Hey,
Just bought a new Alpine deck from Crutchfield for my 2001 4runner. The wire harness that came with the deck doesn't fit with the wire harness from the stock radio? It seems like I got the right wire harness from Crutchfield. How do I fix this? Do I just seperate the wires from the old harness and then match them up with the new one?

So I searched a little more on this site and turns out I probably have the little amp behind my stock HU. Is bypassing the amp going to make sound quality any worse?

yes you need to remove the stock amp and no sound quailty wont suffer a aftermarket hu has more power

it wont suffer but if you get the harness to keep the stock amp in, it sounds pretty dang good

I took the little amp out, sounds great with my iPod hooked up.

Remove your factory amp. You'll probably get cleaner sound from a quality Head Unit (HU). I removed mine and used the Toyota wire harness adapter that I got with my Eclipse HU from Crutchfield. I'm also running aftermarket amps and speakers, so the only wires I had to adapt to the factory wire harness were HU power, ground, illumination, antenna, and battery. I removed the speaker wires from my harness adapter since I didn't need them. You'd use them all if you're running speakers directly off the HU. If I recall, your HU wires will actually connect to two separate harness adapters, one of which I show here that includes HU controls (and usually a few speaker wires). The other adapter handles the remainder of the speaker wires from the HU. Here's what my resulting adapter looks like when I spliced the appropriate wires together with barrel connectors. The small connector end plugs into my HU and the large connector end plugs into the factory wire harness. The blue and white wire with the dangling quick disconnect fitting is the 12V lead to my amps (only needed with external amps).

Bringing back an old thread for a question about the orange wire. My Alpine HU came with a solid orange wire and the adaptor has an orange/white wire. Am I wrong to think the orange wire connects to the orange/white wire????

I just purchased a alpine hu and have a orange and black coming off my adapter, in the instructions it says to cap it off...

Im not referring to the orange and black........orange and white is the one I'm unsure of what to do with. Everything else matches up color to color.

Hmm, that's weird, I don't have the orange and white one. Do you have the double din radio? As I'm writing this I realize that you have a 96, I assume that means our radios are different.

I was of the mind that 96-02 had the same wiring but I could be wrong.

That's what I thought.... I wonder if they sent you the wrong wire set, I hooked mine up today no issues

Couple questions here, how do you get the factory antenna to power up when you turn on the radio? Also I tried like two different dash dins and they all say they're for a 2000 4runner but it doesn't fit. The outside packaging says it does, but when I open up the instructions it doesn't have it listed.

Is your factory amp still installed? Might be keeping your radio from going in all the way?


Did you connect the blue wires together? Ive removed my power antenna and replaced with a Tacoma whip but I believe that's how your power antenna gets its signal to go up or down.

I'll have to give that a shot. And I don't think mine had a factory amp because it's an sr5 model.