HiFiSi

I just fail to see how using a CD that plays a signal only to a certain channel is any different than using the fader to send the signal only to the same channel. The only thing that the CD method would diagnose that the fader method wouldn't would be if the signals somehow got swapped INSIDE the unit, which can't happen.

Or... I just could be misunderstanding what you're trying to do here.

Well I'm guessing here, but doing the bypass basically disables external devices from muting the D3. (If that is, what you are asking about is your onstar being able to automatically mute the D3 when it operates)

To get around this, leave the mute wire in it's stock pin location and hook it up to onstar. Instead of moving the mute wire to the pin location as shown in the bypass instructions, move a different wire that is not in use on that harness, like maybe the power antenna wire.

The bypass will work with any wire in that location, not just the mute wire. The only reason that it says to use the mute wire is because most installations aren't going to use it.

So basically, if there is another wire on the harness that is not being used, move that to the slot above the mute wire instead of the mute wire itself. And ground that wire as required by the bypass.

lol... the Pioneer AVIC-D3. The only mobile multimedia device with 15 ways to almost turn it off.

Also, I just don't see the point of putting a security password on a car radio.

Because for one, it's not going to stop somebody from stealing your radio. They don't know you need a password to use them, as most car stereo thieves are complete dumbasses. I mean, if they were actually smart people, they would be able to get a job and earn a living like a real man. And second, once they figure out that you need a password to use the radio, they are either going to find some sucker who doesn't know to buy it from them or just throw it away. It's not like once they realize the unit is unusable they are going to return it to the owner. So basically it's a totally useless feature, from the owner's standpoint... there is no real benefit for the owner to set a password on the unit, aside from knowing that the thief can't use the radio he stole from you. Which doesn't make up for getting you stuff stolen at all.

If there was a way to bypass the security password, what would be the point of having a security password in the first place? It's your fault you can't remember the password... you should have made the password something your could remember or at least written it down somewhere. You have to send it to pioneer. That's just how it is. Anyway... who the hell can't remember their mother's maiden name? IMO, you deserve to have to send it out to be fixed.

Well, I'm not going to have time to ground the RCA's any time soon. I'm remodeling the basement at my mom's house and I'm going to be getting home around 8 or 9 at night for at least a week and a half...

But what I did do was hook up a portable CD player to each channel of my amp, and all 4 speakers play loud and clear with no interference what so ever. So the amp works fine.

Hopefully when I get a chance to ground the RCA's it will fix the problem.

For now I'll just turn up the volume to cover the noise.

On the same scren where you set the nav voice volume, there's an option to turn voice assistance on and off. Make sure that's turned on.

What? Use the fade/balance. It does the same thing.

Set the fader to the front left speaker while playing some music. If it plays out of any other speaker, it's hooked up incorrectly. Do the same thing for the 3 other speakers. I don't see why you need a special CD when all you have to do is this.

EDIT: for some reason I assumed you have a D3 unit. If you don't, this probably won't help.

VSS means vehicle speed sensor. It tells you car how fast it's going.

To see if you have it hooked up correctly, you can do a couple of things.

1 - While viewing your nav map, hit the map button. That will bring up a menu of view modes. Hit the vehicle dynamics button, and three dials will come up. The center one is your speedometer. If it doesn't register your speed while you are driving, your VSS signal is not making it to the D3.

2 - Hit menu while in navigation mode. Go to the settings tab, and select Hardware info. Select 3D Calibration. If (while driving) the number to the right of "speed pulse" reads zero, your VSS signal is not making it to the d3.

If the connector is totally screwed, you can just bypass the harness and splice the two wires together directly. Just use bullet connectors so you can separate them if you need to take out the unit.

All the screen off option does is turn the screen off. The unit is still powered up while in that mode, as well as any amplifiers or other equipment hooked up to the unit's turn on lead. And what's more, the unit will continue to play music/movies or navigate with the screen off if you hit the screen off button while it's doing that.

So basically, all that does is turn off the display, not the unit itself.

The only way possible to power off the unit totally while the car is on is to wire a switch in on the ACC wire going into the unit.

Well, like I said, I'm fairly certain the amp isn't the problem, as everything was perfectly fine with my old head unit, and then when I installed the D3 the noise showed up. I never touched any part of the amplification system during the install except for the RCA cables where they plug into the head unit.

It's a Profile Clarus 640 (75W X 4) amplifier.

OK. I installed my D3, and I've got an interference type noise coming through all my speakers. I'm running all 4 with an external amp, and with my old head unit, there was a very faint whiny ground loop type noise, so faint I didn't even worry about it. But after installing the D3, there's a very loud noise coming from all 4 speakers. It was first grounded through the car's radio harness, so I moved the ground, mute wire, and parking brake wire so they are grounded directly to the body of the car. I double checked both my amps grounds, and they're solid. So now I'm stuck.

Where should I go next? I don't want to put ground loop isolators on the RCA's because I've used them before and wasn't happy with how much they degraded the sound quality.

I've heard some say to try grounding the RCA's. I'm not sire what exactly the process is with that. How is that done, and do you think it will help?

I'm going to try running a set of speakers through my sub amp to dee if it's the amp itself causing th noise. But I don't think that's the problem, because the noise wasn't there with the old head unit.

Any ideas?

The whole reason for hooking it up to the D3 is to use the controls on the head unit to operate the Ipod. So why would you hook it up that way and use the iPod controls? Seems like it kind of defeats the purpose.

Anyway, it probably does that because the iPod isn't programmed to be able to operate on 2 different sets of controls at the same time? Just a guess.

Well, the preamp outputs on the D3 are pretty underpowered. Your old head unit's preamps could have been putting out a more powerful signal. Turn up the gain on your sub amp, and/or turn up the subwoofer using the settings on the D3.

As an alternative to an iPod, you can get the USB adapter and hook up a USB flash drive or even better, a portable hard drive to it, probably in your glove box. I'm not sure what the maximum size the hard drive can be, but I recall someone posting here that it can be up to 250 gigs?

I'd rather go that route, as the USB adapter is around $100, and you can get a fairly large portable hard drive for $100 or so. So you'd get like 3 or 4 times the storage capacity of an iPod for a lot less money. And it might solve the problem with the iPod's slow seek times too, but I don't know really about that one.