jazzymt

Heh, actually she already does help me make CD's (or rather makes them for me while I'm stuck upstairs soldering). I'm not sure if I could trust her to solder after how "well" she did with me trying to teach her how to weld. Suffice to say, I won't be standing or sitting on any of her metal artwork.

Yup, they're available. Paypal order link is on the first page. They will continue to be available too until Subaru fixes the shortcomings of the factory stereo...or at least allows us to replace it with an aftermarket deck again.

I'm glad the installs are continuing without any significant problems. It sounds like my instructions could use a couple minor updates, but to be honest guys, I can hardly find the time. I mentioned in another thread, but I might as well restate it here, just before the holidays I got engaged and the next few weeks sort of went by in a whirlwind. I'm spending most of my evenings either running normal daily errands, doing "wedding" shopping or building boards trying to stay ahead of orders. To answer your question praedet, I've been ready to order a bench radio for awhile, but I'm trying to work out a deal with one of two electrical engineers to make sure it will happen first. I'd love to do it myself, and learn a buttload in the process, but to be honest, I don't really have the time or expertise to get it done any time soon, if at all. I am willing to invest considerable dough in getting it done though, so it's not dead ended, just "in process" or delayed while I try and work out the details of paying someone else to do it right. j0ebert, I hardwired my Roady2 to the cigarette lighter. Using the cig lighter allowed me to not worry about the wires being hot while I'm working on it since they're off when the car is off, so I didn't have to disconnect the battery. Also, this way XM just turns on & off with the car, exactly what I want it to do. I'd highly recommend double checking everything with a multimeter first, just to make sure things that you expect are off really are off and if things don't seem right after it's installed (stuff won't turn on, error lights, etc), it might be time to check the fuses. Obviously, the safest way to do hardwire power installs is to just disconnect the battery, but I'm lazy.

Like you said, it doesn't matter where you plug it in, as long as it's inline between the board & audio device. There is tons of room behind the radio if you want to stuff it back there, but you can put it wherever you want.

I hope you're right. Good luck. > fingers crossed <

Well...good luck, but your chances don't look so good considering the failure with the European radio. I would guess that it probably will not work & if so, will extend the previously mentioned refund if you can get it back to me.

Yea. Sorry again. Everyone's will ship as soon as the heatshrink arrives...I'm hoping tomorrow, but with all the holiday shipping madness, you never know. I have about 30 boards ready minus the heatshrink and 10 orders. I'm hoping to build that up a bit more to take care of the rest of the orders this week & be able to ship everyone else's order received next week right away after the holidays.

Well guys, I have to appologize. I thought I had plenty of parts to keep things going, but I wasn't paying attention to my supply of heat shrink & it ran out. I was hoping to get more today, but it did not arrive...hopefully tomorrow then. Sorry for the delay. I have lots of boards assembled, I just don't have any heatshrink to put on 'em. I'll get them out asap when the HS arrives.

Why didn't I think of that!? Jeez, I feel stupid. (ejecting other disks from radio...) If you have the mp3 deck, yea, it would work great. Otherwise, no, I don't think that will do anything. Yea, an 80 minute CD would work fine. The reason mine's 75 min is to make room for the electronic PDF of the instructions which is also on there. You can easily make your own "audio-only" 80 minute CD using the little walkthru I posted before. Um...somewhere around 150. I really pulled that number out of my butt as one that I thought I could meet. THere is a chance I'll beat it, for the simplified board anyway (no iPod controls or anything), but without having any idea what shape the board will take, I couldn't really say with any certainty. By the way, someone also asked when I'm shipping last orders. Anything I receive by Wed I'll ship for sure. Thursday is a maybe & Friday is unlikely. Nothing else will ship after that until next year.

Pattali, I'm very sorry to hear that. Since I did not have access to a metric setup, there's no way I could have guessed, but it's still a bummer. If anyone that ordered the board for a metric radio wants to go thru the hassle of sending it back to me I'll give you a FULL refund. Sorry for the bad news again, but thanks for giving it a try. I think your only other option at this point is to replace the whole setup with the JDM 1 zone AC double din bezel...not an inexpensive option by any means, but at least there's something for the extreme audio enthusiast.

Well, I'm glad to hear one made it through customs anyway. I was beginning to think I was sending boards into a black hole. I've got my fingers crossed & am eagerly awaiting news on your install. FYI on general going-on's, I just ordered a huge number of parts to try & get ahead of the game some & keep on top of these orders (enough for more than 125 boards). The current price of the boards will be valid for orders thru the end of December, but the last week I'm "closing the shop" per say for the holidays so orders received 12/24 until 12/31 won't ship until the new year. I'll try and get a big stock of ready-to-ship units to get those orders out first thing 2006 though. It has been hella crazy around here, mostly at my real job, but also holiday shopping & traveling so I haven't had any free time to start working on reverse engineering the radio. I also have not been able to locate a VDC stereo from a junkyard & am unwilling to plunk down $700 just for a bench setup, so I'll likely buy a standard 6CD & start working on it with that (probably not until January ). Happy Holidays everyone.

This is something I'm also eager to learn. The earliest out-of-country shipment I have on record left the US on Nov 22, so that's only 14 business days to today. I wouldn't expect customs to hold it longer than 2 weeks, but since I've only ever shipped one thing from canada here & it took forever (first class), I'm not so sure.

Sorry, I don't know of any solution for the '03 OB's except the one that's unavailable to us - to replace the radio. ~edit~ BTW, you should visit us Outback owners over on subaruoutback.org Welcome to LegacyGT though.

