Factory Headunit Wiring

[jongordon]

Hello,

I am new to the forum so thank you in advance for any help provided. I am discussing a 1992 E30 325i vert. I believe it has premium sound. As I can tell all of the original wiring is in place, in addition to some aftermarket cabling that I haven't figured out why it's there. The factory amp also exists, without a blown fuse. Haven't been able to test it yet (Any ideas?)

I am trying to re-wire the headunit, as the previous owner literally cut the wiring. I have attached photos of the situation and have a couple of questions.

http://imgur.com/a/XFdXJ

1.Is there a wiring harness that I need for this headunit? Based on the looks of the headunit, I either need a part or to physically shove the wires into the unit.

2. Is it as simple as re-wiring the cut cables together? My reservation about that is that I am losing the opportunity to connect them to the headunit.

Any advise is much appreciated. Also if I posted in the wrong place I am sorry, and please let me know where to go.

[tuckerware]

Do you need a factory harness...no. But it would certainly make things easier. With all factory wiring, you can unplug all of the harnesses and remove the whole head unit. If you ever need to work on it, clean it, etc this makes things much easier. I just installed a factory head unit and fortunately only one harness was missing from the previous installation so I just cut out that one and soldered and crimped on a couple new connectors. All of the other harnesses were soldered back on.

This post has the most thorough info I have seen which really helped me:

http://www.r3vlimited.com/board/showthread.php?t=138412

We all have the same Alpine CM5908 radio and you should be able to figure out all of the connections using those pics and descriptions. I can see you have the power antenna connector intact along with the ground for the front speakers that gets screwed into the back of the chassis. You are missing all three of the speaker harnesses along with the power/ground harness.

it wasn't addressed there, but these wires hardwired into the back of the head unit are not for the E30:

??: Unknown - BL/BR - plugs to-> ??
??: Unknown - WT/BR - plugs to-> ??

I happen to have the original owners manual still and it references a "dot matrix" display. This same radio was also used in 5 and 7-Series so I'm guessing there was an LCD display in the instrument cluster which displayed radio information.

[jeffnhiscars]

There's s sticky just above by stereoinstaller that covers the factory wiring and and a "how to" formaftermarket head units