OK, so I know I have a UK Jazz and therefore don't have the 3rd party stuff you guys have in NA (for instance, no Metra or Scosche stuff to start changing HeadUnits with) but I finally found my way round it by sourcing part numbers for official OEM alternatives instead and thought I'd show how I ended up upgrading all of my stock system for very little cost.

So where do I start? Well, as mentioned, I initially couldn't find the correct part numbers for the HU, so started out simply upgrading the 4 speakers as this was cheap and easy

Speaker install

Firstly, the OEM headunit in UK Jazzes is made by Alpine and is 41W peak per channel (41x4) which equates to about 29W RMS per channel.
Part number is 39100-TF3-E200-XA in case you're wondering.

Anyway, I decided to buy a set of 4 Alpine speakers to go with the headunit because the stock speakers are pretty rubbish.
They have no treble, and no midrange with woolly bass. I had to listen with Bass set at -2 and treble +2 and voices still sounded muffled and indistinct. Listening to Talk Sport was pretty unbearable tbh.

The other option is to replace the Headunit.....well, that's difficult here because no third party makes the fascia needed to convert to single or double din for RHD cars that includes the space for the seatbelt light as well. In the end it took me 3 years before I found the official part number myself (see below), but until I did, a speaker upgrade was the best way to upgrade the sound as a first option.

So, on to the procedure (apologies for the piccies, some are from my old iPhone, so they aren't necessarily the best).

Stage 1



Remove the screw inside the door handle recess. You will need a philips no2. BE CAREFUL, this black screw is VERY secure and you need to be careful to apply enough force without stripping the head.



Now remove the bottom plastic cover of the "arm" of the door. It is secured in place via plastic tabs and should pull off. To do this safely, I inserted a thin plastic card into the upper right side where it meets the arm cloth. A slight twist will expose a gap which allows you to get a purchase and pull the plastic off.

Now unscrew the big silver screw shown in the middle of the picture above using the philips screwdriver and remember to unclip the wiring plug as well. Note that UK 'ES' Jazzes have electric windows all round so you'll have to remove plugs for all the four doors, inc. the rear passenger ones.
Now try and get your finger behind the plastic where the speaker grill is and pull the corner towards you. This is the easiest to pull off, after this pops out, the rest of the "plastic pins" will pull away and the door will be "free" at the bottom/middle (there the 6 lug holes for these plastic pins and they are bright red so they're easy to spot).



With the door hanging "loose" there is NO NEED to proceed to remove the plastic panel completely because you can lift it away enough to get to the speaker screw at the bottom (image above shows when I was putting it all back together with the new speakers, the stock speakers look a LOT cheaper and nastier).



...plus, the rear doors have this plastic wedge which makes it harder to pull the door panel completely off anyway, so I just left them hanging there.

Now unscrew the speaker from the door and pull up in order to lift the speaker from the two clips holding the bottom into the door. After this, remove the speaker and unplug it.

Do the same for all four doors and take the 4 speakers into the house/garage.

Total time so far about 15min

So now we need to install the drop in speakers into place and do some modding.

Stage 2



The stock speaker is in the top right of the piccie. Notice the cheap, small magnet. Also, these are simple cheap paper cones, not even dual cones and certainly not coaxials (which Honda charge an arm and a leg for to upgrade to).

The cone is actually part of the spacer, so you need a dremel to cut it away from the basket (about 12 or so thin plastic "legs"). Then cut the top 2 and bottom 2 supports from the input plug.....you'll use these later.
Once done, rip the cone out of the spacer and peel it away from the outer edge where it's glued in as well.
You should have a spacer, a female connector plug and a ruined/ripped out cone. Throw the cone away.



At this point, if I had a 16.5cm speaker, it'd be a direct drop in.....however, I chose Alpine SXE-1725S 16.5cm speakers. Unfortunately, the speaker is 16.5cm but it has a wide flange around the edge that brings it up to 17cm total. In order to fit into the spacer, I had to dremel away that extra edge.



