Please excuse me if this information is somewhere else in the forums. I looked around quite a bit and found some information, but not exactly everything I was looking for.

I have an '05 Cobalt LS with the Pioneer 7 speaker/sub upgrade. I ordered a new Alpine 9856 head unit from Crutchfield and it came with a wire harness, accessory power cord, etc. I understand that I'll have to run a wire to the fuse panel to power the new head unit. What I'm concerned about is that I've heard different things from different people about issues with the amplifier, sub, and driver information center. On Crutchfield's website, there was a note that said I would have to bypass the factory amp and splice the receiver's speaker cables into the cables that go straight to the speakers. This would effectively disable the subwoofer and just go straight from the head unit to the speakers in the cab. However, there weren't directions for this in the installation information packet that I got from Crutchfield. There was also a note somewhere that the use of the driver information center (the thing under the tachometer that shows your gas mileage, trip odometer, oil life, etc.) would be lost by changing the head unit. Here on this forum, I've seen that same information in some places. But in others, people have been saying that they've replaced the head unit and preserved use of the driver information center as well as the factory sub. I would greatly appreciate any info, preferrably first-hand, I can get from you guys about this. I can still return the head unit to Crutchfield, and I don't think it would be an acceptable loss for me to lose the info center AND the sub. I also don't know if I'm up to any major rewiring of the system to get it to work.

Thanks a lot, guys, for any info you can give me on this. My name's Adam, by the way.

 

in the harness is there a blue and white wire?? if there is that is the amp turn on lead i've never had to bypass a factory amp not bose infinity i'll be damned if you need to do it for a pioneer...as far as the dic not working thats only for the malibus and the g6 they use the same harness and their dic displays on the radio...changed my radio last year and had no problems what so ever...i've just got the base but there was another guy on here who changed it w/the pioneer system and hooked the turn on wire for the amp up and it worked fine...at worse you might lose the fact sub

 

Thanks a lot, dude. That makes me feel a lot better about the whole thing. I'm trying to get the panels off so I can at least just take a look, but I'm having some trouble with that. I'm a total car stereo n00b. I just started learning about this stuff a few days ago.

 

You won't lose the DIC but I'd be interested to learn how he wired up the outputs. Its not as simple as just hooking the wires up from the deck to the amp, since the deck outputs high level(speaker) outputs, but the amp input is low level!! The only way to hook an aftermarket HU to the factory amp is to plug in to the RCA output jacks on the head unit and then convert those RCA jacks to the regular input wires that run into the amp. It can be done but I'd still be worried about an input level mismatch.....