' Always happy to hear about another successful install. Thanks for the post Jeff & enjoy your new audio solution in good health I've also built up a healthy stockpile of boards again, so I should be set for several weeks to fill orders immediately. Also, I've been recruiting some help from old friends and/or may even organize and fund the "next generation" design as a senior EE student project through my old school...not sure about that yet. Anyway, long story short, this further investment is starting to hurt, and as fun as it once was, assembling, soldering & packaging even the small boards is getting to be a bit more than a hobby. I don't mean to sound greedy, but I've made a whole lot of these suckers & if I'm going to keep doing it, I need a bit more padding between spending & selling parts. So...the price of the board will increase to $40 on 1/1/2006. That's $45 with shipping. Plan accordingly.

I'm not sure if my aux board is worthy of FAQ'ness, but your first question addresses 2.5i owners & says there is no replacement faceplate available. It should probably be updated to include the Metra dash kit for manual climate control owners. The kit is part # 99-8901, runs around $65 http://www.metraonline.com/latest.php?id=1 http://www.installer-data.com/item/display_item.php?it=99-8901 http://www.legacygt.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21160&page=2&pp=15

Logically, that makes sense, but a few people have tried that, using every concievable place to ground (chassis, radio, battery, cigarette lighter, etc.) and none of them seemed to make a difference. Personally, I think it has more to do with what transformer you're using and AFAIK, the XM Roady2 is the only one that has escaped the ground loop problem completely, although I wouldn't be suprised if that was also proven untrue. Basically, once you've got ground loop noise, aka alternator noise, your only hope to eliminate it is to install a GLI.

That's quite the install. I have a feeling Nate is right about the Sirius sound volume - your ipod probably has very low impedance & is sucking the signal down. As far as the GLI...since you're all buttoned up, you could probably wait a few days for an internet delivery & get this one: http://www.crutchfield.com/S-Fc9bvxjFX91/cgi-bin/ProdView.asp?search=ground+loop&i=127SNI135 That way you don't have to buy any other converters. Post some pics of your setup when you get a chance though, it sounds pretty sweet.

Mkay, here's a walkthru for people that want to make their own silent CD, 80 minute single track, two track 75/5, whatever you want. First, download Audacity. It's a free/open source sound editing program that's easily available...I'm sure there's others, but this one works well for me. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/ Once you've got that installed, open it up. At the top, click on Generate -> Silence. Chose the number of seconds of silence you want: 5 min = 300 75 min = 4500 80 min = 4800 Save the track as a Wav by clicking on File -> Export as Wav & chose a place to save it. Now, open your favorite burning program & start an audio CD. Arrange the tracks how you want them (if you have more than one) & burn the CD. Piece of cake. I hope that helps...if there's any other questions, feel free to ask.

Wow. I go on vacation for a few days & the forum explodes! Well, several more orders were placed while I was gone & you've eaten up my stock again, but I'll make more and get caught back up in the next day or two. As for all the questions that were asked, it looks like they've been covered pretty well by other users, but I'll rehash just to be clear: Sorry, no chance it will work with the Forester. As Jevans pointed out, there is another mod you can use to get a clean aux in with that stereo though using the CD changer input. I recently tried a new format for audio+data and had no idea it was having this side effect. Normally it would be just one audio track, but my only other suggestion to achieve what you describe would be for you to create a 75 minute silent track one & a 5 minute silent track two...I'll post a walkthru for that as soon as I can... As rony & lang pointed out, there is a thick heat shrink applied to the board to prevent shorts. I started cutting the leads a bit long to aid in soldering and some were close to poking thru, but I've added a step to trim them flush after soldering now so there shouldn't be any problems. Thanks again for all your interest & support for the project everyone. I hope you all had a good Turkey day. I had some white-knuckle driving coming home thru a couple good snow storms, but made it thru in my Scooby unscathed. Oh yea, I also have a question for anyone that can answer it...I've been getting a number of purchases from UK/Canadian owners and don't really know for sure if it works on that stereo yet, so if anyone has succesfully installed it (or otherwise) please post asap. I'd hate to keep sending these out only to find they don't work on that version. Also, if it does work, the customs form for sending out of country requires a phone number so please include it in your order notes or email/PM it to me separately.

-small update- I'm all caught up again. Everyone's orders are going out today. I have a some finished boards in stock & everything's A-Ok again. I got my 12V power supply yesterday & hopefully when I get back from turkey day I'll have some time to take out my radio & start playing with it...hopefully.

Unfortunately, that would not work with the current boards because any skipping mutes the audio channels completely (to prevent you from hearing it skip). Plus, I think if it skips for a certain period of time (pro'ly 30 seconds or so), it timeouts & ejects the CD.

Well, I assembled boards to have enough to ship to everyone plus some extras, thinking I had all the parts I needed, only to find out I didn't have enough heatshrink... Sorry. My bad. I'm making up for it by having more overnighted to me so that I can get the rest of the orders out by Wednesday morning at the latest (and then I'll be gone all weekend for Thanksgiving). Other than that, the new boards look good...audio lines finally corrected & otherwise, about the same as the last batch. Besides the screw up on HS to be corrected shortly, I have parts to make quite a few more boards and should have them in stock for a good while now. I also received the forward & reverse wiring harness. 12V Power supply should arrive some time this week & will get started on bench testing the HU by early December. I dunno if I will complete this project in a time frame that helps anyone, but I'm gunna try anyway.

Sorry, no hope to be found here. If you decide to replace your stereo however (the opportunity of which has many of us envious) PM me...I might be interested in picking up your stock deck for my GF's saturn if the price is right (around $50?).

note: updated the FAQ & other info in the first post...

How on earth did you find that info Mario5? I'm not sure it isn't at least partially useful...although it's a lot of info to sift through, but do you think you can find the equivalent for the LHD version? It would be invaluable. On another subject - the PCB's have shipped. UPS expects to deliver them Friday so I should be able to get the orders out early next week.