Interestingly, the impetus behind many of the upgrades I’m implementing comes from me being unsatisfied with a given feature of the car. If something needs to be fixed, it’s funner and more worthwhile to make it better in the same process. For example, the sideskirts and wing needed to be uninstalled, so the whole car was repainted. Old mounting holes were left behind on the chassis, so a new replacement roll bar was installed to fill them up.
Now in this case, the lower DIN pocket that came with the car had an ugly, red carbon fiber overlay on its lid. I know you can’t see it because the lid is down, it was so bad I didn’t even want to take a picture of it:
I didn’t feel like slowly peeling off the overlay and buying a new DIN pocket is pricey. So essentially, I was pushed towards the direction of redoing the whole shebang with a Pioneer Double DIN head unit. Would I have done it regardless of the stuck-on overlay annoyance? Yeah, probably…
As with any head unit install, the harness wiring must sorted out first. All connections were soldered and heatshrinked, because just crimping wires together is lazy work.
In the end, I omitted the rear speaker wires because those speakers were being removed anyway to fit the roll bar. The pair of co-axial speakers in the doors will be sufficient. Having rear speakers in a small car is counterproductive, as most of the time the sound from them interferes with the front stage quality. Personally, I prefer a sound system to be simple. On another note, I also could not hook up the power antenna’s wire because the Pioneer’s harness did not support it. It goes to show that power antennas are becoming defunct technology in this day and age. I could have had the antenna shaved off during the repaint, but chose to leave it for originality and to serve as a novel symbol that harkens to the days of yesteryear.
The new AVH-P8400BH in place:
I used Pioneer’s ADT-VA133 double DIN kit to mount everything in place. The trim ring that came with it matches the texture of the 94+ plastics quite well.
Once particular specification of the AVH-P8400BH that attracted me was its high 800×480 pixel resolution and GUI quality. As functional as double DIN’s are, a downside with them – aftermarket and OEM – is that their interfaces always seem to have been designed in the early 2000’s.
The 7″ screen really fills up the dash and looks great in the car. Time to don my fancy pants. I still need to find time to figure out how to actually use it.
fancy!