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How To Do A Complete ICE Install In A Jazz

So here is my full install procedure for a complete overhaul of the ICE in a UK Honda Jazz ES (GE). This contains the correct part numbers as of time of purchase (BEWARE - lots of piccies). I'll start from the earliest install and progress to the latest:
 

UK Honda Jazz ES Speaker install

Firstly, the HeadUnit in UK Jazzes is made by Alpine and is 41W peak per channel (41x4) which equates to 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 at -2 and treble at +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 an option in the rest of the world but it's not easy in the UK. It's very difficult to find the fascia needed to convert to single or double din for RHD cars that includes the space for the seatbelt light as well. So initially a speaker upgrade was the best way to go as a first option.
So, on to the procedure (apologies for the piccies, some are from the net and some from my iPhone, so they aren't necessarily the best).

Stage 1

Remove the screw inside the door handle recess. You will need a philips #2. BE CAREFUL, this black screw is VERY secure and you need to be careful to apply enough force without stripping the head.
 
door handle

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. Next unscrew the big silver screw shown in the middle of the picture below using the philips screwdriver and don’t forget to unclip the wiring plug (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).
 
door connector

Now turn your attention to the plastic door panel itself. Try and get your finger behind the plastic (between the plastic and the metal door) roughly where the speaker grill is and pull that 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 interior door card will be "free" at the bottom/middle. This picture shows where the 6 lug holes for these plastic pins are, for reference. The pins are bright red in reality so they're easy to spot.
 
door panel pins

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 below 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 (right side photo) which makes it harder to pull their door panel completely off anyway, so I just left them hanging there.
 
coaxial remove/refit

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 garage.
 
speaker removal

Total time so far about 15min

Stage 2

So now we need to install the drop in speakers into place and do some modding. The stock speaker is in the top left of the piccie below, with the spacer you'll end up with below it and the replacements on the right hand piccie.
 
old and new speakers

Notice the cheap, small magnet on the OEM speaker, which also utilises simple cheap paper cones, not even dual cones and certainly not coaxials (which Honda charge an arm and a leg for upgrading 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 end up with 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
 
coaxial trimming

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.
 
coaxial front and back

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.
 
coaxial depth

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 female plugs from the OEM speakers onto the new Alpines.
 
soldering the speakers inputs

I araldited 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). Time for this stage was about 1 hour

Stage 4

So here is the new speaker in position.
 
coaxial 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.
 
door arm pin spade arrangement

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.
 
door handle positioning

Trim all fitted back perfectly, there are no knocks or rattles and you can even see the silver reflection from the new speakers (Total time to put it all back together again about 10min).
 
view from cabin

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, 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

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 the red curve below:
 
frequency plots

I wasn't looking for some kind of teenager chavy BoomBox "BombaClat upside ya face I aks ya" style like the pink curve, but was rather looking for a flatter EQ curve that sounded more balanced with emphasis on SQ rather than SPL (the blue curve). 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:
 
subwoofer in the boot

I initially started out with an underseat sub (Alpine SWE-1000) which I vampire tapped into the rear speaker feeds. The problem with this is that the sound wasn't brilliant so I upgraded to it's bigger brother, the SWE-815 - still an 8" but a better cone (DVC 2x2Ω independent Type E) in a decent enclosure for better response.

The Install

Firstly, I removed the radio and then the centre console/transmission tunnel using this guide (click to expand for a better view):
 
radio/transmission removal guide

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:
 
bulkhead grommet

This is useful because any 12V +ve wire going through here ends up less than a foot away from the battery so there is no worry about routing the power wire all round the shops and over hot engine compartments (where it runs back, it is suspended away from anything remotely hot as it runs around an air intake and directly to the back of the engine bay):
 
engine bay grommet

I used a coat hanger to get through the grommet and simply fed the supplied +ve feed (fused) directly onto the battery:
 
engine bay

Going back into the cabin, I routed the positive wire over to the centre console and ran it back along the transmission tunnel to where the sub was in the boot. I also ran the sub 'remote on' blue signal wire up to the HU (see HU install below) along with the signal input phono leads to the back of the HU. Finally, I ran the remote itself (it's wire) from the sub, up the transmission tunnel to the centre console.
Just before they enter the boot, I used a coat hanger to tunnel all these wires under the carpet for the last tiny run to the sub. The negative lead was screwed into the seatbelt base securely, sub then mounted to the extreme right of the boot (when looking from the rear). It actually gives a better acoustic response as the cone is facing the large hatch door to "bounce" sounds off of.
 
subwoofer close

Screwed everything back into place and voila - all the wiring has 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.
 
subwoofer controller

WOW!!, proper bass again, not too overblown (I'm keeping the port-plug in place) but enough to shake my driver's seat...
 
See the characteristics of my subwoofer

...so 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 and cheap enough (£91) to be an affordable bargain.

How to set your amp gains

Once installed, you need to be able to set the gains correctly. For this you need a recording of a 30Hz Test Tone on either .mp3 on a USB stick or on a CD for playback.
This way, the subwoofer's amp will be sending an optimal (non-clipped) signal to the subwoofer cone (returning to the HU you can now turn the Power IC back on and reduce the Volume down to normal).
 

Tweeter Install

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:
 
tweeter close

Plus it looks discrete enough to (hopefully) not warrant "unwanted attention":
 
looking from other side

I had to remove the door card again and solder these in parallel to the existing front speakers. They work well to balance out the the sub and lift the soundstage appropriately. Best of all, they only cost £20.
 

Double-Din HeadUnit Radio Install

OK, nearly there. I'd finally gotten all the parts I need to install my double-din head unit. I thought I'd start off with the actual part numbers needed if you wanted to place orders via official UK Honda dealerships (they won't recognise any others on their systems) along with the current UK prices (all the part numbers immediately below using "0" are "zero" not "letter o"):
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):
 
audio wiring harness

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:
 
UK Jazz audio wiring harnessUK Jazz audio wiring harness

 
Connects2 Harness for the Honda:
 
connects2 wiring harness

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 "Amp On" wire which isn't being used by the Honda (this isn't the "Amp On" signal you'll need to tap into for a sub - THAT "Amp On" 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: ...along with 2 leads you will need: 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). For the diagram, use the one in the sub install procedure above.
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:
 
removing cage screws

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:
 
completed fascia

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):
 
mic placement

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:
 
custom bezel

Finally, here it is, all installed:
 
radio close

I chose the Alpine as: I have mine set to cut off any frequency below 80Hz from going to the main speakers - meaning they'll only get highbass/mids/treble The sub then gets only 80Hz or below to handle the rest of the frequencies. I tried with a 120Hz cutoff (the Alpine does a range of cutoffs from 60-160Hz using 12dB/Oct slopes) but felt this way sounded better in my car. 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):
 
radio at night

 
radio at night close

So that's it folks - how to change from OEM to after market double din and still retain use of steering wheel controls. I'll end with a summary of the part numbers needed again along with approximate total costs: So that's £259 for me for the whole HeadUnit upgrade start to finish.
 

Total Costs Of All Audio Upgrades

4 Speakers £60
1 Subwoofer £91
2 Tweeters £20
1 HeadUnit £154
HU Ancillaries £105
TOTAL £430


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18th July 2004

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