This then slots right into the spacer snugly, after which you can screw them into the spacer via the screws supplied with the Alpines. I then had to sand the sharp points of the screws at the rear by a mm or so as they are ever so slightly longer than the spacer depth.



The end result is a speaker that is shallower than the stock speaker and thus won't obstruct the window when wound down nor hit the speaker grill in the door plastic in front.

In order to be careful to not damage the Alpine cones, I was very careful here and doing all four housings and speakers meant this was quite time consuming, total time here about 1 hour.

If you don't need to trim the speaker edges, then preparing the spacers and screwing your speakers in carefully (and sanding the points down) might take half that time.

Stage 3

So that's the speakers mounted, now it's time to address the electrical connections.
You could of course, simply cut the plugs off and directly solder the OEM wire onto your new speakers, but I thought a better way (which would also preserve polarity with less of a chance of making a mistake) is to simply transplant the stock electrical plugs onto the new Alpines.



I araldite'd the plastic plug from the housing (from earlier) into position on the Alpines and then soldered the connections into place using thick gauge speaker wire. BE VERY CAREFUL HERE. Not enough heat and the solder won't tin the wire correctly.....too much heat and you could damage the speaker/voice coil.
Also, when putting the plug into position, I bent the Alpine pins back in order to allow enough room for the door plug to fit all the way down onto the connector.
Note, after soldering into position like above, take some time to tidy up any stray strands (which I did afterwards by tinning them into the wire).



Here are all 4 speakers ready to go. Time for this stage was about 1 hour

Stage 4



So here is the new speaker in position.

There are a few things to note when putting the doors back together again.



Remember to reach behind and pull the electrical connector through before pushing the door panel back into place.



The door arm plastic ^^^ has a very tiny plastic pin toward the front end that is easy to miss and easy to damage. It also has a spade-like part on the back end that you have to slide into the door panel in order to fit it. To avoid damage and have an easy fit I inserted the "spade" bit first, then moved to the other end and made sure that plastic pin aligned correctly. The rest of the pins then followed after a slight push and clipped back nicely.




Remember to push the handle against the door and slide to the right in order to "hook" the handle into position. It is held in this way by 4 L shaped hooks that you need to align correctly first. Doing this also means the screw hole lines up correctly (it's easier to understand when you do it yourself).

Total time to put it all back together again about 10min



Trim all fitted back perfectly, there are no knocks or rattles and you can even see the silver reflection from the new speakers.

The sound?

Well, it was a BIG improvement. I now had adequate treble, decent (tighter) bass and a midrange at last. It's not massively louder, just massively better balanced. Good enough in fact, that I had gone back to Bass set to 'C' and Treble set to 'C' (i.e. neutral for both) and everything sounded much clearer.
I could also now listen to medium wave and whilst it doesn't sound great (headunit at fault here) it was MUCH better than it was before, with more clarity to voices.
The extra treble does mean that it's easier to hear a small hiss if radio reception is poor, but that's a symptom of good speakers exposing poor headunit reception and isn't a problem IMO (the overall improvement in sound far outstrips this minor niggle).

So for £60 for all 4, this is a great little upgrade that takes a bit of time to do right but is well worth it when you do.



Subwoofer Install and Wiring Harness vampire tapping

After the speaker install, I decided that whilst the sound was excellent, the lowest frequencies were not really filled in.

Rather than being a flat EQ curve, the sound was more like this:



I wasn't looking for some kind of teenager chavy BoomBox "BombaClat upside ya face I aks ya" style:



...but was rather looking for a flatter EQ curve that sounded more balanced with emphasis on SQ rather than SPL:



This meant that I didn't want a gigantic box taking up my boot - with the added bonus of meaning that the boot is still usable and I can still get at my spare:



I had the factory OEM Headunit set to "neutral" for bass and treble, with the Alpine SWE-1000 set to the 10-11 o'clock position for LPF and Gain (so it cuts off at about 70Hz), and the Phase set to NORM.

