Hey guys, I've read this forum for a while with a 95 SSEi that I used to drive and now a 99 SLE, but haven't posted yet. So here goes... I went ahead and tried adding an aux input to my stock head unit using the guide up here by acid. To summarize, it went just about as badly as any project I've ever done... I've done plenty of guitar-related electronics work from modding effects to creating my own, but no such luck this time. I'll be heading to the pick-a-part tomorrow to get a new radio, but just wondering: has anyone else gotten this to work well?

Somehow in the disassembly process the display backlight got busted... don't have a clue how, but it doesn't work anymore, which is a much bigger inconvenience than not having an iPod input. But besides that, I haven't done the final wiring, but preliminary tests showed that the iPod input sounded terrible. Clean language doesn't begin to describe it, but I've pretty much sworn myself out at this point in the day, so I'll give it a shot. The volume is horrendously low, meaning that you have to absolutely crank the volume to get any kind of decent level out of it, and as a result, it sounds awful. Without the iPod put in, there is even interference with a faint sound of the CD that'* playing in the background. Seems to me that this idea is flawed from the start because the CD player puts out such a higher signal strength than the iPod, so wondering what other people'* experience has been.

I realize that I'm having a conversation with myself here, but for the benefit of anyone reading this, I found a problem and got the aux in to work. I realized that the connector I was using for wire tapping into the CD player out GND (the blue 3M connector in the write up), was made for a much larger gauge wire than I was using, and didn't make a connection. Thus since the signal input was not in reference to the same ground, it showed up mostly as noise. The display is still broken, but at least I have the audio result I was looking for.

By the way, if you're thinking of doing this yourself, closely consider if $25-$40 and 4-? hours of work with possibly breaking your HU is really better than $80 for an adapter that plugs into the CD changer jack in the radio.