I have always had an aftermarket stereo, but I just bought an 05 and it has the stock GM unit. It works just fine, other than a few buttons being burnt out. I have 3 questions.

1. I have steering wheel controls in the truck so if I put an aftermarket unit in there will they still work. If so how.

2. I have my amp and subs from my last truck in the garage and I was wondering how hard it was to wire them up to the stock unit. I have installed a decent amount of sound systems but always on aftermarket head units

3. I was curious if there was any way to hook my ipod into the stock unit by an aux wire. I have a radio transmitter but I cannot stand it. It doesn't work very well at all.

thanks in advance for all of your help. I appreciate it.

 

1. I have an Alpine headunit and my steering wheel buttons work, they used a module to convert the signal (cost $100). I don't know if it is specific to Alpine or will work on any headunit though.

2. Shouldn't be that hard, just running a few wires to the headunit and to the battery, just run them under the door sills and use an existing hole in the firewall.

3. I have my ipod hardwired, the stereo shop dissected one of those Belkin cigarette lighter ipod connectors (goes in the cigarette lighter for power, then has a line out for music). The shop took it apart and hardwired it to an ignition activated power source so that the ipod stops playing when the car turns off, and connected it to the back of the headunit with a mini to RCA wire.

Hope this helps

 

Yea that helps.

On wiring up the subs, I'm assuming that their are plug ins for the input wires from the amp. The rest of it is no problem.

On the ipod thing I don't need to go to quite that extend. I was just curious if it had an aux input on the back of the unit. I can get by until I get a different head unit.

That sounds like you have quite the set up though, got any pics?

thanks for the help

 

Got a few pictures of the sub and amp in the back:






Have a few pictures of the dynamatted doors and components, but haven't taken them off the camera yet.

For the ipod connection, I am sure they have a plug and play connector by now, I had mine done 3 or 4 years ago, so hopefully technology has improved since then, haha

 

That's a good job of hiding your sub. I built a box for behind my seat of my rclb. I need to build a new one for my ccsb now. I think I am going to just have to take the stock unit out and check it out myself and do a little research. I'm sure crutchfield will have some ideas for me.

 

there's a converter box called ISpec . . . I used it on my 02 with the stock head unit. I could have the I-pod in the glove box, and have complete control with the head unit controls . . . worked great

 

To get signals from the stock head unit to the amps you'll need a LOC (line out converter) which taps into the signals from the head unit (usually rear speakers...whatever is easiest to get to). The RCA's plug into the LOC and everything proceeds as normal from there.