The original stereo has be taken out by the previous owner and it wasn’t with the car when I bought it, a Kenwood double din has been put in its place.
I want to fit an original stereo back in the car but I have no idea if it had a Bose unit or a Standard unit?
If it had a Bose unit can I fit the standard unit in it’s place or will a Bose unit only fit?
Is there an easy way to see which unit it had originally?
Any help would be greatly appreciated - kind of want to get the car back to standard if possible
I’ve just finished typing this all out for there to be an error which wiped it all before posting so please excuse my briefness.
Take the Kenwood out of the car and examine the adaptor that was fitted. A Bose car will either have the sound output taken from the Pre-out terminals on the back of the Kenwood or the fitting kit will have something that looks a bit like the photo I will have hopefully attached to this post. If the fitting kit is just the standard ISO to Mazda adaptor without resistors and no pre-outs then it’s a non Bose, else it’s a Bose.
A quick addition to above. The photo is of the part I had to remove from the Bose fitting kit to make it a standard kit when I changed the Head unit in mine last week. I was very cross when it arrived with ‘For Bose’ written on the outside but after some investigation it appears that this component turns the speaker level outputs from the head unit into line level or pre-out levels making it suitable for use with an amp. A ridiculous thing to do when you think about it, feed a signal that has already gone through the pre and power stage of your head unit through some resistors to then run it back through another amp before it reaches your speakers.
You may find another unit behind there which will probably be the steering wheel controls if they are fitted.
IIRC, on the non Bose unit, if you pry the speaker grill cover off, on the centre top of the dash, you will see an empty space, Bose units have an additional speaker fitted in that location. At least that’s what I’ve observed on several non Bose models. It might not be definitive ( although I believe it is) but a lot easier and quicker for a check of which unit was OEM fitted.
Thanks to everyone who helped me with this … turns out I did have a Bose head unit originally. Thing is now … do I fit a Bose one back in or can I fit a standard unit and will that work with the amp??
Very unlikely that a standard unit will work with Bose without some jiggery pokery. Easiest option is to get a bose head unit. Theres one on ebay at the moment. no bids as yet: https://ebay.us/rFpzSl
