Might be purchasing a set of seats from someone who crashed their car, already have the Mr Mike's covers on them. They have the speakers though, which I prefer not to have. But, if it is easy enough to wire them into the car, I may benefit from this. the seats already have the plug coming out of the bottom, but is there a way I can hook them up to an aftermarket head unit?
My first Fiero years ago was an '87 with older seats and headrest speakers. I used a multimeter and figured out which combinations of speakers (dash, pillars, seats) wired in series or parallel resulted in the best impedance per channel.
I just had them connected to a factory radio, but the eight speakers sounded pretty good in that little cabin.
I've done the same with my 87GT. I found an 84 or 85 in the junk yard, cut the harness out of the console and spliced it into my B-pillar speaker wires and simply plugged it into my seats. I didn't go to the trouble Patrick did, and just matched color for color wires.
Because the stock wires running from the area of the ECM over to the B pillar has no, if any excess, I cut about 6 inches from each of the junkyard wires and spliced them in. Gave me some finger room when splicing in the other console part of the harness.
I put seat speakers in my 87GT. I actually really like the seat speakers and prefer them to the B pillars. Mine are upgraded to 3.5" Pioneer 2 ways though, so that helps. I had a similar situation my first Fiero was an 85 and I had put really nice Mr. Mikes covers on the seats. and later discovered that the frame was totally rusted out. So I gutted that interior and put it in my 87, I just used the stock seat speaker wiring harness and ran it just like factory down the side of the consul, to the back of the radio.
I should have rewired them since they are wired weird from the factory but since I am running an external amp, I can even things out by just turning those channels down.
[This message has been edited by zmcdonal (edited 01-30-2015).]
It's not a trivial plug-n-play install if that's what you're going for. You'll have to run speaker wire and get the right impedance for the setup for each set of speakers, in an 86-88 car. It's not terribly hard, but it's probably not worth the work if you don't really want speakers in the seats anyway.
When I got the wiring from the donor car, I pulled the harness end through the console carpet and cut it, getting as much of the wire length as I could get. The same donor car seats had been stripped, so I also cut the harness from the seat backs. Not to use the harness, but to get some extra wiring.
I removed the seats and console from my 87 and found the wires going to the B pillar speakers. They are in the area of the ECM and radiate to either side, tucking under the bulkhead upholstery board. I clipped them about midway of their exposed area.
Then I cut about lengths from each of the pieces I had gotten from the donor car's seat backs. These pieces were needed to give me some slack for splicing. There is just no excess wire for the factory install. The combination of wire colors is specific to each side. Because you have a right and left side speaker in each seat, you're also routing each B pillar speaker to the opposite side, you will need this extra wire. I then soldered and heat shrink wrapped the 6 inch lengths to the matching color wire on it's path from the speaker where it protruded from behind the upholstered backboard.
Next, I did the same with the harness that attaches to the seat connector, matching wiring color codes, soldering and heat shrink wrapping each individual wire, wrapping with tape, cutting a small X in the side of the console carpet to pass the console portion of the harness through, just the way the factory did it. Maybe I could have gotten better sound reproduction by doing it the way Patrick did, but I don't have his capabilities in that respect. I improved the sound over the original 4 speaker system and I'm happy with it.