There isn't much else to show because I routed all the wires through the existing trims and upholstery:

Firstly, I removed the radio using this guide (page 3):
http://collegehillshonda.com/instruc...usbadapter.pdf

Then I used this guide to remove the center console (also has one metal screw to remove), again on page 3:
http://www.collegehillshonda.com/ins...09/armrest.pdf

I then spliced the Speaker wires into the supplied speaker level leads (Rear pair) and, because there is no "remote on" wire coming form the factory HU, I spliced the remote on lead onto the purple ACC input into the HU.

The UK 2010 Jazzes have a slightly different wiring system than those I've seen on the net:



Proof (piccies of my Jazzes wiring loom for the radio before I vampire tapped it with the sub feeds):





Now, when doing the tapping, I didn't start my car and therefore didn't need to disconnect anything (useful to know you can do this without having to unplug the radio and therefore no radio code needed when you plug it all back in again).
All I did do with a multimeter is check that purple was indeed the Ignition On (ACC) feed.

Separate to this, if you look at the passenger side up into the bulkhead, you'll see a massive grommet with loads of wires entering the engine bay:


This is useful because any wire going through here ends up less than a foot away from the battery so there is no worry about routing the wire all round the shops and over hot engine compartments:


I used a coat hanger and simply fed the supplied +ve feed (fused) directly onto the battery:

Where it runs back, it is suspended away from anything remotely hot (runs around an air intake and directly to the back of the engine bay):

Once into the cabin, I routed it over to the centre console where the spkr lvl input (spliced) wires were dangling along with the spliced ACC "turn the sub on" feed.

Next, I added the subwoofer remote cable with the all the other leads down both sides of the transmission tunnel under the carpet - using the wire once again to tunnel under the carpet in the rear to the rear boot. Negative lead was screwed into the seatbelt base securely, sub then mounted to the extreme right of the boot (when looking from the rear). I could've left such a small cabinet underneath the rear seat, but the boot should give a better acoustic response as the cone is facing a larger enclosed space in the boot firing R to L (rather than directly up at the base of a seat or directly back towards the hatch door because the longest length to "fire into" is essential for deeper bass). Plus, I wanted to retain full use of my Magic Seats functionality without having a sub in the way there:


Screwed everything back into place and voila - all the wiring had disappeared!
The added bonus is that the Alpine remote for the sub has a blue LED, which I placed at the very end of the centre console (furthest forward I could put it, beyond the cupholders/ashtray thingy) with the result that it bathes the area with soft blue light - not unlike the Ambient Lighting option offered by Honda - only MUCH cheaper! (There is an updated piccie of the center console showing how it "ambi-lights" the console for me near the bottom of this post).


Overall, practically invisible, small enough to not impede the magic seats or boot space or ability to remove the spare wheel, loud enough to flatten out the sound curve, not loud enough to qualify for burberry accessories, cheap enough (£125) to be affordable...

However, I then found after installing my HU (see below), that the sub was wobbling all over the place. The 2 screws in the carpet had become a bit loose and I couldn't add screws to the plastic sides as that would mean I couldn't get to the boot.
The problem is that the plate used to secure sub to boot is very narrow and therefore can't "spread" the weight of the sub very well, hence it wobbles. So I added a sheet of dynamat to all sides of the stand and re-screwed it on. This helped a lot, but I thought I could improve it even further by screwing it into a wooden board instead of the boot floor.
I found an old corner shelf in the garage (real wood not MDF) and screwed it into that. The underside has three strips of heavy duty velcro attached to it to secure it to the floor without screws:


Here is the rear with all the connections in place including the right-angled phono adapters to allow the phono lead to fit:


With the rear passenger seat up, it wedges the sub into place meaning it's rock solid now, no wobble at all...plus with it being easily removable (no longer screwed directly into the boot) I can easily get to my spare tire as well (put back passenger seat down, lift up boot floor, whole thing lifts effortlessly and gives plenty of room to access the spare tire well).



