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Adding AUX Input to Pre-07 Stock Stereo.

35K views 11 replies 10 participants last post by  Nighthawk243 
#1 ·
hello everybody,

because I have been asked about doing this mod, I decided to post a how-to on it. This mod splices into the feed from your XM receiver to the head unit. so your cobalt will have to have a head unit that supports XM tuning. I am sure this mod could be done to the am/fm radio but I only know at this point how to do this to XM and I actually got this off of a how to at css.com (thanks goes to gpro for the how-to). but I have slightly improved upon his article.

Tools/Equip:

- Power Drill
- Wire Strippers
- Needle Nose Pliers
- Sockets
- Wire Taps or Crimps
- Wire
- electrical tape
- Aux Audio Cable (3.5mm cable) you are willing to cut (i bought a 3 foot cable at radioshack).

First you will need to get the stereo out. I am sure that you can find a how-to on that somewhere on this site.


(picture compliments of gpro's how-to)

The image shown above shows the two harnesses that connect to the stereo. the grey which is unplugged shown in the above pic is for the XM radio. there are 3 cables on that harness that we are concerned with. the green, brown, and tan one. the tan one is ground. the green one is right channel. and the brown one is left channel. here is a pic of these 3 cables shown below:



here is a pic of my splicing work:



you will want to be careful as far as determining which wire in your 3.5mm cable is for which channel. in mine, i discovered that red is left and black is right. i connected an mp3 player with only the left channel connected and played a song with audio only on the right channel. and heard audio. I had to swap the red and black (i thought originally that red would be right channel. I was wrong).

and finally, you will want to drill a hole to run your aux cable from under the stereo. after drilling two holes I discovered that putting the cable on the very left of the stereo base is the best location, it is easy to pull the cable out and hide it back in the hole there. below i show a pic of my work:



and this is an optional measure:

since mine can be hidden under the stereo or pulled out. I wanted to make sure I didn't pull the cable out too far and mess up my work. so I pulled the cable out from where i got is spliced into the xm feed. and pulled it out as far as the hole i drilled (plus a little extra just to be safe) and taped around it with electrical tape enough so that the cable will not pull out any futher then where i got it taped off at. here is a pic showing what i mean:



if done sucessfully, you should be able to hear your mp3 player when tuned to XM channel 0. hope this helps some people out!!!
 
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#10 ·
Using aux cord with rca connectors

Great how to smiles0013!

What i did differently and worked quite well for me was i used a 2 female rca to 1 rca adapter, chopped the single end off and used those 2 wires to splice into the xm feed. I then hooked up a 6' male rca to aux cord to the rca's now attached to the xm, and fed it into my glove box for a nice clean finish when not in use. This was just what i preffered to use, and i'm not bashing this how to in anyway.
 
#11 ·
I have a question. I just got my cobalt about a month ago i have a 06 LT. My radio is able to play MP3 so i was assuming that I would have the xm ability. But when i pulled out my radio I did not see a wire harness for xm but there is a spot where i can hook one up. So is there a way i can buy that harness then do this mod?
 
#12 ·
You have to be able to actively tune to the XM band in order to do the aux cable. If the radio doesn't detect an XM unit, it won't display that band. For your case, I would probably just use a hardwired FM transmitter that hooks into your main FM antenna input or go with an aftermarket HU.
 
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