timhood

I have a '94 Cabriolet with the infamous self-amplified rear speakers. I bought the car with less than 10K miles but the factory radio had already been replaced with an Alpine unit. Speakers were left stock. Now I want to upgrade the whole thing. I installed some new speakers in the rear but I'm not sure which wires I need to connect. There are five wires in the plug that went into the factory speakers. Which two do I use? I'd rather not have to run new wires back as I think this would be a fairly difficult task in the Cabriolet (?)

Merkin

run new wires

boogs

the brown one w/ black stripe and the green one (they should be next to eachother) are your positive and negative respectively. At least from what i can remember. I know it is those two, but their charges may be reversed. Anyway, your red is your power, your white is your antenna, and your other brown (should be on the outside) is your ground. You dont need those anymore, so just tape them up and forget about them. Then just connect like you would any other speakers.

COT51E-ukcab

i tried using the original wires from the speaker amp in my cabby and no go! as with yourself my car came with a aftermarket pioneer head unit.
it i easy to re wire, run the cables under dash from unit down behind kick well then under the door sill and up under the rear panel next to rear seats. the only down side is you loose the use of the small sub located behind the middle of the rear seats. this is crap anyway only 20watts.
i replaced my fronts with sony explode 80w and my rears with 180w 6.5" jbl in the rear. tight fit but no cutting. tip: mount rears with a 1/4" mdf base.
if you fit speaker straight in you have big air gaps all round, so mark out and cut hole for speaker then trim mdf down to shape so that the hole is covered, this acts as a small enclosure and stops vibration. make sure you bond mdf to the metal with a sealant of some kind. because you are limited to the grill size on the panel i used the sony grills off the front to cover jbl's and used the metal grill from the jbl's once cut down and modified to fit the front on the dash! you will be suprised how much the stock plastic grills get glogged up and effect the sound quality, you try blowing through them.
hope this helps!!!!!
my sounds are good but want bass so i'm looking into making a small sub box in boot/trunk or using 2 8" and building an isobaric box in the ski hole.