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Hi, my name's Ed. I've been with Crutchfield for about 12 years, going on 13 and have been
motorcycling for the better part of 15 years. This is my bike, my Suzuki, and I finally
decided to go ahead and upgrade the sound system from nothing to something.
So, we've got an installation on the Cycle Sounds bike fit for the metric bikes. We're
going to take you through the installation and have a look at it.
This is the finished product. Pretty much all you see on this bike are the speakers
that live up on the handlebars. The rest of it is pretty stealthy. It's pretty much hidden
away. We'll take a look at how we've got it wired in.
Everything is wired underneath the seat. What I've done for my cable to hook up my iPod,
I let it live right beneath the seat. Power and ground. I've got my ground grounded to
the chassis, right about here, and power, I've gone into the blinker fuse. It was pretty
easy. You slide it in, it comes with the terminal, you stick your wire on and your hot.
I'd also recommend a multimeter to find out what side of the fuse is hot and which side
is switched. That way you know which side to stick the fuse clamp onto. You don't want
this hot all the time, because it will drain your battery.
The next trick, I had to find out where to stick the amplifier. I didn't want it exposed
because I still wanted a stealthy installation. But I needed to have someplace where its going
to get a little bit of air to keep it cool. So I took off this bolt and amplifier sits
right behind the body panel, so it's out of the way, but it still gets enough air coming
through to keep it cool. And you'll actually see the main cable that runs right beneath
the fuel tank, and just gets stuck all the way up, runs all the way back, and the wires
flare out from there. The power wires goes back and the speaker wires come back up to
the front to hook up to the speakers here.
This kit comes with a bar clamp mount for your mp3 player or iPod or whatever you've
got. I chose not to use it in this particular case because I'm out of space. Now, if you've
got a cruiser or something that's got wider bars and has more opportunity, and you want
to have it up there, the kit comes with that extra piece for you.
We've got the cable coming up from beneath my seat. This is a standard mini-jack input
so you can use an iPod, or any other type of mp3 player. iPod lives in my tank bag and
I just take the slack up, stick it in, zip it and go. It took me about 3 to 3 1/2 hours
to do the whole job and most of that was just being picky about how things were run, where
they lived, and that they were secure.
Case in point, take your time, have some fun with it, make sure you've got some tunes on
in the background, it'll go fine.