Tweeters

The next problem I had was that the sub was adding a decent amount of heft to the lower registers, but I thought something was still lacking. So I added a pair of Alpine SPS-1005 tweeters to the front stereo pair to complement the existing alpine speakers & sub setup. They have a built in 6dB per octave crossover and sound great - not too loud but just loud enough to lift the soundstage and add a bit more sparkle to the sound:


Plus it looks discrete enough to (hopefully) not warrant "unwanted attention":




Best part is, they only cost £20 from eBay (rather than the £60 rrp).



My Double-Din Radio install inc. prices and correct part numbers

OK, nearly there. So I've finally gotten all the parts I need and installed my double-din head unit to complete it all.

I thought I'd start off with the actual part numbers needed if you wanted to place orders via official UK Honda dealerships (I've been given all sorts of numbers that aren't correct before figuring it out myself, plus they won't recognise any others on their systems) along with the current UK prices (all the part numbers using "0" are "zero" not "letter o"):

Double Din Fascia 08B00-TF0-510 £40 + £10 delivery from eBay (this part is £95 from Honda!!!)
Comes with the extension lead that is needed for the airbag light to reach the new socket position (although this extension has it's own part number as well 08B00-TF0-6000-30 if you wanted to order it separately).



Double Din Cage 77255-TF0-000 £17
This is needed to secure the weight of the fascia and headunit to the car as it has a screw hole that is needed for a retaining bolt. ***IMPORTANT*** you CANNOT re-use the existing single din cage. This is because the screw holes to secure it to the fascia are in completely different places. You therefore must get this specific part to go with the new fascia. I sourced mine from my local Honda dealership.

Honda to Din Aerial adapter CT27AA36 £3 on eBay, £5 on amazon
Remember, you need FEMALE honda to MALE din, not the other way round, and many companies make these, all with their own part numbers....I've shown you the Connects2 version (although I got mine from xenons.biz on eBay and it didn't have a part number)......remember as long as you specify a female honda to male din, you'll be fine (or type "honda aerial din" into eBay search to get a full range of prices).

Connects2 Steering Wheel patch lead CTSHO003.2 £35 eBay
This allows you to continue using your steering wheel controls with your new radio. Remember to specify which radio make as each company uses their own propriety jack so the seller needs this info to send you the correct one (for example, for Alpine it is CTALPINELEAD).

A double din headunit - I chose an Alpine to go with my speakers/sub, the CDE-W235BT for £154...more on this later.

Now, on to the harness itself - you have to do a few minor things to it, but it's fairly easy (click to expand for a better view):


OK, so firstly, the connects2 patch lead connects to the harness in the car (grey plug). If you compare this to the plug layout in the car, all leads are connected apart from the blue/white wire labelled "remote amp" - this wire isn't even wired up inside the Jazz, so you can safely ignore it (i.e. the Jazz isn't wired up to supply it so in effect, no current or info will be going down it when plugged together). I clipped the bullet plug off this to re-use on later on (see below).
Also, the Jazz itself provides a ground to the illumination (pin 1) and info from the MICU (i.e. the anti-theft code for the OEM radio at pin 3), neither of which are wired on the Connects2 side, so they are redundant. The following pictures make this easier to understand.

UK Jazz Audio Harness diagram:
See sub install above, I've pu a pinout diagram for the Honda OEM harness there^^^.

Connects2 Harness for the Honda:




So the Honda is supplying a "negative/ground for the illumination" and a "MICU info" wire both of which aren't utilised by the Connects2 harness, and the Connects2 harness has a Blue/White "AmpOn" wire which isn't being used by the Honda (this isn't the AmpOn signal you'll need to tap into for a sub - THAT AmpOn wire should be supplied by the Headunit, so I'm not sure why the Connects2 included it here to be honest).

