IS66

Hello all! New to the Lexus scene and I am loving my 2003 IS 300 I picked up last week. I have an Alpine deck and cd/mp3 changer I want to install, but I think I have a problem. According to crutchfield.com, my stock navigation system will no longer work if I take out the factory deck. Is this true? I scheduled an install at a professional shop here in town for next week and they didn't say anything about the navigation system being disabled. Thanks in advance for the info!

amy011079

I haven't heard of anything like that happening but you may want to post in the audio forum here and see if anyone else has.

Lowstature

I looked at the wiring diagram for the stereo. It seems the factory amplifier is wired to the front speakers to allow for the navigation to work. If you were to add an aftermarket radio, it would have to be wired to bypass the factory amplifier. Thus it seems you would have problems with the navigation.

There may be a method to get around this, but I spoke with Kenwood, Audiovox, Alpine, and several other installers. None could tell me how to make the factory amp work with an aftermarket radio, although none tried to do it, as it just didn't look like it would work on paper.

If you want a copy of the schematics, e-mail me and I will send them to you so that you can see what I am talking about.

Let me know how it turns out......

lowstature@hotmail.com