Blue2

The prior owner trashed the OEM radio installing a junk Alpine head unit. I found out that the factory wiring harness had been cut to pieces. Luckily, I found a used Concert-I on Ebay with harness for $46. The Alpine deck was totally mis-wired. It had no rear speakers, no antenna, and no memory when the key was turned off. When I went to pull the wiring out tied to the Alpine HU I found a surprise under the dash panel. There was a mystery box mounted there - some kind of Kenwood FM transmitter tied to the Alpine with coax and then another coax that ran all the way back through the car to the rear window where it was left dangling! I had to pull out the front kick panel, the rear seat and the rear trunk panels to get all the old wiring out.

I then had to solder about 25 wires that were cut back into the factory harness. I discovered a couple things about the Audi factory radio. It is impossible - at least for me - to remove the electrical pins for the OEM connectors. There is a yellow plastic retainer thingy that you can extract that you would think releases the pins, but it doesn't. They are still retained in and it looks like you need a custom tool to extract. Also discovered in the '99 A4 radio harness two wires of the same color (red/yellow) on the same connector going to different locations in the car with different functions. A big no-no in my mind. Since these were cut, it was impossible to determine which pins they went to. I had to guess putting them back in.

Anyway, after the job was done the old Concert radio worked like a champ. Oh, and I didn't need a radio code. I pulled my Phatbox from my S4 and hooked it up and it worked great with the head-unit. I am amazed what people will do to a car to do a rush job install on an after-market radio. All it took was a little research to find a harness adapter. A CD changer could have been had cheap by throwing one in the trunk. It took me a full 8 hours to put the damage back to stock