There are 2 more wires on the Connects2 harness that aren't needed on the Jazz which are the handbrake signal lead (solid green) and the speed pulse (used on OEM to change radio volume with speed, but not needed on most headunits - pink). Both of these are bulleted leads separate from the DIN plugs so I tucked them away after taping them as they weren't needed.

The other part of the Connects2 harness is the "business" end which is the steering wheel control unit and lead for your make of radio - mine is a 3.5mm jack that will plug neatly into the back of my Alpine (yours will vary depending on the make of your headunit).

Now on to the Radio/Headunit side of things.
The Alpine harness comes with standard ISO plugs which conveniently match the plugs on the Connects2 harness, so simply plug them together.
You'll also have some bullet connectors to connect together, you simply match the colours and connect their bullets (one yellow, one orange, one red).

With Alpine, you'll also have some wires that don't end in the ISO plug, but are "free standing".
A couple of these you won't need:

A pink/black wire (telephone mute - not needed for my headunit as it has that built in - only useful if you have your own handsfree system and want it to mute the radio when you receive a call). My headunit has this already so I concealed it in the harness after taping it up and ignored it.

A spare fly-out connection (red) for "ignition on" - this is basically an additional connection point which would be useful if you required an extra ACC+ve feed for something else in the car - I don't, so again, I ignored it.

...along with 2 leads you will need:

Blue/White "amp on" wire - This is the wire you need if you have a separate amp and wish it to turn on when the radio is turned on (connect it to the signal input of your amp).

A solid blue "Antenna Power" wire which is wired into the ISO plug. This isn't wired on the Connects2 harness side so you can snip it out as it won't be going to anything. Why? Well, you'll actually need it to power the radio antenna.
As you can see from the harness picture above, the Honda aerial adapter lead (CT27AA36) has the standard ISO plug PLUS a solid blue lead, which is needed to power the antenna's amplifier in the Jazz. Without this being powered, you'll get reception but it'll be worse than with it's amp powered up.
Conveniently, that solid blue "antenna power" wire from the headunit does exactly that. It provides 12V when you are listening to the radio and 0V when you switch to CD or USB/iPod playback. Neat eh? This means the aerial amp gets powered only when needed (when listening to AM/FM). I simply connected them up with bullet plugs and was good to go (although it was a tight fit with the phono's and mic lead as well).

So with the harness all connected up, it was time to install the headunit.
Firstly, you have to remove the plastic panel beneath the heater controls to get to a screw/bolt that you need to unscrew to release the radio from the car (it's screwed into the cage remember - this is why you need a new cage for the double-din fascia, they have a hole in the bottom that allows this bolt to secure the fascia to the car and take the weight of the radio).
A diagram tells a thousand words as they say:


Once the OEM radio is removed, remove these screws from BOTH sides of the existing cage in order to screw your new cage onto your new fascia:


You'll end up with 4 black philips head screws to screw the new cage to the new fascia and 4 silver philips head screws to secure that cage to your new radio - or alternatively use the metal "basket" that comes with your headunit.

Now unscrew your hazard button/light from the original fascia and put this into the new one, along with the heater grills (reusing the same screws).
The new double-din fascia comes with it's own Airbag Light so you won't need to transfer that. You'll end up with something like this:



Install the headunit and plug it all in. I also needed to plug in my phono cable to my sub/amp, along with the mic for the handsfree.
This was a PIA but I finally managed to do it and place it in a good position (pointed towards me and run round the A-pillar, behind the mirror control buttons and through the dash to the radio):


Just be careful not to let the thin mic wire interfere with and mechanical components (when routing it over the steering wheel for instance).

