Ok, lets start with the door speakers.

So the entry level Beat came with only two speakers, Right? In the doors. Cause these were the only ones they wired them to the head deck as front speakers. Nothing wierd yet, untill you look at the wiring of the five speaker system.
Because the front channels were already taken and Honda doesn't want the same car running around using different wires the dash speakers are wired as rear speakers.
A little strange, but perhaps they never intended for it to have more speakers?
But this is where it gets really weird.

The sub amp, instead of getting a rca level signal input from the head deck instead siphons its signal off the Front ( door) speakers!
I uncovered what appeared to be a factory three way connection on the front channels using a crimp. So the sub amp seems to get an already amplified signal to work with perhaps meaning it could be made smaller since some of the load was being carried by the head deck. The sub amp is not totally passive. It has live power to it and a 30W rating on it.

I originally found this as I was going to connect the amp to the sub out on my new head unit but after tracing the wires from the amp realised they were connected to the door speakers for signal and because its an amplified signal its unlikely that low output RCA connections would work, which are standard these days.
So I guess the question is, would this standard wiring work with a new head unit? If so does wire 13 (AVC) need any specific attention for said sub amp to operate properly? Can anyone confirm that wire 12 is in fact the signal wire to turn the amp on?



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If that hasn't confused you then how about this? Your factory wiring to the dash speakers has them crossed over from left to right which is its own breed of weird. I suspect because there are so many drivers they had to be wired up in a certain fashion to maintain a suitable resistance.

Technically the door speaker channels are linked also, but in the sub/crossover amp where they both join to power a single speaker.

All the linked channels have me a bit on edge. Is this something the standard head deck was built with in mind or will any modern head deck happily feed this configuration? All I know is the intructions you get with head decks say to not cross or link channels, ( as mine does). But if the resistance on all four channels remains within specs I would imagine it would be fine.

Told you it was weird!

I would gladly love to hear from someone who knows these unknowns!
I think the world Beat population would be best knowing this kind of thing as soon as possible so as to avoid anymore fatal installs and unnessasary disconnection of factory equipment, because people can't make sense of it.