JackBrac

Hello!

I apologize if this has been covered at length - I couldn't find specifics searching the forums. I am attempting to change my OEM stereo in my 07 Boxster. I do have Bose speakers on the door so I assumed that I needed a Bose Amplified wiring harness and purchased one from eBay. I pulled the OEM stereo and figured it would be similar to wiring aftermarket stereos as I have done in the past, but I appear to be way off. The harness that I purchased does not plug and play with the wiring that unclips from the OEM stereo. With searching Google, I can see that the stereos that have an amp and fiber optics are much more detailed in upgrading. My question is how can I determine what stereo I have and if I do not need the Bose Amplified wiring harness? I am looking to install a pretty basic double din aftermarket stereo that I purchased as I did with my older Cayenne.

Any help be very appreciated!

Jack

hueyhoolihan

my 2007 cayman originally had the factory bose sound system. the amp is still in the frunk but disconnected. and a pioneer amp was installed in the frunk ahead of the battery.. the original head unit was removed and a pioneer head unit was installed in its place. a kenwood sub-woofer was installed behind the driver's seat and the original bose sub-woofer was disconnected and left as it was in the passenger's side footwell. i have no idea what kind of speakers are in the doors although there is at least one in each, and i think there are some speakers in the dash, but have no idea if they are original or not.

i have read that bose components must be replaced with bose components and that if an upgrade is deemed necessary the whole bose outfit needs to be disconnected at a minimum. so i suspect, but don't know, that whatever speakers i did have are now either disconnected or replaced with something compatible with the pioneer amp.

BTW, i would have liked to have the original bose system, but without bluetooth, well.... that's the rub, isn't it?

JackBrac

Thank you for sharing this info! My biggest question is in regard to the speaker wires right now. When I removed the OEM stereo, there was a black harness that would link up as power supply to the new stereo. I thought I would have another harness (it looks like it would be brown) with the each speaker wire running through, and that is something I did not have when removing the OEM stereo. Is there another way to wire in the speakers for aftermarket stereo?

Thanks!

zuch

The Bose stereo sends its output to a proprietary amplifier via optical interconnect. The speakers are specially tuned to the Bose system and are fed from the external Bose amplifier. If you are trying to upgrade the head unit you must either change out the amplifier and all of the speakers or add a MOST "translator" between the new head unit and the optical connections. The MOST unit will take the new head unit electrical outputs and convert them to optical. I think most people end up doing the entire system and putting in a new amp and new speakers. If you have a CD changer, that too uses optical (in the Bose system).

JackBrac

Thank you so much for taking the time to break this down for me. I spend a solid amount of time researching yesterday and came to that conclusions. I found this Axxess wiring harness that it looks like other Porsche owners have used to connect an aftermarket head unit to. I am hoping this will do the trick!

Axxess AX-PO90052