Somebody may have posted this little upgrade before but I have not see it. We recently bought a used R25 Classic. It’s got a factory installed Clarion stereo/CD in it. It’s age is little before Bluetooth was standard and doesn’t even have a Jack to plug into on the front. However, it is a nice sounding stereo and it does have AUX RCA connectors if you access the back of the system.
I bought a $28 Bluetooth adapter on Amazon. It arrived yesterday. I went to the boat this morning with my wire stripper, crimping tool & screwdriver. The adapter only has 3 wires and two RCA connectors. You simply splice the red power wire from the adaptor to the red wire coming from the stereo. The black ground wire splices into black one on the stereo and the blue/white striped gets spliced to the same color wire on the stereo. Bingo, I used wire crimps and that part was done in 10 minutes. Next is the part I had to experiment with a little, but you don’t have to. The clarion manual isn’t clear which RCA jacks are for AUX. There are four sets that look almost the same. I experimented a little and found the 2 RCA connectors with red lead wires. They are definitely the AUX IN connectors. There are unused RCA connectors back there with gray leads, ones with black leads, purple leads and blue leads but only the red leads will do the trick. Simply plug the RCA jacks together. Peel the adhesive backing off the adapter and stick it to the inside of the cabinet wall. Turn on the house power and your iPhone or Android should recognize the adapter and you can pair the two. Turn on the clarion and push the AUX button. You have all that great music saved on your phone and it’s now available to instantly play on your boat stereo system via Bluetooth. Or stream Pandora or Apple Music like I do most of the time. No hum, hiss or static. Just clean, clear music.
It’s a 30 minute job. A neat, inexpensive little upgrade. I posted some pictures.
http://www.tugnuts.com/gallery2.php?g2_itemId=78282
I bought a $28 Bluetooth adapter on Amazon. It arrived yesterday. I went to the boat this morning with my wire stripper, crimping tool & screwdriver. The adapter only has 3 wires and two RCA connectors. You simply splice the red power wire from the adaptor to the red wire coming from the stereo. The black ground wire splices into black one on the stereo and the blue/white striped gets spliced to the same color wire on the stereo. Bingo, I used wire crimps and that part was done in 10 minutes. Next is the part I had to experiment with a little, but you don’t have to. The clarion manual isn’t clear which RCA jacks are for AUX. There are four sets that look almost the same. I experimented a little and found the 2 RCA connectors with red lead wires. They are definitely the AUX IN connectors. There are unused RCA connectors back there with gray leads, ones with black leads, purple leads and blue leads but only the red leads will do the trick. Simply plug the RCA jacks together. Peel the adhesive backing off the adapter and stick it to the inside of the cabinet wall. Turn on the house power and your iPhone or Android should recognize the adapter and you can pair the two. Turn on the clarion and push the AUX button. You have all that great music saved on your phone and it’s now available to instantly play on your boat stereo system via Bluetooth. Or stream Pandora or Apple Music like I do most of the time. No hum, hiss or static. Just clean, clear music.
It’s a 30 minute job. A neat, inexpensive little upgrade. I posted some pictures.
http://www.tugnuts.com/gallery2.php?g2_itemId=78282