As others have noticed when doing this install, you won't be able to get the bezel that comes with your headunit to fit in place, so you'll need to make your own to complete the look:


Finally, here it is, all installed:


I chose the Alpine as:

• it matched my existing 6 speaker + sub combo - all Alpine
• it allows AAC playback meaning I don't have to convert my music when transferring from iTunes to a USB stick
• full iPod/iPhone control
• handsfree built in
• it had multi-illumination meaning I could choose orange to match the dash (not all Alpines have this)
• it allowed me to remove my rear feed vampire taps and give the sub a decent phono low-level feed instead
• it sounds great and is damned cheap to boot

I have now set the Sub controller to max level and xover as I am using the Headunit to control those, of which mine is set to cut off any frequency below 120Hz from going to the main speakers - meaning they'll only get highbass/mids/treble
The sub then gets only 120Hz or below to handle the rest of the frequencies. I tried with an 80Hz cutoff (the Alpine does a range of cutoffs from 60-160Hz using 12dB/Oct slopes) but felt this way sounded better in my car, with a crisper sound. 80Hz sounded a tad muddier to my ear, but I'm still experimenting so may change back at some point.

Also, it looks great at night when colour matched (can't tell in the photo but the LCD matches the MFD in the dash quite well):



So that's the final bit folks - how to change from OEM to after market double din and still retain use of steering wheel controls.
Here is a summary of the correct part numbers needed again along with approximate total costs:
Double Din Fascia 08B00-TF0-510 (comes with airbag extension lead 08B00-TF0-6000-30) ~£50
Double Din Cage 77255-TF0-000 ~£17
Honda to Din Aerial adapter CT27AA36 ~£3
Connects2 Steering Wheel patch lead CTSHO003.2 ~£35
...and a double din headunit of your choice ~varies
...with some material for the bezel if you want a better cosmetic look (factory ones won't fit)



Summary

So I now have an Active Alpine Sub SWE-1000, along with 6 speakers (4 component SXE-1725S Alpine's in the doors, plus a pair of extra SPS-1005 Alpine Tweeters up front), all being fed by an Alpine CDE-W235BT HeadUnit.

The headunit sound is SOOOOOOO much better than stock and really integrates well with everything else. BT handsfree is courtesy of Parrot (they have a partnership with Alpine) so calls are crisp and clear and voice-dialling is standard (uses SIRI if you have an iPhone).

I calculated that total cost for speakers/tweeters/headunit/subwoofer plus peripherals (inc. fascia) was under £470 all in and it makes my commute to work a lot more bareable .

 

Very nice work. Was considering importing some of the Connects2 leads myself to hook up my Asteroid Smart in the coming weeks, but just decided to go with the Unika and make it easier.

Is the wiring in the radio harness 24-gauge? I'm retrofitting music/BT buttons on my wheel and I have to make a wiring run from the clockspring into the back of the radio, and I haven't pulled out any of the stuff yet to determine if I need finer wiring or not.

 

Cheers .

From memory the wiring in the harness itself is about 1.5mm in diameter (judging by the hole size of the wire stripper I used) which equates to about 15 AWG.


On a side note, I've moved the Xover points for sub and main speakers to 80Hz again as it all sounded a bit anaemic up front ---- I wish the Alpine did 100Hz as a compromise .

 

Awesome write up! I know this won't help me because I have a GD but props to you for taking the step-by-step DIY for our fellow GE users.

 

Thanks .

Quick Update: This underseat sub was OK if you want to enhance a stock in car system, but now that the speakers were all getting decent un-equalised info from a better HU, it was very lacking (the 4 main speakers sound sooooo much louder and better that the underseat sub struggles to make itself heard and also doesn't appear to extend very deep).
I still wanted to retain boot space so I opted for a quick upgrade in the form of it's bigger brother, the SWE-815 (still an 8" but a better cone {DVC 4 Ohm independant Type E} in a decent enclosure for better response).





WOW!!, proper bass again, not too overblown (I'm keeping the port-plug in place) but enough to shake my driver's seat....with the added bonus of being pretty much a direct swap with my existing cables (uses the same sub controller as the SWE-1000).
Best of all, it only cost £91 so is a bargain to boot.

 

Pictures has gonne, could you please upload them again....

Luis
Honda Fit Sport 2013 - Vortex Blue Pearl