possible but I’m interested in something not prohibitively expensive).